Southport Flower Show, held at Victoria Park in Southport, is the largest independent flower show in the United Kingdom. It was originally started in 1924 by the local council, but since 1986 has been operated by Southport Flower Show company, which is a registered charity. It is held annually for four days in late August and has attendances of over 80,000. The patron of Southport Flower Show since 1996 is Professor Stefan Buczacki.

The UK’s largest and longest running independent flower show, each year it attracts many celebrities from all over the world. As well as flowers, the show includes other attractions such as cookery demonstrations, gala dinners, music and horse riding displays.

The 2001 edition was held on 16, 17 and 18 August. On the last day, Kim Wilde was there to present the show together with Professor David Bellamy on the busiest day, when thousands of visitors attended the Victoria Park showground.

On 29 May 1984 the Sony Radio Awards ceremony was held at the Hilton Hotel in London. Kim Wilde attended the event, but it is unknown if she was nominated.

Book written by Michael Mulligan and published on 4 December 2018. 
The book includes one page with a photograph of Kim Wilde with accompanying text. 
99 other artists are featured, as well as facts and figures about the NOW That’s What I Call Music series of compilation albums. 

Release date: 4 December 2018
Written by: Michael Mulligan
Publisher: Trapeze
Number of pages: 240
ISBN: 9781409179948
Book description:
Everyone remembers their first NOW album. Since NOW That’s What I Call Music Volume 1 was released in 1983 on double vinyl and double cassette, NOW has become synonymous with pop music and has featured some of the most iconic artists of the last three decades.
To celebrate the release of the 100th NOW album, The Story of NOW That’s What I Call Music in 100 Artists looks back at some of the most memorable – and occasionally regrettable – hits of the last 35 years!
Jam packed with amazing facts and ‘Well I never!’ moments about the 4,000+ artists to have graced the NOW track listings – from Phil Collins to Pharrell, Bananarama to Lady Gaga and Peter Andre to Pet Shop Boys – The Story of NOW is a celebration of pop music through the decades. So plug in your earphones and pump up the volume, because this party is just getting started!

Mick Silver was born as Michael Stokes Boreham in Nigeria on 6 August 1960. He was part of the band Kudos in the early 1980’s. Together with David Mortimer, Marc Platt and Philip Fortescue Longden he recorded one album, also entitled ‘Kudos’, from which the singles ‘No Reaction’ and ‘How Can This Be Love’ were taken. When the band split up, Silver released two solo singles, ‘Everything You Need’ (1985) and ‘It’s True’ (1986).

In 1992, he wrote Touched By Your Magic and I Believe In You together with Ricky Wilde. The two songs were released on the album Love Is.

American slasher-thriller movie from 2018, directed by Johannes Roberts and starring Bailee Madison, Lewis Pullman, Christina Hendricks, Martin Henderson and Damian Maffel. In the movie, a family of four staying at a secluded mobile home park for the night are stalked and then hunted by three masked psychopaths.

The soundtrack of the movie features the songs Kids in America and Cambodia by Kim Wilde, as well as tracks by Bonnie Tyler, Mental As Anything and Air Supply.

The first official catalogue of Smurfs for collectors, published by Schleich. It presents all the plastic smurfs that were released between 1965 and 1986.
There are also three pages with photographs of celebrities with the smurf awards made famous by Pop/Rocky magazine, featuring Victoria Principal, Patrick Duffy, Pamela Sue Martin, John James, Bud Spencer, Terence Hill, Roger Moore, Abba, Nena, Limahl, Rod Stewart, Cyndi Lauper and Kim Wilde.

Release date: 1 January 1988
Written by: Bernd Schultz Werbeagentur
Publisher: Schleich (Germany)
Number of pages: 72

This book was independently published in 2019 and written by Wil Pilanon, a French fan, or perhaps ‘former fan’, because the book is a very personal account of how Pilanon experienced Kim’s career from 1981 until 2019. It is obvious from the text in the book that he grew up with Kim’s first five albums and is less interested in her more recent output.
The book is illustrated in black and white with album and single covers and a handful of magazine articles.

Release date: 17 March 2019
Written by: Wil Pilanon
Publisher: Independently published / Amazon Fulfilment
Number of pages: 120
ISBN: 9781090687319

What is a pop icon? Why do you become a fan of a particular star? Does having an idol represent an essential step in adolescence?
Sharing a point of view from a person who was a fan of the singer and who summarizes it in a few lines to present it to young people today.

Song written by Fredrik Thomander, Ricky & Kim Wilde.
‘Shine On’ started during a writing session at Palma Music Studios in Majorca. Although originally recorded as a solo song, Kim eventually recorded it as a duet with Boy George for inclusion on the greatest hits compilation ‘Pop Don’t Stop: Greatest Hits’ in 2021. A music video for the song was recorded on 18 March 2021.
The song was premiered on BBC Radio 2 on 24 June 2021, and released as a single digitally on the same day.

Credits

Drums: Jonathan Atkinson
Lead guitar: Neil Jones
Backing vocals: Scarlett Wilde
Produced by Ricky Wilde & Scarlett Wilde
Mixed by Sean J. Vincent

Kim about Shine On

I think it’s really great when a pop song leaves you asking lots of questions, it doesn’t give you all the answers. ‘Shine On’ is like that. It doesn’t tell you what this song is about on a plate. It alludes to themes, very important ones, and it allows the listener to interpret. I think that’s the great skill of writing a pop tune. You don’t have to put it all out on a plate. You give it, as a gift. (1)

Freddy Thomander has the beautiful Palma Studios in Mallorca, he invited us over, and I said to Rick ‘come on, let’s go and see what this studio is like and let’s write a few songs to put on the new greatest hits’. Cherry Red had already started collating it and getting licenses from various record companies. (…) We got on a plane and we got over there and we stayed there for a week. I remember I was in the kitchen of the studio and I heard the chorus of ‘Shine On’ coming out through the room where we were working. I just dropped everything, rushed in and said ‘What’s that? What’s that?’ Rick had just written the chorus of  ‘Shine On’. It started off initially from a lyric point of view, which I came up pretty quickly after a conversation Ricky and I had had, which was actually really a very personaly relationship, it was about Barbara Windsor and her son Scott and how they had been battling dementia together. A very, very moving conversation we had about it. I based, initially, the first set of lyrics around that, which is where the line about ‘chemical demons’ and controlling the fire in her and everything [comes from]. And then we got back, the pandemic hadn’t quite hit in, I actually went to Thailand with my daughter and then Scarlett was listening to the song that we’d gone home with. At that time the tempo was quite up. It sounded great, but Scarlett listened to it, Ricky played it to her while I was in Thailand, and she said ‘I think we need to take a totally different road’. And I just fell in love with it. It was like one of those zen moments. ‘Love is a temple’, I was sitting in temples, I was surrounded by temples, and it was all very much… it was written in Thailand actually, the rest of the lyric. So it came together from different places. And then eventually George had been contacting Ricky and I for some time about maybe doing a project. By the time I got back from Thailand we were in dead-on lockdown and the next thing I know I’m doing this Zoom with George and he said ‘Come on, we’ve got to work together, let’s make this happen. Will you do this thing that I’m doing, this Cool Karaoke. ‘Name and Number’, it’s got your name on it’, and so I did that and then I said ‘Listen, George, I’ve got a greatest hits coming out and I really want you on. I mean there’s not a bigger icon in the world, is there. I was so proud and happy when he said ‘yeah’. (2)

Interview source

(1) Unsung Heroes podcast, 23 July 2021
(2) Unsung Heroes podcast, 23 July 2021

Born in New Zealand, Pam Sheyne moved to Britain in 1980. She spent several years in London as a session singer and backing vocalist for artists including the Pet Shop Boys, Bryan Adams, Elton John, Celine Dion, Mike & The Mechanics, Tom Jones, Lulu, Daryl Hall, Cyndi Lauper, and Dave Stewart. After initial success in the UK as songwriter with hits including Kavana’s no. 8 UK singles chart with “MFEO” and Billie’s No. 3 UK single chart ‘She Wants You’, Sheyne travelled to Los Angeles where she collaborated with David Frank and Steve Kipner to create what was to become her biggest hit song to date.

‘Genie in a Bottle’ was Christina Aguilera’s first single, it achieved number 1 Billboard single for five weeks and went on to reach number 1 in 22 countries including the UK. The song won an Ivor Novello Award for ‘International Hit of the Year’ in the year in 1999 and Christina won a Grammy for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance for the same year.

Sheyne’s songs have been recorded by a number of international artists including; Camila Cabello, Demi Lovato, Lindsay Lohan, Corrine Bailey Rae, Seal, Sinead O’Connor, Tina Arena, Laura Pausini, The Backstreet Boys, O Town, Jessica Simpson, Cece Winans and The Saturdays. For Kim Wilde, she wrote This I Swear together with Tony Swain.

In the film and TV world, Sheyne has written end titles for Disney’s ‘The Princess Diaries’, ‘Confessions of A Teenage Drama Queen’ and the Golden Globe nominated film ‘The Young Victoria’ . TV shows that have featured Sheyne’s songs include ‘Hannah Montana’, ‘Jump In’, ‘Camp Rock’, ’Camp Rock 2’, ‘Sonny with a Chance’, ‘Lizzie Maguire’, ‘Beverly Hills 90210’, ‘Roswell’, ‘King of the Hill’, ‘American Idol’, ‘Canadian Idol’, ‘X Factor’, ‘The Voice’, ‘Good Morning America’, ‘Fame’ and ‘General Hospital’ to name but a few.

Sheyne is also a songwriting mentor and attends songwriting camps and retreats sharing her experience and talking about the craft of songwriting. She started SongWriterCamps with business partner Richard Harris in 2018 and is extremely passionate about the craft of songwriting. She is additionally a founding member of SONA (Songwriters of North America) a grassroots advocacy group based in Los Angeles that actively fights for songwriter rights.

German electronic music duo Blank & Jones started the So80s series of compact discs featuring original twelve inch remix versions from the 1980’s in 2009, when they were surprised at how many of these remixes were never released on CD. Often record companies filled their releases with tracks that were already mastered for CD, and not the hidden gems that lay in the darkest corners of their archives. Blank & Jones changed all that when they started requesting old master tapes and transferring them to a digital file themselves.

The first volume of ‘So80s’ was released in 2009 and featured rare extended versions and remixes by Bryan Ferry, Duran Duran, When In Rome and Simple Minds. On the second volume, released in 2010, they included more rare 12″ versions. Interestingly, the digital version, released on iTunes and other digital platforms, also included a Blank & Jones So80s Remix of Kids in America, which was never released on CD at all.

Further volumes appeared in subsequent years. Until volume 10, each volume consisted of three discs, volumes 11 to 13 – the latest in the series – were released on two discs.

Book published by Societätsverlag in 2010, consisting of 160 pages. Radio journalists Werner Köhler and Thomas Steinberg have interviewed many stars from the Eighties through the years, and this book sees them talking about their biggest hits. Kim Wilde is included on page 145 to 148, talking about ‘You came’, the song that was a hit for her in 1988 and 2006.

Release date: 6 September 2010
Written by: Werner Köhler, Thomas Steinberg
Publisher: Societätsverlag
Number of pages: 160
ISBN: 9783797312259
Book description:
Hardly any interview that the two radio journalists Werner Köhler and Thomas Steinberg have conducted with artists, singers and pop stars in recent years has ended without asking about the genesis of a song. Over the years, a unique collection of material has come together about the history, idea and personal background of the greatest hits of all time – without exception from qualified sources, namely the artist himself. This material has resulted in countless radio reports that have become an integral part of the SWR1 program : “The Story Behind The Song”. This resulted in a book with a lot of “stuff from which rock & pop classics were made” – the history of the songs that accompany you throughout your life, that you can always remember and that make you “feel good”.

Release date: 1 January 1982
Written by: Sally James
Publisher: Eel Pie
Number of pages: 96
ISBN: 090600828X