Date: 1 October 2006
Originally published in: Loop Magazin (Germany)
Written by:
There are songs, that stay in your mind forever. ‘Kids in America’ is one of them. It gave Kim Wilde her big breakthrough in 1981. Hits like ‘Cambodia’, ‘You keep me hangin’ on’ and ‘View from a bridge’ followed. They made the daughter of the British composer Marty Wilde the most successful female pop singer. At the beginning of the nineties she surprisingly retired from music business. ‘I got bored’, says the 46 year old from West London, looking back. She took on a leading role in the musical Tommy. ‘A wonderful transition! I liked the original album as a child. No other musical has interested me that much.’
Kim got to know actor Hal Fowler, married, became a mother twice an discovered her love for gardening. She studied landscape gardening and found herselfagain in a new career, as book and TV author on the subject of garden design. ‘The same amount of pressure, the same amount of work. The big advantage was that the focus was no longer on me as it was in music, but rather on my work. It wasn’t about how I looked, but what I did.’ She was sure at the time that she would never return to music.
Like often in life everything ended up differently.