Date: 17 October 2018
Originally published in: Frankfurter Neue Presse (Germany)
Written by:
Kim Wilde competes musically with the hard-rock singer Doro Pesch in the jam-packed Frankfurt “Batschkapp”.
The wind machine rotates incessantly. Blows tons of concentrated air towards a long-haired blonde with black sunglasses and several layers of skin-tight leather on the body. Kim Wilde, born in 1960, in the glaring limelight of yellow, red, and green spots is very reminiscent of that delicate lolita doll that appeared in the early ’80s with dad Marty Wilde, rock’ n ‘roll legend of the late’ 50s and brother Ricky Wilde, a glam rock-era teen star, custom-made pop-up vignettes around the world, and fueled teenage hearts of both sexes. Weekly youth magazines trumped each other with ever new variants including Bravo star cut of Miss Wildes cute attractive likeness.
The fanbase of yesteryear with nostalgia in view in the propelled Frankfurt “Batschkapp” is densely crowded, in order to once again feel the unbiased feeling of lost youth days. Kim Wilde, whose post-career career culminated in the London performance of the Who’s musical “Tommy”, where she performed as Mrs. Walker, then married the co-starring actor Hal Fowler, had two children, and finally became a rose breeder and landscape gardener mutating with awards until she started making comeback attempts again in 2006 serves as a welcome catalyst.
However, the 80’s star and his followers pursue very different goals in the next two hours. While Kim Wilde wants to promote their current 14th studio album “Here Come The Aliens”, the audience expects to be served the hits of yesteryear on the silver platter. It gets it too, but a little differently than expected. On the lowest common denominator, that is to say in the full compromise, both sides meet: in the zipper process, the latest news come up well-known – and so overdriven that it literally shakes the eardrums without an earplug. Especially as the London-based superwoman flanked by a seven-member ensemble, including two drummers, brother Ricky Wilde on guitar and niece Scarlett Wilde as a harmony singer, in the futuristic leather dress, which she initially crowned with a silver fringed jacket, made it the Dusseldorf hard rock-lady Doro Pesch to do the same.
Already for the on-time start of the swiftly unwounded show spectacle without a pre-program, which leaves latecomers looking inconsolable out of the back rows, the two electric guitarists turn their Gibson Explorer models on as if it were a matter of winning a carbide competition. The entry number “Stereo Shot” from the new album is not the only title in the Metal garb. The Wild’s 80s evergreens “Water On Glass”, “View From A Bridge”, “Chequered Love”, “You Came” as well as the “Supremes” cover “You Keep Me Hangin ‘On”, each in the studio original subtle arranged in a multi-faceted way, thunder out of a jetting jet from the huge loudspeaker boxes. Only “Cambodia” is still somewhat similar to his former prototype. A breather from the hard rock thunderstorm provide an acoustic set with “Hey Mr. Heartache” and “Four Letter Word”.
Wilde apologizes for the sometimes oblique singing, blaming it to a stubborn cold. In between she holds dialogues with the auditorium. But more than platitudes, how much she and the band still fun to perform in Frankfurt, to go on tour in general and the promise to come back soon, can not be identified. With one exception: Before the final song “1969” Kim Wilde gets downright in passionate fluency: As she tells of an event in 2009, when she saw from her garden two lights on the horizon, which convinced her that there is a universe out there. There are countless extraterrestrial life forms. She also likes to watch the documentary series “Ancient Aliens” on TV. In the song she also sings about the first moon landing in July 1969 and the aliens, who have been watching the warlike humanity for thousands of years and are saving it from self-destructive apocalypse. You can tell that you are really on the nail on the topic. All musicians wear alien masks, Kim plays with a laser pistol.
As an addition to the exuberant nostalgia party, there was that song that everyone had been waiting for the whole evening: the breakthrough hit “Kids In America” still ignites timelessly fresh.
