Marion blogs: “Kim Wilde is crazy about our Keukenhof!”

Imagine Kim Wilde at the peak of her fame. Eighties and one hit after another… She comes to the Netherlands to promote her records, or rather the then super advanced CD and what does she do? She’s going to Keukenhof!

In the evening she also gave concerts, in Paradiso, De Melkweg … There they all went crazy on The Kids in America, Cambodia… I wasn’t a real Kim Wilde fan, but I liked her and she could actually sing too.

But she didn’t live up to her last name, as it turned out when I interviewed her a few weeks ago. I would have thought that in those exciting eighties she would have plunged into the nightlife of Amsterdam, Rotterdam or Utrecht like a real diva, but nothing could be further from the truth. No, after her concerts Kim immediately went to her expensive hotel basket to be able to go out fresh in our beautiful country the next day. And so it came about that the wet dream of countless men and boys fell in love with the flower bulbs in Lisse.

When I speak to her (her voice hasn’t changed a bit) she screams enthusiastically when I ask what she remembers best of her visits to the Netherlands: “Your Keukenhof! I love it, all these beautiful colors.”

Now I have to admit that I have never visited the pinnacle of Hollands Glorie myself, but I immediately feel like it. Because if Kim is still lyrical about it now, I apparently don’t know what I’m missing.

Kim is now fifty-eight, still blonde, a little chubby than before and completely back. She stopped singing for a while to devote herself to one of her great loves, gardening. And that of course also explains that interest in tulips and hyacinths. Also surprising is her enormous passion for science fiction (her new CD is not just called Here Come The Aliens). Kim is convinced that they have been among us for centuries, those aliens. In her own backyard she had a kind of brief encounter with outer space. And no, that was not due to a glass of wine too much, because Kim has not drank a drop for years. “I feel a lot better now.”

She’s happier than ever, like many 50+ women, including myself. It’s a matter of all the pennies having fallen and things that come together beautifully. She also likes being on stage more than ever. “I feel more confident and enjoy it a lot more than I used to.”

Her tour will start next month. She can already be seen at Parkpop in The Hague in June, but in November she will come to the Netherlands – where she now has good friends – for a club tour. She is looking forward to it, even though there is no bulb to be found in the Netherlands in the autumn. Well, there may be no bulbs, but there are balls, that is, bitterballen. Because that’s another passion of the happily married mother of two grown children:
“The first thing I will do is go to a café and order BITTERBALLS!”

Yes, and I will too, right now!