The kids go Wilde for Kim again

 Best known for her smash-hit Kids In America, green-fingered Kim Wilde has cultivated an obsession with little green men on her latest album – Here Come The Aliens. The synth-pop sweetheart talks to Joe Nerssessian about a possible UFO sighting, touring with Michael Jackson and how a drunken impromptu sing-a-long on the train revived her career.

When Kim Wilde was filmed drunkenly singing one of her biggest hits, Kids In America, on a train in Christmas 2012, few would have expected it marked a comeback for the Eighties pop star. But after more than two million viewed the footage online, the unlikeliest of renaissances began.

The following December, Kim capitalised on her viral success and released a Christmas album – her first UK release in almost 20 years – and now she’s back again alongside some extraterrestrial friends with Here Come The Aliens.

It’s more than three-and-a-half decades since the 57 year old burst onto the music scene with the debut single she performed on that train. The daughter of Fifties pop singer Marty Wilde, her synth-driven pop subscribed to the movement of the decade while also straddling the mainstream.

There were 17 top-40 singles in the Eighties, 30 million records sold and support slots on tour with David Bowie before the momentum fizzled out in the mid Nineties.

She retreated into her childhood love of gardening which remarkably helped inspire Here Come The Aliens when she spotted unidentifiable lights in the sky from her garden in 2009.

 She says: “I remember it was the day after Michael Jackson had died. I was playing his records all day. I got home about 10pm and these lights appeared. I was in my back garden standing on the grass looking up wondering what was going on. It did make a big impact on me, I still look up to the sky expecting or hoping to see something. I’ve not seen anything as unusual as that since.”

Her obsession with little green men started before that, however. As an eight-year-old, she watched the first moon landing – an event referenced on the album’s tacit tile track, 1969.

“They’re out there in the stars, maybe they come from Mars,” she sings. Inspired by her own close encounter, the glam-rock stomp sees Kim as a girl, gazing starry-eyed at black-and-white broadcasts of the landing, before turning her thoughts to distant galaxies.

Such pleasing allusions are scattered across the album where the highlight comes with Kandy Krush, the closest thing to Kim’s touchstone hit.

She was actually writing the album prior to her Christmas episode but momentum was halted by the viral hit and her festive record took precedent.

Kim was a little hesitant at the footage at first, she says, but revelled in the reaction once it came.

“The antlers on the head,” Kim adds, “the slurring of the words, just mammothly cocking up in public. For a lot of people I think it was just a relief that someone famous didn’t mind that happening. And it inspired me because the public were so sweet about the whole thing and had a really good laugh.

“People were phoning me up, I’d get in taxis, I’d be in a supermarket, I’d be in a crowded place on the street and people were coming up and going, ‘That was such fun, it was great to see someone let their hair down’.”

 With the world seemingly engaged in a constant state of turmoil, from the US to Europe to Syria, some may argue the time is ripe for an alien invasion and Kim enjoys imagining them observing, debating whether to intervene or not.

“What are they going to do? Are they going to help us become a better and more enlightened humanity or are they just going to fling us off the planet?” she ponders down the phone. “If they intervene, then that creates all kinds of chaos, maybe worse than if they just allow us to evolve into the more perfect version of ourselves that we really ought to.

“I know what I think I’ll do if I was them,” she adds, ambiguously, before adding: “In spite of all the evidence, I still have great faith in humanity.”

As well as framing her alien-encounter, Michael Jackson also helped Wilde realise she never wanted to be a megastar when she supported him on his Bad tour in 1988. The circus of the charade as it arrived in different towns left a bad taste in her mouth and she can recall thinking, ‘I don’t think this is for me’.

 “I really love my pocket-sized career,” she says. “It’s nowhere as big as Madonna’s or Michael Jackson’s but I love getting to sing, write songs, perform. It allows me to pay the bills. I get to travel the world, that’s a huge privilege but I can still walk into Tesco and do the shopping, and I can still take the kids to school and we don’t need bodyguards at home.

“I don’t have to have my life crowded with strangers or people pretending to be my friend.”

Kim Wilde’s Here Come The Aliens was released last week.

As part of a national 19-date tour, Kim Wilde is at the Regent Theatre in Ipswich on Friday, March 30, at 8pm. For tickets, priced from £28 to £35.50, call the box office on 01473 433100 or go on-line at ipswichregent.com. The following day Kim is at the Cliffs Pavilion in Southend from 8pm. Tickets for that concert are priced from £29 to £36.50, available by calling 01702 351135 or via the website at southendtheatres.org.uk.