KIM WILDE: When I was about seven or eight years old, I used to watch Top of the Pops on a Thursday night, and that was my world. I remember making a deal with myself that one day I would be on it. Yes, my dad was one of the first rock stars ever [in the U.K.], but I’d already made a firm decision about my life.
My parents were only 20 when they had me. Rules didn’t exist that much in our house. We were like kids growing up together, sharing each other’s jeans and T-shirts. My dad had the most awesome collection of vinyl, and we had unlimited access to that.
I loved everything that was happening with punk, but I was just as happy listening to Kraftwerk as I was listening to the Sex Pistols, ABBA, and the Clash. I knew that my life was wrapped up with music one way or another, and even though it felt a bit slow to start, especially when I found myself leaving school and going to art college, I had this really strong sense of my own destiny. I’d done some backing vocals on my dad’s stuff, and I’d been on the road with him. And I’d done backing vocals on a lot of the Ricky Wilde stuff. But really, deep down, what I wanted to do was get in a band. I remember going to London and seeing a band called the Mo-Dettes. I became a bit friendly with them, and I used to think that seemed the most fun: hanging out with a bunch of girls you love and making pop music.
Ricky had written some songs and had interest from Mickie Most at RAK Records. One day he was meeting with Ricky and I marched into the studio looking like a pop star. I remember making a special effort that day—my hair looked particularly spiky. I was already dying it and cutting it myself at art college. My tutor said it was the most creative thing I’d done while I was there. I went down the King’s Road and bought myself some punky new wave trousers and a shirt. Things happened very quickly after that. Mickie asked Ricky who I was and started making noises to him that a couple of producers, Nicky Chinn and Mike Chapman, might do some stuff with me. Ricky thought, Sod that. If anyone’s going to be doing something with Kim, it’s going to be me. He went home that weekend and wrote “Kids in America.”
He had the Wasp synthesizer in his bedroom. It was quite a new thing—we’re talking about the dark days of technology, pre-Walkman, pre-cellphones. I don’t know how he got his hands on this bit of kit, but the pulse inspired “Kids in America.” Rick was a big Human League fan. He was the sound maker, and I was the one lending the vocals and the blonde hair.
A lot of people would give me shit for “Kids in America”: “What are you singing about—you’re not from America.” I don’t know that it matters that much. I loved the attitude of the song. Do you really always have to directly identify with the lyrics of a song? I didn’t think so. I always thought it had something special about it that transcended having it make any sense that a girl from a village in Hertfordshire in the English countryside was singing it. Besides, I liked that it wound people up so much.
It went in the charts on its own steam and the BPI [British Phonographic Institute] or whoever put the charts together pulled it out. They thought it had been hyped [that the record company illegally purchased copies]. There was a lot of hyping that used to go on in those days, and they hadn’t put it past Mickie that he might do that to his fledgling artist. So they had to reinstate the song. Mickie would come in every day and tell us the sales figures: 30,000, then 40,000, then 50,000, then 60,000 people were going out every day and buying it. Before we knew it, we sold over a million copies. At the time, I had no way of computing what that actually meant. I had nothing to compare it to, and it was irrelevant to me anyway. I wasn’t interested in units and figures and business. All I cared about was the fact that I was going to be on Top of the Pops for a few Thursday nights.
When it was a hit in America, they were like, “Why ‘East California’? Why not all the way over to the west? Why miss out on that whole section of California that’s not mentioned in the song?” And I said, “Well, they already got it. The people from the west side have already got it. We just had to bring it over to the east.” I was finding myself trying to come up with any excuse as to why my dad might have written “to East California,” and if you ask him, quite disarmingly, he’ll just say, “’Cause it sounded better.” If I’m honest, I didn’t give too much thought to any of the lyrics. I was lost in this fantasy world that my dad had invited me into. I love how pop music can be completely nonsensical like that.
Musically, I found it really hard to put myself where I thought I should be. I loved too many different kinds of music. I really did struggle, and I think it shows in the early parts of my career. I look a little like I’m not sure where I should be, and it’s true: I didn’t know. By the time Ricky and my dad had started writing in earnest, I was far, far away. I was 20 years old living in airports all over the world with barely time to think about any aspect of my life other than making sure I didn’t miss a flight. I barely saw them except to record. I figured my dad had a songwriting pedigree, so I just let them get on with it. I loved what they were coming up with for me, and even when I wasn’t sure, I still went for it wholeheartedly. I played my part, but not in the creative process, putting songs together. It took me quite a few years to start thinking about becoming a songwriter myself.
I was always a bit of a tomgirl at school, a jeans and T-shirts girl. While the others were wearing eyeliner and miniskirts and platforms, I was the girl with the flared jeans and no makeup. As I became more of a woman, I felt more confident and sexy in photographs. They were absolutely tame compared to what’s happening now, but that suited me. I liked that I could look pretty in pictures, but my main thing was I loved singing. Image always had a backseat for me, and sometimes I got it really spectacularly right—although most of the time that would be totally by accident—and then a lot of times I’d get it spectacularly wrong. There have been times in my career when I wish I’d been a bit more stylish. I wish I could have pulled it off and had all the top designers clamoring for my attention and begging me to wear their clothes. But they never did, and now I’m really glad I never got consumed by that.
MIXTAPE: 5 More Songs by British Women 1. “Just What I Always Wanted,” Mari Wilson 2. “It’s a Mystery,” Toyah 3. “Weak in the Presence of Beauty,” Alison Moyet 4. “They Don’t Know,” Kirsty MacColl 5. “Eighth Day,” Hazel O’Connor
Sometimes a career is driven very much by an artist and their ambitions. A really good example of that is Madonna. We both had a great start, but she had that ambition. I don’t think I had that kind of voracious appetite. Had I had that, maybe I could have kept the momentum going a bit more. It was not for want of trying. Rick and Marty were always trying to come up with a hit record—that was the holy grail of each waking day. But all the aspects of creating an image and hype? I didn’t have that energy to put into my career. It wasn’t coming from me, and as a result, I didn’t seem to attract that kind of input from anyone else.
THAT WAS THEN
BUT THIS IS NOW
Kim Wilde continued to have European hits into the nineties. She ended her recording career to marry actor Hal Fowler and raise a family. She appeared in Tommy on the West End stage before going full-force into horticulture and becoming a celebrated TV gardener, presenting makeover shows for the BBC and Channel 4. Wilde then returned to music in 2001, joining various eighties revival tours. In 2003, she recorded the genuinely great “Anyplace Anywhere Anytime,” a duet with fellow new waver Nena that went on to be a Top 10 hit across Europe. (Just because we call this one “genuinely great” doesn’t mean we don’t think similarly highly of other eighties acts’ contemporary recordings. We just don’t say it.) She is still signed to Sony Germany and continues to tour and record new material.
“Kids in America” resurfaced in 1995 when the Muffs recorded it as the theme to Clueless. Subsequently, it’s been performed by One Direction on the U.K. X-Factor and recorded by acts as diverse as Tiffany, Cascada, Atomic Kitten, and James Last. (“Don’t forget Lawnmower Deth,” Wilde says. “They did a death metal version.”) The song got a further le
ase on life in Christmas 2012 when a YouTube clip of a sozzled Wilde wearing reindeer antlers and serenading baffled London subway commuters with a boozy rendition racked up more than 2 million views.
WILDE: My career was tough to deal with at times. It became a roller-coaster ride, and I’d been on the ride for long enough. I’d recorded an album for MCA, and there was not a lot of enthusiasm for it from them or anyone else. So I decided to leap before I was pushed. I found myself getting one of the lead roles in Tommy. I thought that was a perfect halfway house between where I’d been and where I needed to go. Also, I couldn’t bear the thought of traveling anymore. My whole life had been spent living out of a suitcase. Then I met my husband, Hal, and that was the final nail in the coffin of my career. I really thought I’d never sing “Kids in America” again.
I was 36 and had my spiritual needs. My poor spiritual needs had gone unattended for some time. Falling in love and having children awoke a lot of feelings inside of me, and one of the most powerful was the sense that I needed to get my hands in the earth. It happened at the same time I got pregnant, this great desire to be closer to nature. I spent most of the eighties and nineties plastered in makeup, and I had this real desire to go out and plant roses.
My career began as a video artist, and I was one of the best mimers in the business when I was on TV. But when my career began again, it was focused on live music. I was utterly astonished when I discovered there was still a crowd out there who wanted to watch a middle-aged housewife singing “Kids in America.” The feeling was euphoric. I said yes to tours and more tours, and music came back into my life.
The eighties has had a massive revival in the past 20 years—during the nineties, though, it was given short shrift. People quickly forgot the good things. There seemed to be a lot of cynicism, mostly to do with politics and Thatcher, but music got thrown in with it. Greedy and of no substance, shoulder pads, spiky hair—that was eighties music summed up in a few vacuous words. It took a good 20 years for people to go, “You know, those records were great, and that was a fantastic time for pop music.”
When I feel really self-conscious about singing “New York to East California,” I think of the Police singing “De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da,” and then I don’t feel so bad. Some records have that special magic about them, and “Kids in America” has it in bucket loads. I’m really proud to be associated with the song, and I’ve fallen back in love with it after turning my back on it for years. The love affair’s back on!
“NEW SONG”
oward Jones was a sensitive singer-songwriter sheep in a new wave wolf’s clothing. If he’d sat at his keyboard and sung the same songs in the sixties, the seventies, or even the now-ties, he’d have been equally successful. But he blew up in the eighties, so he jabbed at a synthesizer and had a porcupine for a haircut while a white-faced mime named Jed cavorted around him, bringing the lyrics to life. A native of Southampton, England, Jones was not the only conventional artist to be new-waved up to suit the requirements of the decade; Nik Kershaw and Paul Young were similarly refurbished with gravity-defying ’dos. If Jones enjoyed a longer run of stateside success than many of his countrymen, it was because he gave his listeners more to chew on. He made more than just catchy records—he was a musical Tony Robbins, delivering self-help seminars through song. Howard Jones was just one man, but sometimes one man can make all the difference. (Well, he was actually two men if you count Jed the mime.)
LM: Top 10 Life Lessons I Learned from Howard Jones:
1. Don’t try to live your life in one day—don’t go speed your time away.
2. Don’t bite off more than you can chew. (Only so much you can do.)
3. Try and enjoy the here and now, the future will take care of itself somehow. The grass is never greener over there.
4. You can’t change the world singlehandedly. Raise a glass, enjoy the scenery.
5. Treat today as if it were the last, the final show, get to 60 and have no regrets.
6. Don’t be fooled by what you see. Don’t be fooled by what you hear.
7. Don’t crack up. Bend your brain. See both sides. Throw off your mental chains.
8. Challenge preconceived ideas. Say goodbye to long-standing fears.
9. A thousand skeptic hands won’t keep us from the things we plan … unless we’re clinging to the things we prize.
10. You can look at the menu, but you just can’t eat. (As a vegan, I find this to be particularly true.)
JB: Zzzzzzz
HOWARD JONES: There’s a place I used to go when I was in my mid-20s: West Wickham Hill in High Wickham [Southeast England]. It is one of those places that has a fantastic view, and I used to take our dog walking there and reflect on how things were going. It was 1982, and I’d started to get interest from record companies, I was playing big club venues in London, and I got played on the radio in a BBC session. So I was setting out my agenda for my career, and I remember thinking about what I would like to say with my first single. That’s where the “New Song” lyrics come from. They were inspired by the fact that I had been working in a cling-film [think Saran Wrap] factory on the shop floor and dreaming of getting my music going. I wanted to put that back into the music and say to people, “If I can do it, so can you—in whatever field you want to work in. Don’t accept your second choice or Plan B. Go for what you really want to do and believe that you can do that.”
There were a lot of people writing quite doom-laden music and being depressed about the future. That may be how they felt, but I didn’t want to align myself with that. It seemed to me that a lot of people were being miserable to be cool. I’m not going to give any names of artists, ’cause I don’t do that. And I don’t even know if it was just music. It was just a general feeling within people that the future was not going to be good.
Now, if you just go, “Be happy and be positive,” and it’s done in a shallow way—if you do that without having grappled and fought the battle with yourself—then I don’t think it carries any weight. If my music has any effect, it’s because it was born from this battle I was having with myself, the general thinking that you have no control over your future. It’s not true.
I didn’t fit in with the other pop stars at the time, and I think the fans really picked up on that. I was swimming against the tide. I was married—happily. I didn’t do drugs. Then, with the fashion stuff, that was all part of the same message: Don’t be afraid to not wear T-shirts and jeans the whole time. If you have it in you to express yourself a bit more flamboyantly, then please have the courage and the joy of doing that. No record company ever told me what to wear, say, or do. It’s always been difficult to be who you are, but I thought being a pop star is the best way to manifest that.
Having Jed onstage with me, that was another thing that was different. He was part of my act for all of the club dates pre-1983. To have a mime artist who dressed up as loads of characters for different songs—I don’t think anybody else was doing that. He wasn’t like Bez from Happy Mondays. Ours was more like performance art than a guy just dancing around. It was specific, and the costumes expressed the ideas of the songs.
“New Song” was the first song I ever recorded. It was started at Chipping Norton Recording Studios in Oxfordshire. It didn’t turn out as good as it should have, so we went up to Good Earth Studios in London to do some more work on it. It was Tony Visconti’s studio; that was where Bowie and T. Rex used to record. I always liked David Bowie, but I really had a problem with his lyrics, because they meant nothing. They were just meaningless. He’s definitely a fabulous artist, and the shows I saw him do were some of the best shows ever. I loved pretty much everything about him, but I was like, What’s that mean? What are you saying, David? Art for art’s own sake is just not me. I like being able to relate to what people are saying.
“New Song” is probably my favorite. It is radically different from what you’d hear in most pop songs. The line “Challenging preconceived ideas”—you would never hear that in a pop son
g. That song is packed with stuff like that: “Don’t crack up / Bend your brain”—don’t be thrown or sidetracked, don’t succumb to weakness, be strong. And “See both sides”—that’s really important, to see both sides of an argument.
“I realized I needed to work out what I thought about life and the world, how I was going to behave and what philosophy I was going to have. And that was documented in the albums.”
I used to read a lot of books about Eastern philosophy. I really related to Alan Watts’s work. He was a Western guy who interpreted Eastern philosophical thinking. From the age of about 21, I realized I needed to work out what I thought about life and the world, how I was going to behave and what philosophy I was going to have. And that was documented in the albums. “What Is Love?” questions the idea that romantic love is the Holy Grail. “Maybe love is letting people be what they want to be”—not putting them in a box and tying them down and making them be what you want. To really love somebody, you’ve got to let them express themselves and not try and dominate them and want to make them be like you.
“No One Is to Blame” is a complex song. I was doing promotion in San Francisco with a record company guy, and he said, “Howard, what do you think of all the pretty women here in San Francisco?” I said, “They’re great, but I’m happily married to Jan.” And he said, “You can look at the menu, but you don’t have to eat.” That’s what sparked the song. What I was trying to do was be honest on behalf of the listener. It was about being attracted to other people and admitting that. You are attracted to maybe half the people you meet, and that isn’t a bad thing. You shouldn’t blame yourself for that. No one is to blame—this is natural. This is what being a human being is like. So don’t think you’re the only one. But if you want to consummate that attraction to other people, then you have to be prepared to take what comes with it.
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