Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
I’m older, wiser calmer, happier now... but I still scan the night sky for UFOS
Joyce Baker, perhaps explains why Kim is so unspoilt by fame and so easily able to take and leave the showbiz life.
“I’d done the training, watched dad as a performer, as a musician, sitting there strumming his guitar, writing songs, singing a lot… being on TV,” she says.
“So as I got older each year it became clearer in my small child’s mind, music was my destiny. I could feel it pulling me.”
When Kids In America became a worldwide smash the then 21-yearold Kim was more than ready to grab fame with both hands.
Brit Awards, sell-out international tours and album sales of more than 10 million followed. She had 17 hits throughout the 80s, including Chequered Love, You Keep Me Hangin’ On and Water on Glass
It was more than any female performer of the 80s. But by the mid 90s she wanted to get off the rollercoaster. “It was so exhausting eventually,” Kim recalls. “I’d have ups, which were exhausting, and then it would have its downs, which were exhausting in a very different way.
“It stopped being fun. And I started questioning that I had more to give.”
It was then Kim decided to start taking a back seat from the UK scene, and threw herself into the West End, appearing in Tommy by The Who’s Pete Townshend.
Having fallen in love with her future husband, cast member Hal Fowler, while raising two children she found a new career as an award-winning gardener and host of TV show Garden Invaders.
“Being Kim Wilde in music and being the anonymous gardener – there’s a lovely yin and yang to that,” she says.
“I think we all need grounding, we all need to be connected to nature.”
Some of Kim’s closest friends are no longer here. She admits being smitten with David Bowie, who died last year.
“He was a lovely guy, I was completely besotted with him, everybody was.”
Unfortunately for Kim, the Starman was falling for Iman, who he married.
But Kim will always have her other star men... if they visit her again.