The 1981 Listening Post - Kim Wilde - Kim Wilde

 Kim Wilde - Kim Wilde

#248

By Julia Talbot

June 29 1981

Kim Wilde

Kim Wilde

Genre: Forgettable Bubblegum?

Allen’s Rating: 4 out of 5

Julia’s Rating: 2 out of 5 or a haircut at Supercuts

Highlights: 

Kids in America

Much the way all newborns look like one another, one hit wonders resemble themselves, often more than they do anyone else. Before this assignment I, like most of (GenX) America, had not heard of Kim Wilde. I had however heard her most popular song: “Kids in America”.  I was surprised to see that apparently Kim Wilde, while never much of an American pop presence has been steadily releasing albums every few years culminating with her most recent Aliens Live: a compilation of live recordings released in 2019. Not to sound trite but she really is bigger in Europe…. And Australia. Despite having amassed a good number of releases and kept her hand in the game for so long, by any metric anywhere, Kim Wilde was really most popular and successful in the 80’s. She still holds the record for being the most-charted, British female solo act in the 1980’s -the decade when she had seventeen UK Top 40 hit singles.  And to think this lukewarm dynasty was kicked off with her self-titled album at the tender age of 21. 

Ms. Wilde (nee Kim Smith) is the eldest child of another tepid pop star, her father Marty Wilde (nee Reginald Smith), who (perhaps not surprisingly) wrote or co-wrote with her brother all the songs on this album. No wonder Kim quit the business of being a full-time musician in 1998 to become a (rather) decorated landscape gardener. Perhaps she has taste…. Or standards or perhaps just something better to do than to sing someone else’s mediocre lyrics. 

The initial reviews of this album pretty much say the same thing that I guess I would have said as well - if this album had been released today and not 39 years ago: shows promise. However, knowing the end of the story, so to speak all these decades later, let’s just say that it is heartening to know that Ms. Smith/Wilde has gardening to fall back on. 

Objectively speaking, Kids in America is the only highlight to this bubble-gummy album and even that is a song that one can’t really listen to more than three times in a row (I tried!) without having had enough. The rest of the album reads as filler. Not objectively terrible, but totally forgettable background music that just doesn’t register, not unlike the music loop at a Supercuts. Exactly the kind of album a twelve-year-old could get passionate about… and then forget about nine months later.

https://open.spotify.com/album/5vf8cU0vjl22ThptA93DDf?si=cNiombWvTCGqoRzXQBGeBA