Kim Wilde heads to Birmingham Town Hall for gig

Between 1981 and 1996, she’d had 25 singles reached the top 50 of the UK singles chart and also enjoyed hits with Chequered Love, You Came and Never Trust a Stranger. Worldwide, she’d sold more 10 million albums and 20 million singles.

But as the hits dried up, she’d left her pop career behind and branched into an alternative career as a landscape gardener and radio presenter.

And then, just before Christmas, she blazed her way back into the pop firmament. After drinking much too much too much, she’d boarded a London commuter train, sporting a pair of sparkly reindeer antlers, she launched into a slurred rendition of her first and most famous hit – 1981’s Kids in America – accompanied by her brother Ricky Wilde on guitar.

The six-minute clip went viral and though the then 52-year-old was mortified, it propelled her back into the public’s consciousness. And far from laughing at her drunken antics, the public loved her all the more for having a sense of humour and not taking herself too seriously.

“I don’t think I could have been more drunk. I was absolutely paralytic. There was a lot of difficulty talking that night. The words sound great in your head but when they start coming out of your mouth they all tumble over each other.

“It’s hands-down the most humiliating and embarrassing aspect of it all.

“It’s something that potentially could have been incredibly negative but I have grabbed hold of it by the antlers and made something very positive.

“I do believe that’s sort of how I live my life. I’m good at taking negative situations and turning them around. Maybe the Christmas angel was talking to me.”

During her wilderness years, Kim had struggled to come to terms with her inevitable fall from grace. Like most pop stars who’ve tasted success and seen it fall from their hands, she’d suffered from a lack of identity, becoming increasingly depressed.

“That’s what I really wanted but it didn’t seem to be happening. I didn’t have anyone to share my life with.”

She was pointed in the direction of the Dr by her worried father, rock’n’roll star Marty.

“They gave me a big bag of all kinds of anti-depressants but by the time I’d got home, I’d lost the lot.

“I felt it was the universe talking to me. I thought, ‘Right, I’m going to have to sort this out myself.’ I just started exercising and looking after myself a bit better.”

She married the actor Hal Fowler and they had children, Harry and Rose, while Kim developed her new career in gardening.

And now, having returned since her accidental, drunken appearance on a Tube, she’s as popular as ever.

Kim is on the road with her first headline tour in more than 30 years and will line-up at Birmingham’s Town Hall tomorrow.

“I have toured more in the past 20 years than I ever did in the first 20 years of my career.

“My band and I have headlined on several tours abroad but this is the first one in the UK, mostly due to the fact that I have not released a new album here (my Christmas album Wilde Winter Songbook apart). My fantastic experience of touring with Rewind and Let’s Rock (80’s retro shows) gave me the confidence to announce this tour, the U.K audiences have a very special place in my heart and I can’t wait to see them all up close and personal.

“There are seven of us rocking out on stage tearing through my greatest hits and introducing several of the new tracks from the new Here Come The Aliens album. I have a 12 strong entourage making sure we look as good as we sound.”

Here Come The Aliens is a reference to an experience in which Kim professes to have seen a UFO.

“Yes, it’s true, something very unusual happened in my garden in 2009, and has in many ways inspired the new album, not least of course with the amazing artwork by my niece Scarlett Wilde.

“The album is a celebration of pop music from throughout the years, with nods to artists like Blondie, Billy Idol and Gary Numan, and more recent ones such as Goldfrapp and Chvrches. “I grew up in the 60s and fell in love with the amazing music that filled that decade, the Beatles of course, but also growing up listening to my dad writing songs on his guitar. Dad had an amazing vinyl collection, and as Ricky and I grew up we heard everything from Tchaikovsky to Elvis, Sinatra to Mike Oldfield.

“Pop music had always been at the heart of our family life, always playing in the house with new albums arriving weekly for Ricky and I to absorb. Some love affairs never die, and our love affair with Pop Music continues to this day, stronger than ever in fact.

“This album happened subconsciously, before we knew it all our influences came together in a perfect storm and Here Come The Aliens is the result.”

The music is very different in the present idiom to the time when Kim was on Top of the Pops.

“Of course the music industry is transformed.”

Andy Richardson