FEATURE:
Kim Wilde at Sixty-Five
Inside Her Classic, Kids in America
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I am sort of…
tying two things together. First, the amazing Kim Wilde turns sixty-five on 18th November. I am going inside Kids in America, as this was Wilde’s debut single. I love how Kim Wilde’s eponymous debut album, where Kids in America features, had all the songs written by Kim Wilde, her younger brother Ricky, and her father, Marty Wilde. In fact, it was mostly father-daughter writing the songs. That is the case for Kids in America. Released as a single on 26th January, 1981, it reached number two in the U.K. One of the most successful and remarkable debut singles in music history, Kids in America sold so well in its first week, many suspected foul play because it was not included in that week's chart. A scam. Kids in America, In its first eight weeks of release, sold more than half a million copies in the U.K. alone. It is easy to see why. The song is so infectious that you cannot help but to listen to it again and again! I am going to get to an interview with Kim Wilde, where she said she felt caged in by Kids in America. Artists who are defined by one song or expected to repeat it, it did take on a life of its own. I am starting out with some features about the classic song and how it was made. In 2018, LOUDER published their feature. Speaking with Kim Wilde about the making of Kids in America, it is a fascinating piece. I have included the earliest parts of the interview. An idea of how the seeds were planted:
“Kim Wilde remembers exactly where she was when she stumbled upon the song that would change her life forever. “I’d just left art college in St Albans, and I was half thinking about going on to do a degree, only because I hadn’t found a band,” she tells TeamRock from her home in Hertfordshire. “Actually, one of my main motivations for going to college was to try and start a band, because I heard that could be a good place to start them.”
Having grown up under the watchful eye of British rock’n’roll singer and MBE-awarded songwriter Marty Wilde, Kim’s career in music was as good as set, as was that of her older brother, Ricky. “Ricky had left school at 16 and had been on the road with my dad Marty when he started writing songs. My dad had some studio time he couldn’t make because he’d double booked himself, so he gave the studio time to Ricky.”
That simple administrative mistake ended up sewing the seeds for what would become one of the biggest-selling songs of the 80s. “Ricky went in demoed some songs he’d been writing and ended up taking them to London to meet with several record companies,” recalls Kim. “One of them happened to be Mickie Most’s RAK Records. Mickie recognised very quickly that he had a great talent on his hands with Ricky’s production, songwriting skills, energy and passion for pop music – they were all the things he recognised in himself.”
With Ricky firmly ensconced in Mickie’s favour, Kim sensed an opportunity. “I asked Ricky to ask Mickie if it was okay if I went and did some backing vocals on these tracks that Ricky had done,” she says. “I was trying to row myself in as a backing singer really, which is where my head was at the time. I had a lot of experience with my father in studios and live and I knew how to work with harmonies; it came as second nature to me. So I thought, ‘Right, I’m going to get myself in as a session singer, and then I’m going to get on the circuit’.”
“So obviously I arrived looking as natty as I could,” says Kim. “I remember I had a pair of black red striped pants and an old dinner jacket of my dad’s. At that point I’d already started dyeing my hair, so I basically turned up looking like Kim Wilde, but not realising that at the time.”
As it turned out, Kim wasn’t the only one sensing an opportunity. “Mickie asked Ricky who I was and mentioned something about getting me in with his producers, Nicky Chinn and Mike Chapman, who were writing all the hits for Suzi Quatro and numerous others at RAK Records at the time,” says Kim. “They were sort of like the Stock Aitken Waterman team, but it was Mickie Most, Nicky Chinn and Mike Chapman. So Ricky thought, ‘Sod that’. He was determined to impress upon Mickie that he didn’t need other producers, that he was a one-man show.”
So Ricky set about writing the song that would transform both of their careers – but not without inspiring some good, old-fashioned sibling bickering in the process. “He went home that weekend – we were all living in Hertfordshire at this point – and he wrote Kids In America,” recalls Kim. “I remember that happening, because his bedroom was next to mine and he’d got himself a Wasp keyboard – the little yellow and black thing – and I was really annoyed by all the noises coming out of his room. It had a sort of pulsing beat which ended up being the intro to Kids In America. That was particularly annoying coming through into my room while I was trying to listen to Joni Mitchell,” she laughs”.
In 2023, Marty Wilde talked to Songwriting Magazine about how he and Kim Wilde wrote Kids in America. It is one of the most enduring hits of the 1980s. One that arrived right near the start of the decade, I still think it is amazing today! It still pops and has this incredible addictiveness. Not so dated and old that it does not fit into modern Pop:
“I’d seen a TV programme which was about a certain batch of young teenagers in America and they frightened the hell out of me, because their attitude was…quite interesting! They came across very single-minded and their attitude was was very hard, which of course, a lot of youngsters can have, at a certain age. But I thought, if the American youth are going to be like that, we’re going to have a third World War in a few months time! So with this song, I said to Rick, ‘That’s the title: Kids In America.’ Then, of course, I had a clear cut picture. I wanted this tough girl who was looking out of a window, looking at the nightlife and people, traffic rushing by and thinking, ‘What the damn hell am I doing sitting here? Let’s get down there, let’s follow the music! Once you are there, you’re in control, in that song. She is in control. It’s not the guy, it’s not the person she’s dancing with, she is in total control. And that’s what I got from watching those American teenagers, I thought that’s what they would be like.
“It came together fairly quickly, really. I mean, Rick is very productive, he’s a very talented writer and he’s full of ideas – we both were – and, of course, Kim’s input was important. We worked in a studio in Hartford with a group called The Enid – I think they’re still in operation. They were a wonderful group of musicians. So whenever we were in their studio, [they would create] whatever sound that we wanted. So if we wanted a French horn, or a bit more synth on this, or a more powerful sound there… They knew they could twiddle the knobs and get it up, so suddenly we had a French horn at the end of Kids In America and we had sirens and a great pulse… They were a very experienced band so we were helped, we were fortunate to have them, so there’s no question that The Enid must take some credit. All the tracks that we did there, which were n Kim’s first album, came very quickly.
“It was one of those those times when I hadn’t really written anything of value and hadn’t been writing at all for some time – I’d probably not written for about five or six years when I started to write this song – so that layoff did me good. Because with lyrics, if you’re talking about love and after you’ve written [so many] songs on love, you start desperately looking around for a fresh angle. So I had the angles, I had fresh ideas and I felt like I was about 20 years old again! And with Rick being a young guy, the whole thing really went through like a dream. As we were finishing one song, he would get a melody line or I would get an idea and we’d be moving on to the next one.
“[With the iconic ‘woa-a-oh’ backing vocal] there was always a gap there but we all thought it should be a vocal ‘answer’ and also something you which you can get a crowd to join in with. It was just a natural chant that came in and it was needed. It comes down to the arrangement, you couldn’t leave [it out] so that tiny little line really fills it up. And when Kim does a concert you can here them all going, ‘Woa-a-ohh!’
“It was like every song that I’ve ever been a part of, when I’m actually writing it, I’m 100 percent up for it. Sometimes you can be very wrong. I’ve been there many times, you can be part of a song that you think, ‘Oh, this is a smash!’ But whatever happens, you go in with that kind of enthusiasm when you’re writing because you need to keep your energy flowing. If you start to doubt yourself, your song will end up on a piece of paper in the corner of a room instead of being out on a record. So yeah, I still get a buzz. Sometimes you write a song you think: why in God’s name wasn’t that a hit? It’s one of those things, there needs to be a gap for a song to be a hit. There has to be a market for it and a bit of luck. [We had] phenomenal luck!”.
There are a couple of other interviews I want to bring in. The Guardian chatted with Kim and Marty Wilde in 2017. A single that was controversial as it sold so fast. Seen as a scam because of its instant success, there is no denying how Kids in America was this titanic thing. It instantly connected with people. I want to include recollections from Kim Wilde:
“My brother Ricky hated school and left at the age of 17. He started writing songs and trying his luck with record companies. He was bowled over by the charismatic Mickie Most at RAK Records and took me along to meet him. I wore my best black-and-red punky trousers and had newly acquired blond hair which, according to one teacher, was the most creative thing I’d done at art school.
Mickie noticed me straight away. He asked Ricky: “Does your sister sing?” Suddenly, Ricky was being asked to write songs for me. He wrote the tune for Kids in America with my dad [the singer Marty Wilde] doing the lyrics. Ricky came up with the melody on a Wasp synth, a little black and yellow thing that made a bloody irritating noise if you were an older sister in the bedroom next door.
We recorded it in a studio in Hertfordshire owned by prog rock band the Enid. It was full of reptiles and other slithery things. The finished song sounded really exciting, but took a year to get released, during which time I worked in a local pub, wondering what was going to happen. When Kids in America finally came out, it sold so fast the people who regulate the charts thought it was a scam. It sold 60,000 copies a day and was only kept off No 1 by Shakin’ Stevens.
As Hertfordshire kids who grew up with Saturday Night Fever, we always imagined American teenagers were having a much better time: going to drive-ins, eating hamburgers, wearing fabulous clothes, snogging really cool kids. The song worked because everyone had the same fantasy.
Four years ago, Ricky and I were coming back on the train after the Magic FM Christmas party. They had all these exotic cocktails, so we’d stayed much longer than we planned. I’d acquired a pair of antlers and, since Rick had his guitar, I said: “Come on, let’s have a sing-song.” A passenger filmed us so there’s this footage of me on YouTube, extremely squiffy, wearing antlers and singing Kids in America. To my amazement, it went viral”.
Kim Wilde has very little but respect and love for her best known song. In 2015, The Guardian spoke with her, and she did say this: “After the 1980s I felt very caged in by “Kids in America”. I put out a more R&B influenced album but the public just didn’t want that girl Kim Wilde doing that. So I got out of the music business. Now I realise what a piece of gold that song is; I feel extremely honoured it’s mine”. I can appreciate she did not want to feel defined by one song. However, it is a gift that keeps on giving. Widely played to this day, she is still out there releasing phenomenal music. Her fifteenth studio album, Closer, was released in January. Writing on the album with Ricky Wilde and his daughter, Scarlett, it is another case of family being at the heart of her music. The same with Kids in America and writing with her father. Even though Marty Wilde is not songwriting anymore, he can look back proudly at one of his greatest moments. As Kim Wilde turns sixty-five on 18th November, I wanted to show proper respect…
FOR Kids in America.