- Included among the Record Descriptions of Favorite Albums (Part 1).
- Kim Wilde is her debut album and opens with “Kids in America”, with her second Top Ten U.K. hit “Chequered Love” as the first song on Side 2.
Kim Wilde – Kim Wilde (1981): Kim Wilde is the daughter of early British rock and roll star and teen idol Marty Wilde and had a major U.S. new-wave hit in 1982 with “Kids in America”; the song was co-written by her father and her younger brother Ricky Wilde, who also produced the single. While only reaching the Top 25 on the record charts, “Kids in America” received heavy airplay on both radio and MTV for months and became the 23rd most popular song of 1982 in the Billboard Hot 100. “Kids in America” was first released in the U.K. in January 1981 and sold a half million copies in eight weeks, reaching #2 on the singles charts. Kim Wilde is the U.S. edition of Kim Wilde’s debut album and opens with “Kids in America”, with her second Top Ten U.K. hit “Chequered Love” (with “chequered” being the British spelling of “checkered”) as the first song on Side 2.
Like “Kids in America”, all of the songs on Kim Wilde are written by Marty Wilde and Ricky Wilde and are also produced by Ricky Wilde, except that Ricky Wilde is the sole songwriter on “Falling Out”. Kim Wilde is backed on the album by the British progressive rock/symphonic rock band the Enid; Ricky Wilde also provides keyboards, guitar, and backing vocals. The third single from Kim Wilde, “Water on Glass” – a song about the “ringing in the ears” condition known as tinnitus, and the high-pitched chimes provide a good approximation of what it sounds like – was a #11 hit in the U.K. and also charted in the U.S. Kim Wilde was a hit album as well, topping the album charts in Germany and Sweden and reaching #3 in the U.K. The songs on Kim Wilde show more variety than one might expect, and many are downright fierce; besides the three singles, all excellent, my other favorites include “Our Town”, “Everything We Know”, “You’ll Never be so Wrong”, and “Tuning in Tuning On”. In 1986, Kim Wilde had a Top Ten hit on both sides of the Atlantic with her staccato cover of the Supremes hit “You Keep Me Hangin’ On”; Vanilla Fudge previously launched their career with a psychedelic rendering of “You Keep Me Hangin’ On” in 1967. While Kim Wilde did not have another major hit in the U.S., “Another Step (Closer to You)”, a duet with Junior Giscombe (then known only as Junior), had considerable radio play in the U.S. in the summer of 1987 and was another Top Ten single for Kim Wilde in her home country. Kim Wilde continued to score hits off and on in Europe in later years, including a surprise hit album in 2018 called Here Come the Aliens that made the Top 30 in the U.K., based loosely on a possible encounter in Kim Wilde’s garden in 2009.