The 1981 pop hit that sold so fast that the charts “thought it was a scam”
From out of nowhere, Kim Wilde found herself catapulted to the fore of the synth-pop new wave so fast that the music industry thought such momentum was a giant swizz.
She was in good company for such a pop fast track. The Wildes were something of a musical family: elder brother Ricky, the UK’s answer to Donny Osmond, who boasted a string of kid hits across the 1970s after the moderately successful ‘I Am an Astronaut’. The dad Marty also worked in the biz, having cut American rock and roll style records as a young mini-star, then later penning numbers for the likes of Lulu, Status Quo, and The Casuals.
It’s unclear whether Kim possessed many burning ambitions to become a pop star, but tagging along to RAK Records, where Ricky was trying to make it as a songwriter for hire, resulted in the life-altering path crossing with pop honcho Mickie Most.
Most had a knack for pairing the right artist with the perfect number, lending a hand to the explosion of The Animals and Herman’s Hermits during the height of the British invasion. While his stature had ebbed a little in the early 1980s, Most spotted star potential in the young Kim, chiefly grabbed by her black-and-red punk slacks and newly dyed blonde hair, and quipped to Ricky, “Does your sister sing?” Luckily, Kim could certainly hold a tune.
Ricky and Marty soon knocked their heads together to pen a debut for their sister/daughter pop hopeful. The beating lyrical heart of the work in progress came from the fatherly concern for the new generation of kids growing up in a world of sex and vice, wholly foreign to the boyhood of Marty’s youth. Such a theme flashed a dual dimension to Kim, who countered Marty’s cautious examination with the natural youthful fascination with the States’ pop cultural glow across the Atlantic.
“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,” Kim reflected to The Guardian in 2017. “The song worked because everyone had the same fantasy.”
Soaking up the electronic trends of the day, Ricky worked out a riff on the pretty crude EDP Wasp synthesiser, nailed the lyrics with Marty, then holed up at The Lodge Recording Studio in Northampton to finally cut Kim’s debut single. Reportedly, Most knew the Wildes all had a smash on their hands, but a lengthy mixing job meant the eventually titled ‘Kids of America’ had to wait a full year before being unleashed to the world, whereby Kim resumed working in her local pub in St Albans, anticipating her hit in waiting.
“When ‘Kids in America’ finally came out, it sold so fast the people who regulate the charts thought it was a scam,” Kim looked back. “It sold 60,000 copies a day and was only kept off No 1 by Shakin’ Stevens.”
The single was flying off the shelves at such speed that chart regulators suspected foul play; such an explosion in sales was surely the result of RAK’s dodgy fudging of the numbers, payola scheming, or orchestrating sly buy-back purchases to boost those digits, and eventually pulled out the charts. RAK had a live one, however. Week after week, ‘Kids in America’ would continue to fly, eventually peaking at number two behind Stevens’ ‘This Ole House’.
Suddenly, Kim was rubbing shoulders with the likes of OMD and Gary Numan, boasting a hit all over Europe and a respectable Top 30 hit over in the US, and would largely carry her pop career to this very day.
