Kim Wilde: From Pop Star to Gardener

If you peek into the garden of Kim Wilde’s Hertfordshire home, there’s a good chance you’ll find the English pop star turning her compost heap or ripping out weeds – while looking like she’s just stepped off the set of a music video.

“I’ll come home covered in make-up, feeling tired and frazzled, and just go outside in whatever I’m wearing,” says Wilde, who brings her Greatest Hits Tour to Australia in mid-October. “A few hours later, when I’m covered in mud, I’ll come back in. It doesn’t matter if my outfit gets ruined. For me, it’s a way of getting rid of some stress.”

Since her debut single, Kids in America, was released in 1981, Wilde has sold more than 30 million records globally and is the most-charted British female solo act of the 1980s. (As a trained horticulturist, she is also the only person in history to obtain both a US No. 1 single and a gold medal at the prestigious Chelsea Flower Show.)

When we connect over Zoom, Wilde is sitting in her bedroom, a suitably glamorous space with a leopard-print bedspread and a projector that throws colourful night sky animations across the ceiling. After I ask her to specify her worst habit – one of the Take 7 questions, below – she disappears to consult her daughter, Rose. I hear a peal of laughter in the distance before she returns to her computer.

“My hearing has been impaired by years of rock ‘n rolling, so Rose thinks my worst habit is that I forget to put my hearing aids in,” she says. “We end up having these hilarious conversations where she says something, and I’ll misinterpret it as something completely different.”

In January, Wilde will release her 15th studio album, Closer. The lead single, Trail of Destruction, is a critique of modern-day ills, from environmental devastation to fake news and social media toxicity.