KIM WILDE

I quickly went back to Chris Musto. We had the Flying Padovanis, at least that! That band was a family to which I would hang myself back. The family, always there. Chris had felt he was a Padovani and so did I. Paul Slack was struggling with his divorce, but with Chris we thought we could always go back and start all over again. When Paul had dropped out, Chris and I had gone to join Kim Wilde. And we did record and most of all had put together a band to do her European promotion. She was having hits all over Europe. Playing with her would bring in money, quite a lot of money. And, we would travel a lot. We were doing playbacks on View from a Bridge or Cambodia. She was the daughter of Marty Wilde, who had had a lot of success during the Cliff Richard days. He was managing her and her brother Ricky was writing her songs. When we wouldn’t be on promo trips, we were in the studio at Rak Records, Mickie Most’s studios, the hit maker. You would meet Hot Chocolate who were working there and Sting too was doing some stuff there. He would come on his own on his motorbike and no-one would recognize him under his helmet. Ricky and Kim had asked me to introduce him to them and he had been lovely, ending up playing a bass part on one of the songs Kim was recording. Kim was pretty and cool, but suicidal. Her brother and her father were putting a lot of pressure on her, not to mention Mickie Most. When you grow up in a house full of gold records and when you only know that, it is not an obvious one. She had calmly told me on a quiet afternoon, that if the sales would go down, she would seriously consider committing suicide! Great! All idiots! We still did together some memorable trips, record companies putting on the table all that could please us, paying for all our fantasies in sumptuous hotels, and we, rockers at heart that we were, would not stop them… whether it was in Zurich with the four Queen amigos at the restaurant that Giger, the guy who had conceived the design for the Alien monster, was running or with some crazy members of the band Madness in a Brussels club and later on in their hotel room with the television show dancers… we were still doing it…Rocking... Did we fuck or what, that night???