ROCKER WILDE COMING OUT OF DANCE GROOVE

“Sex symbols can’t sing, you know that,” said sex symbol Kim Wilde, an English singer who has a Top 5 single with her remake of the Supremes’ “You Keep Me Hangin’ On.”

She was being facetious--or so she thought. But the truth is, sex symbols usually can’t sing very well.

“But I’m different,” Wilde insisted during a recent interview. “I’m not a great singer. I’m not like Aretha Franklin or somebody like that, but I do have a distinctive style. I can sing.”

Has Wilde ever taken singing lessons?

“No, though a lot of people have suggested that I take them,”she wryly replied.

The discussion seemed to annoy Wilde, but she appeared to be in a dark mood even before the subject came up.

Maybe the problem was her dark, bleak hotel room in Hollywood. Although it was only afternoon, in seemed like the middle of the night in that room. Or maybe it was the nerve-wracking whine of the vacuum cleaner in the room above--after the interview had been shifted to her room because it was too noisy poolside.

Wilde, 26, has been trying to establish credibility as a singer ever since her first single, “Kids in America,” was an international hit in 1982.

“The press spotted me right away as the sexy type,” she explained. “I had the blond hair, the big lips, a decent body. That’s all some of them--the male journalists--saw. They look at me one-dimensionally.

“They didn’t think I could sing. They didn’t think I was committed to singing. They were only impressed with the fact that I took good photos. They thought all I was good for was inspiring lust.

“I haven’t cultivated this sex-symbol thing. I don’t hang out in clubs or date handsome men. There’s no hot gossip about me. But I still can’t escape (that image).”

Wilde once did seem like a candidate for instant oblivion. But she fooled everyone, making five albums and blossoming into a star in the United Kingdom and Europe. Her voice has improved too. Initially thin and without punch, it’s become stronger, more fluid and more expressive.

“You Keep Me Hangin’ On,” Wilde’s biggest American single, is from her MCA album “Another Step,” which is just a shade under the Billboard magazine pop Top 40.

This is the third Top 10 hit version of the song. The Supremes had the first one in 1966, followed two years later by Vanilla Fudge’s psychedelic rendition.

Wilde said that she avoided listening to the other hit versions before recording hers.

Wilde’s remake was fashioned by her younger brother, Ricki, who has written a lot of her music in collaboration with their father, Marty, who was one of Britain’s small crop of ‘50s rock singers.

The only thing she doesn’t like about her version is that it’s a dance single. She’s ambivalent about her success in this genre, where singers are often just background figures. The real heroes are the arrangers, producers and musicians. Dance-music artists are frequently one-hit wonders.

“I can sing pop and rock, not just dance,” she insisted. “I could have done something like Jody Watley, who did a dance album like Janet Jackson’s. But I don’t want to do a dance album like anybody’s .

“I don’t want to be known as a dance-music singer like Stacey Q. In a year’s time, people will be saying, ‘Stacey who?’ I don’t want to be ‘Kim who?’ in a year’s time. If I stick with dance, that may happen. I refuse to get stuck. . . . “

Wilde’s record company has other ideas. Its aim is to build her popularity by capitalizing on her fame in dance circles. Her choice for her next single was the album’s title song, “Another Step,” which is not a dance tune. But the company has the final word and it has selected the dance-oriented “Say You Really Want Me.”

Wilde’s blunt assessment of this choice: “I think it’s a mistake.”

She also wants no part of trying to establish a higher profile in the dance-music world by doing promotional appearances in clubs.

“This dance thing is is a dead-end street,” she said. “I refuse to get caught at the end of it with nowhere else to go. It would be stupid to do that and I’m not stupid.”