- Marty Trivia: Born on April 15, 1939 in Blackheath, England, his birth name was Reginald Leonard Smith Sr.
- Marty Trivia: His discoverer and manager was music impresario Larry Parnes. Parnes gave his performers stage names where the first name was used to make the singer sympathetic to the public...
- ... Hence "Marty". But Parnes also wanted to make his singers exciting and slightly dangerous to the audience. Hence "Wilde".
- Marty Trivia: He was already proficient on the ukulele and simply switched to guitar.
- Marty Trivia: As did many of his generation in Britain, Marty rose to fame by covering the early American rock and roll singers including Jimmy Rogers, Elvis, Eddie Cochran, Ritchie Valens, Dion, and others.
- Marty Trivia: But his biggest selling single in the UK was "Bad Boy", which he also wrote -- a dark, threatening ballad, it oozed menace and mystery by the standards of its day, ...
- ... and it became Wilde's biggest single, even reaching the lower level of the charts in America, where it was released by Epic Records.
- Marty Trivia: From mid-1958 to the end of 1959, Wilde was one of the leading British rock and roll singers, along with Tommy Steele and Cliff Richard.
- Marty Trivia: He was the main regular artiste on the Saturday ITV popular music shows Oh Boy! and Boy Meets Girls. There he met and married Joyce Baker, ...
- ... one of the Vernons Girls who were also show regulars. The courtship was highly public but, after the marriage, Wilde's popularity as a teen idol declined.
- Marty Trivia: His last single to reach the UK Top Ten (1961) was "Rubber Ball".
- Marty Trivia: Like many in Britain, and back across the pond, by 1963, when the Liverpool sound came along, he was effectively regarded as part of music's past. His subsequent recordings were all-but-invisible.
- Marty Trivia: His youngest child, Marty Jr. (born 1983), was a contestant on the Golf Channel's The Big Break IV: USA vs. Europe. His older children, Kim, Ricky and Roxanne have worked in the music industry, like their parents.
- Marty Trivia: With more than sixty years as a performer, he continues to tour on the UK nostalgia circuit and beyond.
