Song:Walking On Sunshine
Album:Walking On Sunshine: The Greatest Hits Of Katrina & The Waves
I guess most folks think of British pop group Katrina & The Waves as a one hit wonder. Of course there's more to the group than their biggest hit Walking On Sunshine. Even their route to chart success was unusual. The guy behind Katrina & The Waves was guitarist songwriter Kimberley Rew. He had a version of The Waves with drummer Alex Cooper as early as 1975. Then he formed Soft Boys with Robyn Hitchcock. Meanwhile singer keyboardist Katrina Leskanich (born Apr. 10, 1960 in Topeka, KS) had a group with her guitarist boyfriend Vince De La Cruz called Mama's Cookin'. Katrina lived all over the world as an Air Force brat and settled in England in 1976. When Soft Boys split up in 1981, Rew was looking to reform The Waves. Cooper was with Mama's Cookin'. Rew joined and after Katrina was named lead vocalist, the group was renamed Katrina & The Waves. They were having trouble getting a record deal and recorded an album and shopped it to labels in 1983. The only company to respond was the Canadian label Attic Records. They had distributed Soft Boys records. So their first two albums were released only in Canada. They started to get more attention from record companies when Rew's song Going Down To Liverpool was successfully covered by The Bangles. This led to a contract with Capitol. In 1985, they released an album that was a combination of the first two albums. Walking On Sunshine reached #9 on the Billboard Hot 100 and the video got heavy airplay on MTV. Subsequent albums didn't do as well probably because according to Cooper, Rew let the others write songs and the songs weren't very good. They did have a top twenty hit with That's The Way in 1989. This EMI England comp covers their 80s recordings. They continued to record in Rngland in the 90s and won the 1997 Eurovision Song Contest with Love Shine A Light. It reached #3 in England. Katrina left the group in 1998 and was legally unable to use the name Katrina & The Waves. She unsuccessfully tried to get around that by calling her group Katrina & The New Wave and released a solo CD in England in 2005. Kimberley Rew has also recorded solo CDs and currently has a band called Jack. Who knows? Maybe Katrina & The Waves will reform in the future but they're not a real one hit wonder anyway. Here's the video for Walking On Sunshine by Katrina & The Waves.
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