I’ve never been a fan of summer songs, and I’m certainly no fan of
“Walking on Sunshine.” Still, the story of Kimberley Rew and his big
hit with Katrina & the Waves is pretty interesting. This article is
running in the current issue of Atlanta, GA’s Stomp and Stammer,
but also reprinted here since the article isn’t likely to end up on the
website. No real political content, but there is a reference to the Iron Eagle
soundtrack…
Waved Out
Kimberley Rew celebrates the 25th anniversary of his Summer of Hit
There
are a lot of good songs by Katrina and the Waves. There are even good
songs by The Waves, who made their debut in 1982 with
Shock Horror! Katrina
Leskanich’s didn’t get top billing on that one, but her vocals would
convince The Bangles to cover “Going Down to Liverpool” in 1984. By
then, Katrina and the Waves were signed to a Canadian label, and the UK
act had already released 1983’s
Katrina and the Waves (aka
Walking on Sunshine) and 1984’s
Katrina and the Waves 2.
The band wouldn’t sign an international deal until 1985—long after any
hipster cachet remained from songwriter Kimberley Rew’s work with the
Soft Boys.
The good news is that the international deal provided
exposure for Kimberly and the Waves’ most brilliant moment—that being
the bluesy AOR stomp of “Maniac House,” which survived from
Katrina and the Waves 2 to make it onto the soundtrack of 1986’s
Iron Eagle.
That alone would warrant the new CD reissues that cover all the band’s
Canadian releases. But if you ask Rew about “Maniac House,” he’s
suspiciously quick to bring up a different song.
“When you’re
a new band on the scene,” Rew explains from his English home, “people
will start sniffing around and be keen to put your songs on their
films. They want to seem up to the minute. Of course, ‘Walking on
Sunshine’ has been in lots of films, too, and keeps being played on the
radio. I think it’s nice that people like to still hear it. It makes
people feel good and happy, and I’m sort of proud to be associated with
that. It’s a positive thing. It’d be great if that success was repeated
ten times over with ten different songs, but having one hit is a lot
better than having none at all.”
“Maniac House” should’ve been
the first song to fill up the Top Ten all by itself. Still, since Rew
mentioned it, “Walking on Sunshine”—which hit America in 1985 as a
rerecorded (or remixed) tune—remains Katrina and the Waves’ most
beloved hit. The current reissue campaign is built around the song’s
25th anniversary on the US pop charts. Rew is certainly correct about
the terminally bouncy tune being in plenty of soundtracks and
commercials. You’ve heard it on
American Idol, and the cast of
Glee
recently returned the song to the UK charts. That’s kind of
unfortunate. “Walking on Sunshine” swamped the band’s later singles,
and nobody noticed that Katrina and the Waves were still making good
music by the time of 1993’s
Edge of the Land.
In fact,
enough Americans had forgotten Katrina and the Waves—if not their
biggest hit—that a younger generation was amused to learn there was a
band with that name after New Orleans flooded in 2005. In truth,
though, Rew is being modest in claiming the one hit. Katrina and the
Waves scored a worldwide comeback in 1997 when the band won the
Eurovision Song Contest with a Rew composition called “Love Shine a
Light.”
“That was only in the UK,” says Rew, “so I didn’t think
you’d know about that one. Factually, there you are. It was strange.
We’d had our one hit, and we were just making music and doing shows all
the time. We were aware that our career was on a downward trajectory,
but we just kept doing it. We love making music, basically. If you’d
asked me in 1995 if I was planning to enter the Eurovision Song
Contest—and even win it—I would’ve explained how that’s not the natural
career progression. But the system in those days was that anyone could
send in a tape of a song and get a chance to represent the UK. There
was nothing else going on with us at the time, so we did it. Funnily
enough, winning made it easier for Katrina and the rest of us to move
on to other things.”
Those other things would include Rew renewing the solo career he’d begun with 1981’s
The Bible of Bop—which
was essentially a Waves album without Katrina, and is also part of the
reissue campaign. Rew has released several more fine albums over the
past few years, while Leskanich has pursued a solo career. (Legal
objections prevented her from performing as Katrina and the New Wave.)
She’s pushing the 25th anniversary of “Walking on Sunshine” with a live
album.
Leskanich is also spared Rew’s place in the pop and/or
punk pantheon. He’s one of the few musicians with both cool cult status
and an embarrassing pop hit. It was probably his Soft Boys lineage that
got “Walking on Sunshine” into a scene from
High Fidelity. The song was used as a gag, though, and wasn’t hip enough to make the soundtrack album.
Strangely, Rew hasn’t given any of this much thought.
“There
may be a difference in perception,” he acknowledges. “So many things
come of just meeting people over the years. I knew [Waves drummer] Alex
Cooper before I met Robyn Hitchcock, when we were all in my hometown of
Cambridge. Alex and I were already The Waves before I joined with
Robyn. Then Robyn went on to his next phase, and I got back together
with Alex. Robyn and I are both very creative people, but we’re very
different. That’s why we get on. I met Katrina and [Waves guitarist]
Vince de la Cruz and [bassist] Bob Jakins, and suddenly I was the
songwriter for a new band. That’s the way it came out—at least, at
first. The fact that the Waves weren’t anything like the Soft Boys is
neither here nor there. It all makes sense in my head, but I can’t
expect the rest of the world to fall in line with what’s inside of my
head.”
There are some fun bonus tracks of The Waves in 1976 on the
Shock Horror!
reissue. Still, a misinformed music geek would easily contrive a
simpler scenario. That would involve Rew having an officially
acceptable heyday with the Soft Boys, and then awful commercial years
with Katrina and the Waves. Rew is secure enough that he doesn’t mind
an interviewer spelling all that out for him.
“Oh, yeah,” he
muses. “I think I see what you mean. Oh, man. The Soft Boys were left
alone as a band, ultimately. Robyn’s went on to do fantastically well,
but it’s taken a long time, and all on his own terms. What you get is
not in any way diluted. It’s the Hitchcock experience. When I signed to
Capitol with the Waves, it was really new to me to be working for a
large organization that wanted to have an affect on your work. I could
never stand outside myself and see that we were going in a wrong
direction. If you listen to something like
Edge of the Land,
you can hear how it’s more of that rock sound of the time. There’s that
kind of feeling where we were blown hither and thither by circumstance.
Of course, we’d break up in a couple of years, anyway, so not to worry.
It turned out all right in the end.”
Besides, as noted,
Edge of the Land
was a pretty good album. Rew’s solo albums have been plenty catchy,
too. With that in mind, it seems harmless enough to close things with a
nod to a real low point for Katrina and the Waves—that being
Break of Hearts from 1989, when the band were label mates to Vanilla Ice and Wilson Phillips.
“Glad
you mentioned that,” replies the relentlessly mannered Rew. “That was
the point where Katrina and the Waves sounded most like the year they
were in. In 1985, we sounded like 1965. In 1989, we sounded more like
adult-oriented rock. I’m 58 years old, and I’ve been making music for
about 35 years. I suppose it’s only natural that some has been more
successful than others. But I’m here in Cambridge in the house that I
bought in 1985 when we had the hit, and it’s very nice to have a roof
over your head.”
