For Katrina Leskanich, the former lead singer of the British band Katrina and the Waves, playing in America last year as part of Retrofutura — a package tour that featured popular ’80s acts Howard Jones, the Thompson Twins’ Tom Bailey, and Ultravox’s Midge Ure — marked a very notable milestone in her career. It was the first time in 25 years that Leskanich, whose erstwhile group catapulted to stardom in 1985 with the now-iconic pop hit “Walking On Sunshine”, played in the States, a long absence that she attributes to her mostly performing in Europe.
“I kind of fell out of the loop of having the tour history,” the UK-based American artist tells PopMatters, “and it seems to be kind of an important thing in America. The longer the time went by where I wasn’t doing anything in America, the less credibility I had as a touring artist. It wasn’t until Retrofutura’s invitation that a lot of things happened. So that was my first tour in America in a long time. And also it gave me the impetus to record my first album in about ten years.”
Leskanich is referring to her most recent solo record, Blisland, a collection of songs whose straightforward melodic pop-rock sound is reminiscent of the Waves’ music since the band’s breakup in the late ‘90s with her soulful and vibrant vocals intact. The record’s arrival coincides with her return to the States for a headlining tour that began on 17 March in Long Island, New York, as well as the 30th anniversary of “Walking on Sunshine”.
What inspired Leskanich to make Blisland after a lengthy was the fact that some of the other artists on the Retrofutura tour had new material in addition to the old hits. “I thought, ‘Alright, I’ll push the boat out, do some writing and see what I come up with.’ And that’s how I came up with Blisland. I thought I’ll just do it myself. You don’t need a label so much these days, you can DIY it and work it yourself. It’s fun though, you keep all the control, and you still feel like you’re contributing something to what it is you do and and love. It kind of really enriched my life to create music and record it and put it out there for people.”
The criteria for the songs on Blisland was that they would play well live on stage. So she opted for a very simple approach in making the album, such as using less instrumentation and backing vocals. “I just wanted some really nice chord progressions and some good strong choruses,” Leskanich says. “[On] ‘Texas Cloud’, I thought this kind of thing would be really fun to play live and just kind of go off on it because people love that beat and slide guitar thing. So I was thinking if most of these had the potential to play well live, then that’s a pretty good starting point. And I wanted it pared down.”
There are definitely moments from the record that recall the power pop sound of the Waves — albeit with an introspective and mature outlook — such the lovely “Dizzy” and the energetic “Every Step”. “It’s one of my favorite tracks on Blisland,” she says of the latter song. “It plays really well live. I did ‘Every Step’ on Retrofutura and it kind of went down surprisingly well. I think it’s helped by the beat. It sort of builds and builds in kind of an exciting way.”
Meanwhile, the heartfelt yet philosophical “Sun Coming Upper” is Leskanich’s own response to “Walking on Sunshine”. “What was irritating me was so much fear mongering about what you read in the newspapers and your own feelings about mortality and deaths of people around you. Just kind of an overall, ‘What’s the bloody point of life sometimes?’ What I’m saying in the chorus is that when nothing’s going right I need the ‘sun coming upper’. So what I need at that point is to feel that freshness, innocence, and blissfulness of ‘Walking on Sunshine’”.
While there are some New Wave-ish power pop aspects on the record, Leskanich branches out stylistically on a few occasion on the record: from the country saloon twang of “Farmer’s Song”, to the gritty guitar-driven blues of “Texas Cloud” that could have found a place on a ZZ Top record once upon a time. “I get bored listening to albums when everything sounds the same, when one song sounds like the next one,” she says. “I don’t want another four-chord chord progression song — now I want to do something that’s going to do something completely different and a little bit unexpected, like with ‘Farmer’s Song’, I thought now I’ll do something really, really weird here, having a little bit of a laugh over it myself and thinking it’s so great that I can get away with this. Because if there was a record label breathing down my neck or looking over my shoulder, it might be a different story.”
Fittingly, the album closes with a live version of “Walking on Sunshine” recorded at the Borderline, a music venue in London, but with a twist: it’s performed as a torchy country-meets-’20s blues song. What makes this version unique is that it doesn’t feature drums, which was a key ingredient on the original version. That performance of “Sunshine” was also special for another reason. “It was sort of fun because I’d split up with the Waves — and Kimberley Rew [the guitarist who wrote ‘Walking on Sunshine’] was in the audience that night. So I thought it was kind of fun that he would be there and to hear the song done in a kind of completely different way. It’s really a one-off. I have never played ‘Walking on Sunshine’ like that since then and I probably never will. It was just a bit of fun for the moment.”
That new take of “Walking on Sunshine” kind of puts Leskanich’s career full circle over an energetic and infectious song that she and the the Waves will forever be synonymous with. Leskanich, who is originally from Topeka, Kansas, formed the Waves with Rew, bassist Vince de la Cruz, and drummer Alex Cooper in Britain in the early ’80s. At the time, Leskanich, who is the daughter of an U.S. Air Force colonel, worked as a dishwasher; Rew served as a mailman; de la Cruz drilled holes in bowling balls; and Cooper worked at a mortuary. It was around 1983 that Rew rode his bicycle to the band’s rehearsal room and brought over a song.
“He said, ‘Right, here’s my latest creation,’” Leskanich recalls. “And he just sat there with the guitar and played the song through. We said, ‘Wow, that’s happy.’ Because we thought we were really cool, we thought we were the Velvet Underground. We thought, ‘Okay well it’s not like any of our other material, but alright we’ll give it a go.’ We used to play it live in our shows and we dropped it from our set because it was a dance floor emptier. Nobody knew how to danced to it, everybody was into Siouxie and the Banshees and other music. They didn’t want to hear that ‘happy crap’. And Vince said to Kim, ‘Wow, that ‘Walking on Sunshine” song is just kind of irritating, and Kim thought that was a good sign. After we rehearsed it, it was about four days later, and I saw Kim. And I said, ‘That “Sunshine” song — I can’t get it out of my head.’”
The band got signed to Capitol Records and worked with Scott Litt, who would later become R.E.M.’s longtime producer. It was Litt’s idea to put in the drums at the beginning of the track before the rest of the instruments and Leskanich’s vocals joined in. Leskanich recalls the recording sessions being held in the wee hours of the morning under inside a very cold room at New York’s Power Station studios, “We were like, ‘Oh, okay, Scott, hit it!’ And they played it about as loud — we were pinned to the back wall. It was absolutely deafening but we were blown away. We had goosebumps obviously because it was like a refrigerator in there. But we just thought, ‘Oh wow, This is good.’”
Ironically, the band’s intended single to herald its arrival was the shamelessly-underrated rocker “Do You Want Crying”, but it didn’t resonate as much as “Walking on Sunshine” did with radio programmers. “Capitol Records decided to send out a demo tape to all the DJs with four Katrina and the Waves songs on it: “Do You Want Crying”, “Walking on Sunshine”, “Going Down to Liverpool”, and “Que Te Quiero”. All the DJs came back and said, ‘You guys, it’s “Walking on Sunshine”, not “Do You Want Crying”. It’s this song that starts with the drums and the !ow!’ and the chorus.’ They couldn’t resist it. So poor little “Do You Want Crying” had to get on line and wait for the dust to settle around ‘Walking on Sunshine’. Of course, it never did.”
First entering the Billboard Top 40 chart on 20 April 1985, “Walking on Sunshine” would later peak at number nine in the States and propel the Waves to fame, joining the ranks of the other popular New Wave acts at the time. “I think we were always perceived as New Wave because that’s what everybody was talking about,” says Leskanich. “We kind of dressed New Wave, we got our clothes from Kensington High Street Market from Hyper Hyper, where all of the new wave bands at the time were buying their clothes. So it was very handy to throw us in there. And when the Bangles covered [the Waves’] ‘Going Down to Liverpool’, they were considered New Wave or Paisley Underground, so there was that vibe. All of our music was very, very much influenced by traditional ‘60s styled music, except for something like ‘Do You Want Crying’, which Vince wrote. And so Vince was much more informed by a modern sound and a modern blueprint for a song, whereas Kim’s material is very retrospective.”
Katrina and the Waves subsequently released other hit singles including “Do You Want Crying”, “That’s the The Way”, and much later “Love Shine a Light” (which won the Eurovision Song Contest in 1997). Yet the songs never surpassed the longevity and popularity of “Walking on Sunshine”, which still gets airplay, has been featured in movies, and has been covered by other artists, including Dolly Parton. Today Leskanich acknowledges that she has a tender relationship with the songs that shaped her life, and yet is also detached from it to the point where she hardly flinches if she hears it on the radio or TV.
“It’s sort of, ‘Wow, there’s that song again.’ I’m not flooded with memories or weepy eyed or anything like that. I suppose I’m a little bit astonished but it still makes people happy and people are still interested in the song. I guess it’s gonna outlive me, so it has a career of its own. If somebody asked me what I did, [I say,] ‘Well, I was in a band called Katrina and the Waves,’ you see the question mark bubble come on top of their head. And then I say, ‘Walking on Sunshine?’ That’s it. And then they smile.”