‘Walking On Sunshine’ 30 Years On

Born in Topeka, Kansas, in 1960, Katrina Leskanich explains how she found herself a teenager in England in the mid-‘70s fronting a rock'n'roll band.

“Well, a lot of fellow musicians come from the same providence: it's growing up in a military family,” she explains. “When your dad gets his orders and it says we're going to Germany or we're going to Holland or we're going to England then you just pack up your bags.

“This is where it was happening. We started up Katrina & the Waves and we were playing around military bases just trying to get noticed." Best remembered for the mega-hit, Walking On Sunshine, Katrina & The Waves first recorded the song in 1983 for a Canadian-only release. It was only after The Bangles covered their song, Going Down To Liverpool, from a second Canadian album that Capitol signed them to an international deal. The re-recorded Walking On Sunshine was a smash around the world in 1985, appealing across the board not just to pop fans, but rockers, punks and everyone else.

“Well, we just used what we had to work with,” says Leskanich. “It was always just the four of us, so everything sounded quite raw. When you're that young and full of beans and angst, it just seemed like all of our songs had - even the ones that were meant to be sort of slower and ballads - had incredible amount of almost hysterical energy. I mean, when we first started people thought it sounded downright old-fashioned, because obviously we were up against Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet and Siouxsie Sioux. We seemed fairly ordinary!”

Irrepressibly vibrant it certainly is: a perfect pop song with rock sensibilities and punk energy, but it undoubtedly overshadowed some of the Waves and Katrina’s other work?

“I think there was a brief period after Walking On Sunshine where it was beginning to dawn on us that it was all about that song,” Leskanich reasons. “When your record company comes to you and says, ‘look, guys, all we need is another Walking On Sunshine', but that just wasn't our style. I mean, the closest we got was the following year; we had a song called Sun Street that actually performed in the UK charts better than Walking On Sunshine. What's the point of saying that now when nobody really ever heard of Sun Street and it's all about Walking On Sunshine? A novelty song irresistible to people wanting to turn the plot in a movie from darkness to light!”

Originally published in X-Press Magazine