Katrina and the Waves

Katrina And The Waves were a successful, female-fronted, four piece rock band during the 1980s and 90s, built around the infectiously melodic, sixties-influenced songs of Kimberly Rew (former guitarist for The Soft Boys) and the distinctively powerful vocals of Katrina Leskanich. The group were best known for their evergreen, step-lightening 1985 hit single "Walking On Sunshine" and their landslide 1997 Eurovision Song Contest victory with the song "Love Shine A Light". The band’s earliest incarnation was as the Waves, a group that played in and around Cambridge, England from 1975-77 and featured guitarist Kimberley Rew and drummer Alex Cooper.

This line up of the Waves never issued any recordings, and broke up when Rew left to join The Soft Boys, who left their mark as a twin guitar-led psychedelic rock quartet who in their short, commercially unsuccessful but influential existence managed to create an idiosyncratic canon, essentially two albums, A Can of Bees and Underwater Moonlight , based around the charmingly off-kilter songwriting of frontman Robyn Hitchcock, a whimsical Englishman in the Syd Barrett/Kevin Ayres mould, but out of step with the prevalent pub rock and punk of the time. Hitchcock has gone on to enjoy a cult solo career of steadily building success and now records and tours with the Minus Three, featuring REM’s Peter Buck.

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