Katrina & the Waves - Shepperton Film Studios, Shepperton, Britain, 12-29-1983

I have long felt that Katrina and the Waves are a very underrated 1980s new wave band. They had many more good songs besides their huge hit "Walking on Sunshine." I've already posted a concert by them, from 1985. This is a concert from 1983.

Frankly, I think that 1985 one is better than this one. It's longer, and has more key songs on it, helped by the fact that they'd released more music in the two years between that concert and this one. I'm mostly posting this because it's so very rare and needs to get into wider public circulation. This is from a professionally recorded concert done in a film studio, but in front of an audience. It was released as a bonus DVD on some versions of the 2003 archival album "The Original Recordings: 1983-1984."

 I had it on my SoulseekQT wish list for many months, and I finally was able to download it the other day. I converted it from video format to mp3s. The sound quality is excellent. There are very few live recordings of this band, period, and nothing from this early in their career. This is from a time where the band had released some music, including a single of "Walking on Sunshine," but they failed to make the charts anywhere. It wouldn't be until 1985 when "Walking on Sunshine" was re-released when they would find big success.

This album is 35 minutes long.

01 talk (Katrina & the Waves)
02 Que Te Quiero (Katrina & the Waves)
03 Game of Love (Katrina & the Waves)
04 Do You Want Crying (Katrina & the Waves)
05 Walking on Sunshine (Katrina & the Waves)
06 Don't Take Her Out of My World (Katrina & the Waves)
07 Mexico (Katrina & the Waves)
08 Brown Eyed Son (Katrina & the Waves)
09 Maniac House (Katrina & the Waves)
10 talk (Katrina & the Waves)
11 I Really Taught Me to Watusi (Katrina & the Waves)
12 talk (Katrina & the Waves)
13 Monkey Town (Katrina & the Waves)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16666484/KATRNANTWVES1983ShppertnFlmStdosShppertnBitin__12-29-1983_atse.zip.html

I didn't find any good photos of the band in concert from 1983 or even 1984. So this one shows lead singer Katrina Leskanich on the US TV show "American Bandstand" in July 1985.

Katrina & the Waves - 9:30 Club, Washington, DC, 5-16-1985

Katrina and the Waves are mostly considered a "one-hit wonder" from the 1980s, even though they had multiple hits, including one as late as 1997. But I have a soft spot for them, which you may have noticed when I posted a two volume best of collection in 2022. They never released a live album, and bootlegs are nearly nonexistent. But I recently came across this soundboard boot, so I thought I'd share it here.

Katrina and the Waves will forever mainly be known for the hit song "Walking on Sunshine," and of course that's here, near the end. But all the songs are good, in my opinion, and very lively and danceable. If you want upbeat, this is what you want to hear. This band is way better than their one-hit wonder status would suggest.

There's not much else to say. The recording has great sound quality. For once, I didn't have to boost the lead vocals or do anything else.

This album is 47 minutes long.

01 talk (Katrina & the Waves)
02 Browned Eyed Son (Katrina & the Waves)
03 Lovely Lindsay (Katrina & the Waves)
04 Que Te Quiero (Katrina & the Waves)
05 Do You Want Crying (Katrina & the Waves)
06 The Game of Love (Katrina & the Waves)
07 talk (Katrina & the Waves)
08 Cry for Me (Katrina & the Waves)
09 talk (Katrina & the Waves)
10 Going Down to Liverpool (Katrina & the Waves)
11 Mexico (Katrina & the Waves)
12 Machine Gun Smith (Katrina & the Waves)
13 talk (Katrina & the Waves)
14 Do You Love Me (Katrina & the Waves)
15 Walking on Sunshine (Katrina & the Waves)
16 Red Wine and Whiskey (Katrina & the Waves)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16666483/KATRNANTWVES1985930ClbWshngtnDC__5-16-1985_atse.zip.html

The cover photo comes from a 1989 concert. I found other ones from around 1985, but I just particularly liked this one.

Katrina and the Waves - Best Of, Volume 2 (1985-1997)

A few days ago, I posted Volume 1 of the best songs from the band Katrina and the Waves. This is the second and final volume.

There's not much for me to say that I didn't say with Volume 1. In short, I think this band is underrated, and is a lot more than just a "one-hit wonder" type band.

But I will explain a little more about the band's history, picking up in 1985, where the music in this volume begins. 1985 is the year the band redid their 1983 song "Walking on Sunshine" and had top ten hits in the US and Britain with it. The band was willing to sound just as commercials as their record company wanted, which meant they often were overproduced. But despite this willingness, they were unable to follow "Walking on Sunshine" with any big hits, although they did have some minor ones.

The band kept putting out albums through the rest of the 1980s and 1990s. I must admit that I haven't listened to every song on every one. There's a lot of bad, cheesy music on them, to be honest. But they had some real winners too. I particularly like "Red Wine and Whiskey," and think it should have been a big hit.

Bit by bit, the band's sales were falling. It looked like they would fade away into obscurity. But in 1997, pretty much on a whim, they paid $250 to submit a new song the band had written, "Love Shine a Light," to that year's Eurovision contest. If you're an American like I am, you're probably unaware or only dimly aware of Eurovision. But in Europe, it's a very, very big deal. (There's a funny 2020 movie about the contest called "Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga" that stars Will Farrell.) The band was chosen to represent Britain with their song. Then they went on to not only win the Eurovision contest, but they crushed it, with one of the highest vote tallies ever. The song then went on to become a huge hit in Britain (reaching number three there) and the rest of Europe, but didn't make a dent in the US charts.

This was a very unexpected and improbable comeback for a band that seemed to have been running on fumes for most of the 1990s. But, ironically, the song's success led to the break-up of the band that same year. Kimberley Rew, who wrote the song, was embarrassed by the cheesy Eurovision spectacle (see the Will Farrell movie for a general idea why), and was the only band member not to perform it during the contest. The band had already been fairly poppy, but the song's success pegged them even more or a pop band than a rock band, which meant playing the European cabaret circuit instead of rock venues. Rew didn't like that and broke the band up.

All the songs here are from the band's albums from 1985 to 1997, except for one. The last one is kind of a bonus track, because it's from ten years later, and is a solo release from the band's lead singer, Katrina Leskanich. It's a cover of the Clash song "Hitsville UK" that I happen to really like, so I've added it to the end.

This album is 45 minutes long. I believe all the songs are originals, except for the Clash one.

01 Red Wine and Whiskey (Katrina & the Waves)
02 Walking on Sunshine [Second Version] (Katrina & the Waves)
03 Love That Boy (Katrina & the Waves)
04 Is That It (Katrina & the Waves)
05 Money Chain (Katrina & the Waves)
06 Lovely Lindsey (Katrina & the Waves)
07 Sun Street (Katrina & the Waves)
08 [I Can] Dream about It (Katrina & the Waves)
09 Rock 'n' Roll Girl (Katrina & the Waves)
10 That's the Way (Katrina & the Waves)
11 Love Shine a Light (Katrina & the Waves)
12 Hitsville U.K. (Katrina Leskanich)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15260768/KtrinatheWves_1985-1997_BstOfVolume2_atse.zip.html

The cover photo is from 1986. For the band's name, I used the font and colors from one of their albums.

Katrina and the Waves - Best Of, Volume 1 (1981-1984)

One thing I'd like to post more of at this blog is "best of" collections. That can get problematic in terms of copyright issues, since they usually contain all or mostly all released versions, so I don't want to post them willy nilly. But occasionally there are musical artists that have been poorly served by "best of" collections, and I think could use more attention. I posted a "best of" like that for Evie Sands in 2018, but I think that's the only one I've posted so far.

So here's another. Katrina and the Waves were a British New Wave band best known for their 1985 smash hit song "Walking on Sunshine." In terms of chart positions, it isn't that impressive, hitting number eight in the British chart and number nine in the US chart. But it's become one of those perennial classics that gets played frequently on the radio and appears in lots of movies. 

That song is so big that it overshadows everything else the band did. They had two more top forty hits in Britain, "Sun Street" and "Love Shine a Light," and two more top forty hits in the US, "Do You Want Crying" and "This Is It." So they're not a "one-hit wonder." In fact, "Love Shine a Light" was a much bigger hit in Britain, reaching number three there in 1997. But they could and should have had more hits than that. For instance, one of their best songs is "Going Down to Liverpool," which was done in an extremely similar version by the Bangles, who had a hit with it.

Speaking of the Bangles, they and the Go-Go's still get lots of attention as 1980s female bands. But in my opinion, Katrina and the Waves should be up there too. True, only the lead singer, Katrina Leskanich, was female. The band's secret weapon was Kimberley Rew. Formerly the lead guitarist in Robyn Hitchcock's band the Soft Boys, he was the ace songwriter behind "Walking on Sunshine," "Going Down to Liverpool," and most of the rest of this band's best songs.

I think the reason Katrina and the Waves doesn't get more love these days is because in addition to putting out some great songs, they put out many more bad ones. A Trouser Press review of one of their 1990s albums called it "bland, overprocessed, commercial slop." Admittedly, there's a lot of that. That's why a carefully selected "best of" is so important. All the official "best of" collections I've seen miss the mark by including some bad songs and neglecting some good ones. I've found so many good songs that I made two volumes.

The first volume deals with the years before the band hit the big time with "Walking on Sunshine" in 1985. Critics generally like this early material better, because it is less slick and overproduced. The first two songs come from a Kimberley Rew 1981 solo album. Rew sang most of the songs, including these two, but that album had a couple of songs sung by Katrina Leskanich on it. Next came a 1982 EP credited to "Katrina and the Waves" for the first time. Again, Rew sang most of the songs, but the best two, included here as tracks 3 and 4, were sung by Leskanich. Rew has a good voice. Note for instance that he sings the version of "Going Down to Liverpool" included here. But he wisely realized that Leskanich has a great voice, and after that EP nearly all the songs he wrote for the band were sung by her.

The band's record company must have really dropped the ball, because it amazes me that none of the catchy and commercial sounding songs here were hits. That includes this version of "Walking on Sunshine," which is the one first put on record in 1983. It was redone in 1985 with less guitar and more horns, and I've put that hit version of Volume 2. But even this early version should have been a no-brainer hit, in my opinion.

This album is 42 minutes long. I believe all the songs are originals, except for the cover of the soul classic "River Deep, Mountain High."

01 My Baby Does Her Hairdo Long (Kimberley Rew)
02 Give Me Some of That Love (Kimberley Rew)
03 Saturday Week (Katrina & the Waves)
04 Atomic Rock 'n' Roll (Katrina & the Waves)
05 Brown Eyed Son (Katrina & the Waves)
06 Going Down to Liverpool (Katrina & the Waves)
07 Spiderman (Katrina & the Waves)
08 Walking on Sunshine (Katrina & the Waves)
09 I Want a Man (Katrina & the Waves)
10 Do You Want Crying (Katrina & the Waves)
11 Mexico (Katrina & the Waves)
12 He's a Charmer (Katrina & the Waves)
13 That's Just the Woman in Me (Katrina & the Waves)
14 River Deep, Mountain High (Katrina & the Waves)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16693390/KATRNANTWVES1981-1984_BstOfVolum1_atse.zip.html

The cover photo is from 1985. I couldn't find any really good color ones from earlier.