Katrina And The Waves: Whatever Happened To The Band Behind 'Walking on Sunshine'

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Whatever happened to the band KATRINA AND THE WAVES, the band behind Walking on Sunshine

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#katrinaandthewaves #walkingonsunshine #katrinaleskanich

I cite my sources and they may differ than other people's accounts, so I don't guarantee the actual accuracy of my videos.

The band Katrina and the Waves would be best known for their 1985 hit song ‘walking on sunshine;and while the song is super up beat, the history of band isn’t. Today let’s take a look at whatever happened to the group.

Front woman Katrina Leskanich a military brat would grow up as a tomboy focusing on being an athlete before becoming a musician telling the LA Times


“I never had any boyfriends when I was in school,” she admitted. “I couldn’t be bothered with dances and proms and and stuff like that. You had to wear uncomfortable dresses and I didn’t like that. Social functions like that just didn’t interest me.”
I was a good basketball player,” I was the most valuable player on my team in my sophomore year in Holland. I was on the softball team and the track team too.”
Leskanich’s parents were strict catholics and wanted their daughter to attend Kansas University and became a Veterinarian. So of course her becoming a musician was not their first choice. Her father was an air force colonel, which meant she lived in several places growing up including Nebraska, Germany, Holland and England. . Leskanich wouldn’t discover her musical calling until she was 14 when her parents got her a guitar and in her last two years in high school she joined a rock band and soon wanted to become a musician telling the LA Times
“When I told my parents, they got angry and kicked me out of the house, It’s hard for any father to see his 16-year-old daughter join a rock band. It was particularly hard for my father. He’s a strict disciplinarian. To him, being in a rock band was crude.”
Leskanich’s voice would sometimes be mistaken for being black. She would admit that R&B and Soul was a huge influence on her gravitating towards artists like Etta James , Aretha Franklin, and Sam and Dave. . telling the LA Times
“For a long time I didn’t listen to anything that wasn’t black,” she recalled. “Everything else seemed so tame. Before I got into black music, I was into the Eagles and Linda Ronstadt. After I got into black music, I melted down my Ronstadt records.”

The origins of Katrina and the waves began with guitarist Kimberly Rew and drummer Alex Cooper who met in England in 1975. They would start out as a band called The Waves. There time would be short lived and they wouldn’t record any material and would end up disbanding after Rew left the group in 1978 to join another group named the soft boys.. Cooper soon joined a band that played cover tunes called Mama’s Cookin which was featured a 16 year old Leskanich and her boyfriend Vince De La Cruz who she knew from church choir. Leskanich was performing illegally being under 18 and also acted as the band’s manager for the time being. Soft boys would disband in 1981 and Cooper soon rejoined Rew in his new outfit Mama’s Cookin The group would temporarily change their names to Waves and play clubs and military bases.As a way to get interest on military bases for the men who hadnt seen a lot of woman for a long time they added Katrina to the band’s name to attract more men to their shows and so they became katrina and teh waves
Rew would be the principal songwriter coming up with songs for Leskanich to sing. When the band started work on what would be their first album on their own dime they used the new monicker Katrina and the Waves. The band would en with engineer/producer/ Pat Collier to record their first album.
The band would release their debut LP Walking on Sunshine in 1983 which featured the famous title track. However the song almost never made it onto the record with Leskanich telling the guardian One day, he stood in the chapel where we rehearsed and presented Walking on Sunshine. I thought it wasn’t really us. Vince de la Cruz, our bass-player, thought it was irritating. I was going through a Velvet Underground and Nico phase – lots of black eyeliner – and here was a Motown-type fun song about sunshine. It proved to be a total dancefloor emptier. So we dropped it...By now we’d realized that, however annoying Walking on Sunshine was at first, it was impossible to get out of your head.
Rew’s time with the Canadian group Soft Boys re