Katrina & The Waves

Katrina & The Waves - Love Shine A Light (1997)

In 1997 Katrina Leskanich was the lead vocalist with the band Katrina and the Waves, who had a huge international hit in 1985 with the Grammy nominated Walking on Sunshine but apart from a few minor hits nothing much in the following years.

Katrina who originally hails from the US but has lived in the UK since 1976 didn’t really know much about Eurovision when she and her group were asked to represent her adopted homeland as she told outnorthwest:

“I had a call from Jonathan King who was trying to turn the contest around, he’d brought Gina G to the contest the year before with ‘Oooh aah just a little bit’ which I still think is the best song ever entered into Eurovision.
He asked us if we had a song that we could put forward and we did have this song which was originally going to be used by the Salvation Army as their anthem.  We thought it was just too cheesy to release ourselves but it was perfect for Eurovision!

Everyone loved it and I fully expected them to take the song and get some blonde little tweetie bird to sing it but a big Eurovision fan at Warner Brothers said: 'Look, you guys have a name, all you need is a hit song and if you do it we'll give you a record deal.' So we couldn't say no as we hadn’t had a hit record in 12 years. It was such a feel-good song, It had 'I am a winner' written all over it and by that time Ireland were winning every year and they really couldn’t afford to host the contest anymore so it would have been embarrassing for it not to win!”

And win it did, infact Katrina and the Waves never really had any competition when it came to the voting on the big night- they received no fewer than ten 'douze points' and five 'dix points' - finishing on an unprecedented 227 points; Ireland were in second place 70 points behind and the contest was finally dragged away from the Emerald Isle (although Katrina did wear an Emerald shirt) after four wins in five years.

So thirty years after Sandie Shaw had first won the contest for the UK and sixteen years after Bucks Fizz, Katrina and the Waves broke all Eurovision records to bring the Euro-gong back to blighty. However, even though the single rose to No. 3 in the British charts the victory proved to be short lived as Katrina parted company from The Waves a year or so after the contest having gone on to a career as a successful Radio 2 presenter, musical theatre star and finally co-write and produce her first solo album in 2006.

Now wearing the slightly uneasy crown of ‘last UK Eurovision winner’ what does Katrina think would bring the contest back home again?
“Last year both Morrissey and Jarvis Cocker expressed an interest in Eurovision– in the end nothing came of it - but I think they would have had a great impact on the UK's choice of performer and song. There were also established performers in the line up but in the end the public choose a nostalgic Eurovision track which wasn’t really a song that could compete with the event that Eurovision is in the 21st century.”

More than a decade since her triumph, Eurovision is well and truly in her blood now as Katrina is constantly requested to take part in Euro-specials all over the continent. In  2005 she participated in the Swedish selection for the Eurovision Song Contest and in that same year she co-hosted a special TV special ‘Congratulations Eurovision- 50 Years of the Eurovision Song Contest’, held in Copenhagen which was broadcast all over Europe (apart from the UK). Earlier this year Katrina was one of three jury members for Eurosong 2008 in Belgium.

Currently Katrina is working on a remix of the Kirsty McCall/Tracey Ullman hit  ‘They Don’t know with the Sleazesisters as well as a Latino mix of ‘Love Shine a light’ which she recently performed on the UK Eurovision-Your decision show.

Cheekily we reminded Katrina that it is about time she had another smash hit, as they seem to come around every decade.

“Yeah, if I get to live to be about 500 that would be great!”

www.katrinasweb.net