The world could solve its energy crisis if science could somehow harness the boundless optimism of Katrina and the Waves’ “Walking on Sunshine.” It’s the rictus grin stretched across the face of Eighties pop, the perpetual positivity machine that continues its inexorable march across the cultural landscape — a song flexible enough to integrate seamlessly into everything from antihistamine commercials to Hollywood cult classics, and durable enough to withstand the test of time despite the intense dislike many feel for it. To that point, what’s unique about “Walking on Sunshine” is that it’s beloved most by creative executives — the music supervisors and marketers responsible for recycling the song in campaign after campaign, making it one of the most lucrative copyrights in publishing history.
Guitarist Kimberley Rew, the writer of “Walking on Sunshine,” and drummer Alex Cooper formed the original incarnation of the Waves in 1975. The group gigged in and around its native Cambridge, England for two years before Rew exited to join the Soft Boys, the idiosyncratic neo-psychedelic band fronted by Robyn Hitchcock. The Soft Boys issued their debut LP A Can of Bees in 1979, followed a year later by the underground classic Underwater Moonlight, which established Hitchcock as one of the most formidable songwriters of his generation — a reputation that grew steadily over the decade to come thanks to a series of critically acclaimed LPs recorded as a solo act and in tandem with the Egyptians (a.k.a. former Soft Boys Andy Metcalfe on bass and Morris Windsor on drums). Cooper, meanwhile, signed on with Mama’s Cookin’, a pop/soul cover band featuring American-born singer Katrina Leskanich and her then-boyfriend, guitarist Vince de la Cruz. After the Soft Boys split, Rew joined Mama’s Cookin,’ which reclaimed the Waves name long enough to record the 1982 single “Nightmare” as well as a mini-album, Shock Horror!
When bassist Bob Jakins quit the Waves, de la Cruz moved over to bass, and the remaining foursome adopted the name Katrina and the Waves, following advice that it would be easier to secure performances by showcasing a female singer. “I wanted anything to get me out of my job. I was doing the classic: washing dishes and bagging groceries,” Leskanich told SPIN in 1985. “Once people saw me with my tennis shoes on, up there with the rest of them, all their ideas about me being a sex symbol diminished… rapidly!” Rew’s bandmates were not impressed when he first brought “Walking on Sunshine” to rehearsal: “I thought it wasn’t really us,” Leskanich confessed to The Guardian in 2015. “[de la Cruz] 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.” Still, the original version of “Walking on Sunshine” was made the title track of Katrina and the Waves’ self-financed debut LP, recorded at London’s Alaska Studios in 1983 under the supervision of producer and engineer Pat Collier, former bassist with London punks the Vibrators. Although Walking on Sunshine was ostensibly recorded to sell at Katrina and the Waves’ merch table, Canadian indie Attic Records — which previously licensed the Soft Boys’ LPs for release — signed on to re-release the album to the Canadian market, where steady airplay led to a Katrina and the Waves tour of the Canadian provinces.
Katrina and the Waves 2 followed on Attic in 1984, and when the Bangles scored a minor hit with their cover of Rew’s “Going Down to Liverpool,” first recorded for Shock Horror!, Capitol Records offered Katrina and the Waves a worldwide deal. “Walking on Sunshine” was one of six songs re-recorded (or “tarted up,” per producer Collier) for the band’s Capitol debut: “We’d realized that, however annoying ‘Walking on Sunshine’ was at first, it was impossible to get out of your head,” Lesnakinch told The Guardian, but the group remained unhappy with the drum sound on the original Alaska Studios recording. “We did loads of versions; we just kept going round and round in circles,” Collier explained to MixOnline in 2017. “We kept redoing it nonstop.”
Finally, Capitol opted to outsource a remix, handing off the “Walking on Sunshine” tapes to Scott Litt, a producer and engineer at New York City’s Power Station. Litt re-recorded the drums from scratch, positioning Cooper in the back right corner of Power Station’s Studio B and capturing his performance with no fewer than three different makes of microphone: Sennheiser 421s on the bass drum and tom toms, an AKG 451 on hi-hat and Shure SM57s on snare top and bottom. “I’d put the bottom one out of phase with the top because they’re seeing the sound source from 180-degree different angles,” Litt explained to MixOnline. “That was a great technique that [engineer Bob] Clearmountain used, not only on snare but on tom toms — miking underneath the tom and putting that out of phase with the top to get a deeper, more reverberant sound.” Litt was so pleased with the results that he continued tinkering with “Walking on Sunshine,” noting “I was flying guitars around. I put that intro on the beginning of the drums. At the time, one of my favorite songs was ‘Wake Me Up Before You Go Go’ by Wham, and that has a real R&B vibe to it, so that was a bit of an inspiration for me. You can probably hear it when you listen to it.” Litt also relocated Leskanich’s exuberant “Owww!” to the beginning of “Walking on Sunshine,” just before its iconic horn overdubs come in, and by withholding the horns from the first chorus, he redoubled their impact when they finally re-enter during the second chorus.
Say this much for Katrina and the Waves: with Collier and Litt’s assistance, they created a song called “Walking on Sunshine” that somehow sounds exactly how you suspect walking on sunshine would feel. It’s a perfectly executed pop song, and in the summer of 1985 it reached number nine in the U.S., number eight in the U.K. and number three in Canada. But then “Walking on Sunshine” became ubiquitous, appearing on movie soundtracks spanning from Daddy Day Care to High Fidelity all the way to American Psycho, and turning up in so, so many commercials (Claritin, Skittles, Nescafe, Fisher Price, Mastercard, etc.) that it’s now impossible to identify where the bouncy, clever pop song ends and the mirthless, relentless advertising jingle begins.
At least Katrina and the Waves enjoyed the spoils: the band kept the “Walking on Sunshine” publishing rights, and the royalties from airplay and advertisements proved substantial. “‘Walking on Sunshine’ was the crown jewel in EMI’s catalog,” Jarrett Mason, who worked for EMI Publishing from 2004 to 2008, told NPR in 2010, noting that advertisers would pay between $150,000 and $200,000 to license the song for one year. “It has that kind of feel-good vibe that can just be applied everywhere,” Mason added. In 2015, Bertelsmann-owned BMG acquired the entire Katrina and the Waves catalog for £10 million, and while the deal included rights to “Going Down to Liverpool” as well as “Love Shine a Light,” which unexpectedly won the 1997 Eurovision Song Contest for the United Kingdom, a source close to the negotiations told The Irish Times “almost all of the band’s music publishing income stems from ‘Walking on Sunshine.’”
Kimberley Rew knows “Walking on Sunshine” will outlive him — and you and me, too. “I’d love to say ‘Walking on Sunshine’ relates to a significant event in my life, like walking out of my front door, seeing a comet and being inspired. But it’s just a piece of simple fun, an optimistic song, despite us not being outstandingly cheery people,” Rew told The Guardian in 2015. “We were a typical young band, insecure and pessimistic. We didn’t have big hair and didn’t look anything like a Motown-influenced group. We didn’t have any credibility or a fanbase in awe of our mystique. We were a second-on-the-bill-at-a-festival-in-Germany pop band. But we had this song.”
Walking on Sunshine (KORD-0046)
