Ask a random sample of people who were thirteen or older during the eighties “what is the decade’s most tiresome icon”, and you’ll get a lot of answers, depending on where one was at the time; Boy George, “We Are The World”, “Choose Life” T-shirts, Don Johnson, the “Flock of Seagulls'” dude’s haircut, the training scene from Flashdance…

…but as they go through their own personal lists, eventually most of them will get to “Walking On Sunshine“, the too-big-to-measure one-hit-wonder by Katrina and the Waves.

And it’s true; “Walking…” was very overplayed.

But the reason tragedy wasn’t that the song overstayed its welcome; it’s that it became synonymous with the group that played it.

And that’s a shame – because Katrina and the Waves were a really, really good band.

Even people who are sick to death of “Walking on Sunshine” admit that Katrina Leskanich, the band’s statuesque lead singer, had a voice and a half.  Of course, you have listen harder to hear that guitarist Kim Rew, in his first big gig after leaving the Soft Boys, had a way with bending and strangling chords into ad-hoc passages may not have been “Solos” in the Steve Vai sense of the term, but were really, really good.

But here’s the real cool thing about The Waves; they did something that very, very few bands had done since John Fogerty left Creedence Clearwater Revival, and that had become an almost lost art in the meantime; they wrote small, perfectly-crafted, three -minute pop songs that were shimmering little gems of pop perfection.  Perhaps your world was falling apart at 10AM; perhaps it’d still be falling apart at 10:04; but from 10 to 10:03, you could smile and go “dang, that’s cool”…

So yeah.  Forget the “Sunshine”.  Dig the wave.