I may have hinted previously that I don’t actually listen to music on the radio. In fact, the only time I regularly listen to the radio is on my very short drive to work in the morning. And it’s never a music station. I flip back and forth between NPR and progressive talk radio. Given the time of day I’m usually making the drive, this is the only song that I hear regularly, because it’s the theme song for The Stephanie Miller Show.
The song has been around for 25+ years, and I’ve been aware of its existence, but I never paid much attention to it. It wasn’t until Stephanie Miller had Katrina Leskanich on the show that I learned that the band member who wrote the song was Kimberley Rew – a musician with whom I was much more familiar as the guitarist for one of my all-time favorite bands, the Soft Boys. The world of music is full of such intertwinings, I guess, but given the different styles and sounds of the two bands, I found it surprising that Kimberley Rew was not only a member of Katrina & The Waves, but that he had previoulsy been a founding member of a precursor band (just The Waves back then) before going off to work with Robyn Hitchcock in the Soft Boys. (There may be a whole post about the Soft Boys coming some day. You have been warned.)
Walking on Sunshine is never going to be on my list of top songs. It’s a bit mindless, a bit happy-sappy and relentlessly optimistic – and it takes fucking forever to get through on Rock Band – but I hear part of it almost every weekday morning, and so far I haven’t needed to kill anyone afterward. I’d say that makes it a pretty good song for the radio.
Someone's Got To Say It 