Who is Katrina Leskanich? Katrina and The Waves singer and winner of Eurovision 1997
Click to share on X/Twitter (Opens in new window)
Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
KATRINA Leskanich is an American singer best known as the lead vocalist from British pop rock legends Katrina and the Waves — the last act from these shores to win Eurovision.
With the 2025 edition of the continent's premier Song Contest well under way, here's everything you need to know about the UK's most recent winners.
3
Katrina and the Waves released their first single in 1982
Credit: Corbis
3
The band won Eurovsion in 1997
Credit: PA:Press Association
Who is Katrina Leskanich?
Katrina Leskanich was born on April 10, 1960, in Topeka, Kansas, but moved to the United Kingdom in 1976.
Her dad was a Vietnam vet and colonel in the US Air Force and due to her family's military background, she moved around frequently during her childhood, eventually relocating to the UK 1976, where she has lived ever since.
Katrina's music career began in England with the band Mama's Cookin' — a pop cover band formed in 1978, in which she sang and played keyboards.
The band evolved into Katrina and the Waves after Kimberley Rew, guitarist and songwriter, joined the group and began writing songs specifically for Katrina.
The band gained international fame with their hit Walking on Sunshine (1985), which became a global anthem.
The song reached the Top 10 on the US Billboard Hot 100 and UK chart, as well as earning the band a Grammy nomination.
Biggest hits
In 1997, the band's tune Love Shine a Light stole the Eurovision crown.
It went on to reach at No.3 in the UK Singles charts and No.2 in Norway and Austria.
Other Katrina and the Waves' smash hits include Walking on Sunshine, Do You Want Crying and Sun Street.
Katrina's solo projects
Katrina has thrown herself into a number of exciting projects since Katrina and the Waves disbanded in 1999.
Eurovision winners unrecogniseable
She worked as a DJ for BBC Radio 2 before taking on the lead role in musical Leader of the Pack.
The popular singer has also released some solo tracks, including covers of Kirsty MacColl's They Don't Know and Clash tune Hitsville UK.
She has also played at a number of different festivals in Europe, including Rewind and the San Fermin.
When Katrina won Eurovision?
Katrina and the Waves secured victory at the Eurovision Song Contest in 1997.
3
Katrina pursued a solo career following her time with The Waves and is still performing with her new band at festivals.
Credit: Rex Features
It was the group's biggest success since they released Walking on Sunshine 12 years earlier.
This victory was notable for achieving the highest score at the time — 227 points — a record that stood until the voting system changed in 2004.
Two decades after Katrina's Eurovision success, the singer returned to deliver the UK's scores at the annual event.
Richard Osman and Nigella Lawson were among those who presented the marks in years prior to Katrina's stint.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
South Wales Argus
30 minutes ago
- South Wales Argus
Brookside star joins Casualty and is already filming scenes
Michael Starke, who played the role of Thomas "Sinbad" Sweeney on the long-running show, is now a cast member for Casualty. The 67-year-old is understood to have already started filming for the medical drama, news that is sure to excite soap fans across the UK. Brookside star Michael Starke signs up for Casualty and has already started filming According to The Sun, Nicola Bolton Management, Michael's representatives, said on Instagram: "Our MICHAEL STARKE @michael_starke_ has been busy down in Cardiff filming on @bbccasualtyofficial @bbc #casualty." This isn't the first time the actor has taken part in other soaps, as he took on the role of Jerry Morton in Coronation Street all the way back in 2007. During his stint on the ITV programme, his character opened up a kebab shop, but left the show after only 18 months. He has also appeared in other shows like Hollyoaks on Channel 4. What was Brookside all about, and when was it axed? According to IMDb , Brookside was a Liverpool-based soap opera which followed the "everyday life and times of the residents, friends, and enemies who live in the fictional suburban street of Brookside Close". The show aired for a staggering 21 years from 1982 until 2003, and is widely considered a classic among fans of British drama. Channel 4 has described the drama as a "ground-breaking" show which dealt with a range of controversial issues, including child abuse, murder, suicide and adultery. Recommended Reading: Brookside came to an end after suffering from declining ratings, shifting channel policies and a perceived decline in creative quality. Many die-hard fans have also blamed this decline on constant changes to the drama's scheduling and the shift to more sensationalist stories later in its run. Casualty can be watched and streamed on BBC One and BBC iPlayer.
New Statesman
41 minutes ago
- New Statesman
The lost futures of Stereolab
Photo by Joe Dilworth Nikolai Kondratiev was born in Russia in 1892. An influential theorist of the New Economic Policy under Lenin, in the 1920s he pioneered the idea that would define his posthumous reputation. Capitalist economies, he argued, underwent predictable cycles of about 50 years' growth followed by stagnation. In 1938, Kondratiev fell out of favour and was executed under Stalin's Great Purge. But after his death, his theory found acclaim in the West, memorialised as 'supercycles', or the Kondratiev wave. One small ripple from this theoretical legacy came in the summer of 1994, on the fringes of the British Top 40 singles chart. A basic schooling on the Kondratiev wave could be found in the lyrics of 'Ping Pong' by the avant-pop band Stereolab, a catchy, three-minute single sung in French-accented English, and built around sultry electric organ and sparkling, understated guitars. The release peaked at 45, mounting no threat to that week's imperial Wet Wet Wet chart-topper. From the vantage of the mid 2020s, perhaps Nineties guitar bands require their own theory of stagnation and growth. After long absences, this summer sees a new album by Pulp and the live return of Oasis (the latter a group impelled by very different economic theories). At a quieter volume in the public consciousness, we now have a largely unexpected new album by Stereolab, the long-running project of onetime romantic partners Tim Gane and Lætitia Sadier. Stereolab burst from the ruins of Eighties indie. Ilford-born Gane – a teenage devotee of experimental bands like Throbbing Gristle – was the guitarist in McCarthy, a badge-wearing socialist outfit whose verbose and accusatory songs included 'We Are All Bourgeois Now' and 'Should the Bible Be Banned'. At a 1988 Paris show, Gane met, and quickly began a relationship with, a McCarthy fan: Lætitia Sadier. Born in 1968, Sadier grew up in the eastern suburbs of Paris, interrupted by long stays in the US following her father's corporate job. Sadier briefly joined McCarthy before the band split in 1990. The pair then moved to south London, signed on to the dole, and plotted an entirely new project. By the Nineties, rock had amassed so much past that would-be musicians could pick a spot in virtually any niche of its history, and burrow there for a whole career. Stereolab's early releases were in thrall to the Seventies Düsseldorf duo Neu! and their propulsive, defiantly minimalist 4/4 beat. A rotating cast of musicians came and went around an unchanging nucleus of Gane, Sadier and the Australian guitarist Mary Hansen, whose bright, volleying harmonies with Sadier were the emotional centre of the band's sound. What set them apart was their politics. Gane wrote – and largely produced – the music, leaving lyrics entirely to Sadier. Delivered in a conversational but strident voice, Sadier sounded like a compelling sociology lecturer suddenly taking flight. On the single 'French Disko', which was performed on late-night TV's The Word, Sadier called for acts of 'rebellious solidarity' before a chorus of 'La Résistance!' But her lyrics tended towards affirmation rather than polemic. There was 'Ping Pong', with its Kondratiev chorus, and the playful 'Wow and Flutter', which does not on first listen sound as though it is questioning the supremacy of the IBM and US imperialism, but somehow pulls it off. In interviews, her political declarations were measured and playful, pondering to Melody Maker in 1993 what exactly to do about 'people like John Major' come the revolution. ('Do we kill them? Do we brainwash them? Do we get them to mop the streets?… That's a hell of a responsibility.') Through punk, the postwar Situationist International – a revolutionary Marxist alliance of artists and intellectuals – for a time held an outsized influence on pop music. You could detect their influence in Stereolab's fusing of anti-capitalist lyrics to the sounds of American consumerism, with their sincere adoption of Sixties bubblegum pop, easy listening and elevator Muzak. In the Eighties and Nineties, leftist bands as varying as the Style Council and the Manic Street Preachers practised entryism, smuggling leftist ideals through catchy pop. That was not Stereolab. 'I would go so far as to say we were avoiding going overground,' Sadier told the New York Times in 2019. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Instead, Stereolab protected their independence – releasing on their own Duophonic imprint – and got better. Between 1996 and 1999, Stereolab came good on the critic Simon Reynolds's declaration of the band as part of the 'post-rock' wave – meaning guitar bands who had been energised by the arrival of hip-hop and dance music. Emperor Tomato Ketchup, Dots and Loops and the sprawling Cobra and Phases Group Play Voltage in the Milky Night, released consecutively, were among the finest alternative albums of the 1990s, coming at the exact moment Britpop ran out of road. Suddenly, this DIY indie project encompassed glitchy German techno, rhythmic Brazilian jazz, sleek and severe 20th-century minimalism and a collagist approach that beat hip-hop samplers at their own game (later, rap producers including J Dilla, Tyler, The Creator, and Pharrell Williams would sample and praise specifically this era of the band). Playful and psychedelic, Stereolab almost resolved political music's central dilemma – that anyone buying the object probably agrees with you already – by flooding their work with what the critic Mark Sinker dubbed 'portals', meaning references to counter-cultural history from filmmaker Stan Brakhage to synth pioneer Wendy Carlos. This couldn't last. Cobra and Phases… received a cruel, attention-seeking 0/10 review from the NME, terming them 'culturally pointless'. It was a harbinger of more than just a casually cruel media culture, proving 2000s indie rock and its skinny-jeans-wearing acolytes would revive just about anything but an interest in politics. And far worse, Stereolab were struck by tragedy. In 2002, Mary Hansen was killed in a traffic accident aged 36. Gane and Sadier separated, and a grief-stricken band lost their zeal. Stereolab's hiatus in 2009 barely caused a ripple. Instant Holograms on Metal Film is the first new Stereolab studio album since 2008's Chemical Chords. After reforming for what appeared to be a slightly awkward, financially necessitated reunion in 2019, something seemed to stick: Stereolab have toured whenever possible since. The first sounds on Instant Holograms are one minute of silvery, arpeggiated synthesizers, introducing the record like some long-lost Eighties television ident. 'Aerial Troubles', the first full-length song on the album, opens with Sadier's declaration – her voice deeper and richer – that 'the numbing is not/it is not working any more'. This is an album uniquely concerned with consumption, greed ('an unfillable hole, insatiable') and 'dying modernity'. Stereolab are back, and they've never sounded so disappointed. On first listen, it surprises that the bubblegum colours Stereolab painted in during the Nineties have been drained to a slightly more parched canvas. On repeat listens, this is to the album's benefit. If Instant Holograms is largely a retread of former Stereolab sounds – and it is – what is different and manages to convince, is its more downcast mood. 'Ego skyscraper, erect and collapsible', mourns Sadier on the mid-tempo, gently exploratory 'Immortal Hands', 'nihilistic and vulgar'. More than any other Stereolab release, Instant Holograms does not leave the subject of life under capitalism. The strange romantic songs or surreal asides that were once part of the band's coalition are this time absent. This could all be a bit much, but what separates Sadier from a bad case of what we might call the 'Ian Browns' (specifically the one-time Stone Roses frontman's dire Covid-sceptic barkings about 'masonic lockdowns' and '5G radiation') is the glacial, cool manner in which she delivers them. It is also the way that the music appears to offer solutions, glimpses of possibility. Take that track: what begins as a downcast plea suddenly fizzes into mutant disco, bursting bright with horns and recalling their most expansive material on the classic Dots and Loops. Ditto the track 'Vermona F Transistor', in which – against a lovely, woozy Tim Gane guitar line – Sadier's phrases begin to suddenly drown in bubbling, electronic vocal effects, rendering them absurd, suggesting their own slipperiness. Stereolab broke out at a time when – even for experimentally minded Marxists – the mood was playful and the forecast optimistic. Putting it mildly, this is not the case today. Instant Holograms will not command much of the same audience as Oasis's return, but the continuing appeal of both is more similar than either would admit: those listening to Stereolab will be hoping to set the clock back to half-past-the-Nineties as much as those in bucket hats at Heaton Park. But on the final song 'If You Remember I Forgot How to Dream Pt 2', Sadier closes with a rebuke to the numbing that featured earlier in the album, emphasising the 'power to choose' and the 'courage to heal'. On Instant Holograms, Stereolab find new ways to explore and analyse the disappointing world around them. Useful lessons, some might say. 'Instant Holograms on Metal Film' by Stereolab is out now on Warp Records [See also: Lorde's Brat moment] Related
South Wales Argus
2 hours ago
- South Wales Argus
Krispy Kreme to give away free glazed doughnuts on June 6
The company wants to reclaim their title "as the OG of the glazed doughnut". Therefore, they are encouraging customers to bring 'Faux-G doughnuts' into a Krispy Kreme store, which they can "upgrade" to an original glazed doughnut for free. A "Faux-G doughnut" is defined as being a glazed doughnut from another shop that could be seen as an "inferior imitation". Customers will need to bring their "Faux-G doughnut" into a Krispy Kreme store or show proof of purchase (such as with a receipt) to claim their free original glazed doughnut on Friday, June 6. The offer will only be available for one day, with it being limited to one redemption per person. Guy Meakin, Krispy Kreme UK President, said: "They say imitation is the ultimate form of flattery, and we have seen many copies of our iconic doughnuts over the years. But we all know a dupe is rarely as good as the real thing. Nothing compares to the melt-in-your-mouth experience of a fresh Original Glazed. "This National Doughnut Day, we're inviting everyone to taste the difference and remind them that when it comes to doughnuts, there's only one OG. "We want doughnut fans to enjoy the best of the best, so turn your backs on the dupes and stick with the original. "We're excited to see the reactions as people upgrade their 'Faux-Gs' for the real deal." As part of the campaign, rapper Lady Leshurr has released her brand new single, Run This Glaze, which is a diss track playfully calling out 'imitators' of the Krispy Kreme glazed doughnuts. Lady Leshurr has released a new single called 'Run This Glaze' alongside the Krispy Kreme giveaway (Image: Will Ireland/PinPep) Is Krispy Kreme American or British? Krispy Kreme is an American company that was set up back in July 1937 by Vernon Rudolph. It started in North Carolina, seeing steady growth over the decades, with it opening its first store in the UK in October 2003. This original store was situated in the Harrods department store in London before it shut in 2011, with there now being 120 locations in the UK. Did Krispy Kreme change its name before? As part of an April Fool's Day campaign back in 2017, Krispy Kreme claimed they were going to change their name to 'Krispy Cream'. As reported by The Mirror, this was to avoid the issue of Brits not knowing whether to pronounce 'Kreme' as 'cream' or the more French-sounding 'crème'. Recommended reading: In the two years prior to this announcement, there had been over 30,000 independent tagged posts on social media spelling Krispy Kreme incorrectly. At the time, the company said after "much consideration", Krispy Kreme has taken the decision to rebrand in the UK and distance the UK franchise from its US counterpart. The Shannon Corner store in London did actually roll out a store rebrand to try and sell this, before it was eventually revealed as a joke.
