To. Walking on Sunshine

me songs are smashes straight . t of the gate. Others take years to nsinuate their way into our lives. The super-hits live on through TV shows, cereal commercials and music to get married to. Walking On Sunshine started life as a pop record and eventually became a Living on sunshine: Walking On Sunshine enabled Katrina & The · · t thb h Waves' songwriter Kimberley Rew 00 to "retire.from the big stage." It's SIngIng rus • been an airplay record·breaker, a movie soundtrack regular and -d h even the tune played by an electric toothbrush (far left). This year the song celebrates its 25th birthday Davi Hepwort by popping up as a production number on hit TVseries Glee. talks to a lucky few who wrote the evergreen hits they could retire on. ONOVAN ENJOYED AN AVERAGE career as a recording artist. His first hit was Catch The Wind in 1965. Barabajagal, his last one, was four years =~.Since then he has continued to tour and _:lrd, gone in and out offashion and tried .odic comebacks, all without significantly - -:ng the barometer of public perception. As - ~- most people are concerned, Donovan was ~ cess for five years. But take the longer - ~'. as his song publishers Peer Music cer- ::Iy do, and Donovan has never stopped g a success. His signature compositions ..nue to earn serious money nearly 50 years -:i'r they were first put on record. Those =:urds, in which Mickie Most's rock-lite ~ngements underscore the singer's attrac- ::;y fey delivery, are capable of conjuring - -:her world. This anachronistic music can - -? t to regular use many years later, some- '=~literally through Catch The Wind's use a TV advertisement where the American .:ty company General Electric promote their =itment to wind turbines and sometimes and, like the soundest of sound investments, nisation department when I was at EMI music. -..:nterintuitively, such as in the scene in they carryon attracting exploitation and mak- Now everybody regards it as a serious revenue -..:<JdFellaswhere Robert De Niro and Joe ing money while the artist is sleeping. In a earner, particularly when the revenue from :::sci brutally beat an associate to death in a sleepy pub in a Cambridge back street on a record sales has dropped like a stone. How the jukebox plays Donovan'sAtlantis. midweek evening in January, I told Kimberley much? It's impossible to say what you might -You never know when you write a song what Rew that Walking On Sunshine, the song he get for a commercial. It's a negotiation. The oflifespan it's going to have," says Mike wrote for his group Katrina & The Waves back Rolling Stones are reputed to have got a mil- =- _ilio, who wrote Handbags And Gladrags in 1989, had just turned up as a major produc- lion dollars for the use of Start Me Up in a ~~.1,0years ago. "So many songs sink without tion number in America's biggest TV hit, Glee. Windows commercial in 1995. But that was _ =ace. But if you write a song He knew nothing of the show or worldwide and it was exceptional. You might :.::2.: hangs around for years not the song's use, even though the get£50,000 for the use of a song in a major TV cly does it provide a useful bit "Iwrote clip had already had 2 million and radio commercial. That's for a year. That's . ~arnings but also it seems to Walking On views on YouTube. As record com- just for the song." :=-erate a power and momentum Sunshine in a panies bemoan the fact that the This may seem modest until you calculate -= of its own." record-buying public on which that in the last few years Donovan's Mellow ~'hese special songs may attract rented room. they once depended now have far Yellow has been used to advertise The Gap, res of cover versions, hitch a I lived in other more leisure options, the writers Marks & Spencer's Free Range Eggs, Mr _::'.e on somebody's marketing people's houses and publishers of songs are find- Kipling's Yellow Drizzle Cake and Kraft Mello , become fortuitously identi- ing that there have never been among others; Sunshine Superman has been with a major movie or the first for about ten more ways of making money out used by Magners Cider; the relatively obscure :; ~ of call for the lazy film editor years. Then we of song copyrights, often from I Love My Shirt by K Swiss watches and Hap- ..:hing to announce a subject, had a hit record those same options. piness Runs by Fruity Cheerios. Similarly, in _O"aest themselves to a pro- and Ibought Nigel Elderton runs the UK the 21st century his music has been on TV or =-=.mme director needing to mark a house" arm of Peer Music, a company film soundtracks for Confessions OfA Danger- : rticular time of year, slot into accustomed to looking after song- ous Mind, Futurama, TheSimpsons, TheRules ::mlti-platinum computer game writers whose material outlives OfAttraction, Edison, Skins, HouseMD, Nip/ :'ind themselves in the narrow repertoire of their success as a recording act. Donovan was Tuck, The Invention Of Lying and Dancing ~::gs that people pick to celebrate the key attracted to them in the early '60s because they With The Stars, again among others. This is -uals of their lives. They make fortunes for handled Buddy Holly. "Donovan has always not bad for somebody who stopped having hits : - lishers and put roofs over their composers' represented a certain set of values and there's 40 years ago. ....ezds;at the same time they often create cracks been a lot of demand for his songs and his "We're negotiating at the moment for the use :>ands formed in more carefree times. sound lately. Sync rights, as we call them, are of Mellow Yellow in a soft-drink commercial. Sometimes they happen right out of the box. now an increasingly important part ofthe We've re-recorded some of his old songs ..:::.o.:ther times they have to be roused from a business. Publishers and record companies because then we can do better deals with peo- a sleep. At their biggest they are far bigger didn't think of this kind of thing until the Levi's ple who want to use those songs. They don't -~"n the writer to whom they first occurred ads in the mid-'80s. I set up the first synchro- have to pay what the record company want as ~ well as what we want. We can provide the IN THE PUB IN CAMBRIDGE WHERE HE'S PLAYING to concentrate very hard. It's not something sound recording as well. When we did some his regular Wednesday-night show, Kimberley that comes naturally to me." deals with the re-recorded tunes, the penny Rew proudly shows me a battery-driven tooth- The group financed their own album but dropped for Donovan. His voice may be a brush that plays his song Walking On Sun- couldn't find a record company in Britain or semitone lower but he can still do it." shine. This is just one in the Tooth Tunes the US interested in putting it out and therefore Donovan is unusual in having half a dozen series, promising "Music In Your Mouth". in 1983 Walking On Sunshine emerged, to no songs attracting covers and sync uses. Often "Instantly change volume with brushing pres- great fanfare, on a small Canadian label. They it's just one. Veteran music publisher Tom Bra- sure," announces the packaging. Rew, who's continued to tour and the song went down well dley tells me about the author of one such. In preserved it in its blister pack, produces it as with audiences. Meanwhile an earlier Rew 1960 he was in a band in Swindon along with an example of the unpredictable places a hit song, Going Down ToLiveTpool, was covered a younger player who was brave enough to set song may take you. Still boyish in the latter by The Bangles on their successful albumAll offfor London. "And this was before the M4," half of his fifties, the unassuming Rew is the OveTthe Place. In 1985, by now signed to EMI he points out, admiringly. After coming under last person you would suspect of having in the US, they released a reworked version of the benign influence of Marty Wilde, the penned a money-spinning song. His website Walking On Sunshine, punched up further by young guitarist was hired to replace Denny features pictures of him blinking alongside the addition of horns. "On the second one I Laine in The Moody Blues. They recorded a Celine Dion (he wrote a song called That's Just played two guitars, the rhythm plugged into song the boy had written at the age ofl7. That The Woman In Me for her album Taking the desk. I didn't think the horns would make song, Nights In White Satin, changed the Chances) and a representative of the American so much difference but, well, all power to the direction of the group and turned them into a collection agency BMI to mark the fact that horns. The second one was again produced by franchise that still flourishes today. "He can Walking On Sunshine has had 2 million plays Pat Collier but it was mixed by Scott Litt, who never get away from that song," says Bradley on US radio. That kind of airplay means you worked with REM. He had a radio ear. We of his old friend Justin Hayward, now 63.

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