‘Blame BBC for Eurovision losing streak’
The 1997 winner, Katrina Leskanich, doesn’t fancy our chances in tomorrow’s final, she tells Tristram Fane Saunders
THE lead singer of Katrina and the Waves, Britain’s last Eurovision Song Contest winners, has blamed the BBC for the country’s consistently poor showing in the competition.
It is 20 years since Katrina Leskanich led the country to victory with Love Shine A Light. And while many commentators have blamed tactical voting and murky politics for Britain’s failures, the singer believes the fault lies closer to home. The BBC oversaw the selection of six former X Factor contestants as hopefuls for this year’s show. One of them, Lucie Jones, will represent the UK with Never Give Up On You. The contest takes place tomorrow in Kiev.
“Isn’t it just a colossal waste of money not to take it a bit more seriously, and try a little harder?” Leskan- ich said, adding that she believed the song has little chance of winning.
From 2011-15 the entry was chosen internally by the BBC and “we kept choosing such terrible representatives that you just knew from the get-go they weren’t going to win”, she added.
Leskanich’s comments will be embarrassing for the BBC because she will appear on the show tomorrow, reading out the UK’S votes. In an interview with
The Daily Telegraph, Leskanich, 57, Continued on Page 2
I ’m always being asked, ‘Why can’t we win Eurovision?’ ” says Katrina Leskanich. “For 20 years, I’ve been asked this question. ‘Why do we put forward such crap?’ ”
If anyone should have an answer, it’s her. In 1997, her band, Katrina and the Waves, took the UK to victory in the Eurovision Song Contest with their track Love Shine a Light.
It’s not a feat we’re repeated since. Leskanich says a number of factors are to blame, starting with the BBC, which selected our entries between 2011 and 2015.
“One person in the BBC was making the decisions,” she says. “I did ask for them to come out and make themselves known, because we kept choosing such terrible representatives that you just knew from the get-go weren’t going to win.” These representatives included Engelbert Humperdinck, who came 25th, and duo Electro Velvet, who scored just five points and came 24th.
Since last year, the UK has returned to choosing a singer through a public vote, but Leskanich isn’t impressed by the acts putting themselves forward for the competition. All six candidates on this year’s UK shortlist were former X Factor contestants.
“A bunch of X Factor rejects? That just says it all.” Leskanich sighs. “How horrible is that? Isn’t it just a colossal waste of money not to take it a bit more seriously, and try a little harder?” She wants established artists to throw their hats in the ring, and then for the chosen act to promote itself properly in the media all over Europe in the weeks leading up to the competition.
“Schmooze!” says Leskanich. “We did loads of work in Germany, and in Spain. So people knew us, and they felt good about voting for us.” She also feels that the UK and the other “Big Five” countries (France, Spain, Germany and Italy) should no longer be “footing the bill” alone.
“I just don’t think it’s fair,” she says. “The bill should be divided depending
on a country’s GDP, and everybody should make contributions towards Eurovision if they want to be involved in it.” This year, the 57-year-old is the UK’S spokesman, announcing our votes for each country at tomorrow’s final. But her official role doesn’t stop her speaking her mind about our entry, Lucie Jones, one of those X Factor rejects, and her song Never Give Up On You.
“I’m not being a curmudgeon,” she says, “but I don’t think it’s gonna win.”
Her pessimism is partly due to Brexit, which she thinks will make it even harder for the UK to pick up points. “Who’s gonna vote for the UK now?” she asks.
But Leskanich has little time for people who say Eurovision shouldn’t be political. “It can’t not be, because it’s a worldwide stage. Behind the Russian grandmas and the Polish cleavage, there have always been political messages.”
Nevertheless, the competition has come a long way since 1997, when it was a “dinky little affair”, she says. That year, Leskanich took to the stage wearing a £3 shirt she’d bought at a street market.
She also had to adopt a Richard Iii-esque hunch to hide the fact that her borrowed jacket was missing a shoulder-pad. “It was the most nerve-racking two minutes and 58 seconds of my life,” she says.
Eurovision had profound consequences for the Waves. At the time, their Eighties chart hits such as Walking on Sunshine were long behind them – but the bubbly pop group had found some unexpected fans in the world of hard rock.
Two years before the contest, they toured Scandinavia with Motörhead. The group’s hellraising frontman, Lemmy, called the Waves “the loudest f---ing band I’ve ever heard”. Despite tales of his wild antics, Leskanich assures me that Lemmy was “an absolute pussycat”. He and the band were tucked up in bed an hour after boarding the tour bus.
“These guys can keep going because they get a certain amount of sleep,” she says. “And gallons of Horlicks!”
The Waves’ unlikely rock kudos disappeared with Eurovision. When they were approached out of the
blue by the BBC, the Waves’ guitarist Kimberley Rew offered his song Love Shine a Light – originally recorded for a Salvation Army fundraiser in Wiltshire. But Rew, who had also written Walking on Sunshine, refused to take part in the contest.
“He didn’t feel comfortable doing it,” Leskanich, who is American but moved to Britain aged 16, recalls. “I think he’d probably seen the Eurovision Song Contest before, whereas I hadn’t.”
The band split up soon afterwards. “It was a divorce between me and three men,” says Leskanich. “When you divorce, it’s all about lawyers and money. It’s very ugly, it’s very painful.” The court case became heated when a lawyer tried to prevent her from using her own name, Katrina. “I had to show them my birth certificate!”
Without any royalties for her biggest hits, Leskanich has had to “scrap around” to make a living. (She has just returned from a gig at Butlins in Skegness.) “I’ve had to do some real crappy shows… But what I need to do makes me happy. If I’m unoccupied, I get into trouble!”
She has no hard feelings towards her old bandmates, she says. Would they have stayed together if Eurovision hadn’t happened? “Without a doubt.” But she doesn’t regret it. “I think it was inevitable that something was going to come along and shift things. And I’m really glad it did. As upsetting as it was to suddenly not be the singer in Katrina and the Waves, it would’ve been too comfortable to just coast along. That’s not what life is about. You’ve got to throw yourself out there.”
Leaving the band also made it easier for her to be open about her sexuality. On the day we speak, Leskanich is celebrating her 14th year together with her wife, Sher. “I didn’t come out in a massively ‘ta-da!’ way. I kind of just crept out,” she says. “There wasn’t any easy way to start talking about the fact that my partners were women, in the business, without it becoming an issue.”
Still, one “ta-da!” moment came at the 1997 Sony Music Awards, when her friend, the late comedian Caroline Aherne, kissed her in front of the cameras.
“It was so scandalous back in 1997 for two women to be seen kissing. Afterwards, when the press went to her door, she said, ‘Shh! Be quiet! Katrina’s asleep in the other room!’ That was her sense of humour, which was brilliant. She just didn’t care.”
Eurovision is, Leskanich admits, “a cheesefest”. But it’s the greatest cheesefest on earth.
“When some of the European countries put on their razzmatazz – with all the drums, the lasers, the glitter – there’s nothing like it. It’s way beyond X Factor… It’s in a league of its own.”