me songs are smashes straight. t of the gate. Others take years tonsinuate their way into our lives.The super-hits live on through TVshows, cereal commercialsand music to get marriedto. Walking On Sunshinestarted life as a pop recordand eventually became a

Living on sunshine: Walking OnSunshine enabled Katrina & The· · t thb h Waves' songwriter Kimberley RewSIngIng 00 rus to "retire.from the big stage." It's

• been an airplay record·breaker,a movie soundtrack regular and-d h even the tune played by an electricDavi Hepwort toothbrush (far left). This year thesong celebrates its 25th birthdayby popping up as a productionnumber on hit TVseries Glee.

talks to a lucky fewwho wrote the evergreenhits they could retire on.

ONOVAN ENJOYED AN AVERAGE

career as a recording artist.His first hit was Catch TheWind 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 stoppedg 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-..:nterintuitively, such as in the scene in

-..:<JdFellaswhere Robert De Niro and Joe:::sci brutally beat an associate to death in a

the jukebox plays Donovan'sAtlantis.-You never know when you write a song what

oflifespan it's going to have," says Mike=- _ilio, who wrote Handbags And Gladrags

~~.1,0years ago. "So many songs sink without_ =ace. But if you write a song:.::2.: hangs around for years notcly does it provide a useful bit. ~arnings but also it seems to

:=-erate a power and momentum-= of its own."~'hese special songs may attractres of cover versions, hitch a

_::'.e on somebody's marketing, become fortuitously identi-with a major movie or the first

:; ~ of call for the lazy film editor..:hing to announce a subject,_O"aest themselves to a pro-

=-=.mme director needing to mark: rticular time of year, slot into::mlti-platinum computer game:'ind themselves in the narrow repertoire of

~::gs that people pick to celebrate the key-uals of their lives. They make fortunes for: - lishers and put roofs over their composers'....ezds;at the same time they often create cracks

:>ands formed in more carefree times.Sometimes they happen right out of the box.

..:::..:other times they have to be roused from aa sleep. At their biggest they are far bigger

-~"n the writer to whom they first occurred

and, like the soundest of sound investments,they carryon attracting exploitation and mak-ing money while the artist is sleeping. In asleepy pub in a Cambridge back street on amidweek evening in January, I told KimberleyRew that Walking On Sunshine, the song hewrote for his group Katrina &The Waves backin 1989, had just turned up as a major produc-tion number in America's biggest TV hit, Glee.

He knew nothing of the show orthe song's use, even though theclip had already had 2 millionviews on YouTube. As record com-panies bemoan the fact that therecord-buying public on whichthey once depended now have farmore leisure options, the writersand publishers of songs are find-ing that there have never beenmore ways of making money outof song copyrights, often fromthose same options.

Nigel Elderton runs the UKarm of Peer Music, a companyaccustomed to looking after song-writers whose material outlives

their success as a recording act. Donovan wasattracted to them in the early '60s because theyhandled Buddy Holly. "Donovan has alwaysrepresented a certain set of values and there'sbeen a lot of demand for his songs and hissound lately. Sync rights, as we call them, arenow an increasingly important part ofthebusiness. Publishers and record companiesdidn't think of this kind of thing until the Levi'sads in the mid-'80s. I set up the first synchro-

nisation department when I was at EMI music.Now everybody regards it as a serious revenueearner, particularly when the revenue fromrecord sales has dropped like a stone. Howmuch? It's impossible to say what you mightget for a commercial. It's a negotiation. TheRolling Stones are reputed to have got a mil-lion dollars for the use of Start Me Up in aWindows commercial in 1995. But that wasworldwide and it was exceptional. You mightget£50,000 for the use of a song in a major TVand radio commercial. That's for a year. That'sjust for the song."

This may seem modest until you calculatethat in the last few years Donovan's MellowYellow has been used to advertise The Gap,Marks & Spencer's Free Range Eggs, MrKipling's Yellow Drizzle Cake and Kraft Melloamong others; Sunshine Superman has beenused by Magners Cider; the relatively obscureI Love My Shirt by K Swiss watches and Hap-piness Runs by Fruity Cheerios. Similarly, inthe 21st century his music has been on TV orfilm soundtracks for Confessions OfA Danger-ousMind, Futurama, TheSimpsons, TheRulesOfAttraction, Edison, Skins, HouseMD, Nip/Tuck, The Invention Of Lying and DancingWith The Stars, again among others. This isnot bad for somebody who stopped having hits40 years ago.

"We're negotiating at the moment for the useof Mellow Yellow in a soft-drink commercial.We've re-recorded some of his old songsbecause then we can do better deals with peo-ple who want to use those songs. They don'thave to pay what the record company want as ~

"IwroteWalking On

Sunshine in arented room.I lived in otherpeople's houses

for about tenyears. Then wehad a hit record

and Iboughta house"

well as what we want. We can provide thesound recording as well. When we did somedeals with the re-recorded tunes, the pennydropped for Donovan. His voice may be asemitone lower but he can still do it."

Donovan is unusual in having half a dozensongs attracting covers and sync uses. Oftenit's just one. Veteran music publisher Tom Bra-dley tells me about the author of one such. In1960 he was in a band in Swindon along witha younger player who was brave enough to setofffor London. "And this was before the M4,"he points out, admiringly. After coming underthe benign influence of Marty Wilde, theyoung guitarist was hired to replace DennyLaine in The Moody Blues. They recorded asong the boy had written at the age ofl7. Thatsong, Nights In White Satin, changed thedirection of the group and turned them into afranchise that still flourishes today. "He cannever get away from that song," says Bradleyof his old friend Justin Hayward, now 63. "Hedoes very well. Lives in Monaco. The MoodyBlues tour America every year and do greatbusiness. I don't know whether I'd want to playthose old songs every night but that's the lifehe wanted. He's still driven by the same thingsthat drove him when he was 15. All songwrit-ers are like that. They're all insecure and theyneed reassurance."

Bradley stresses that even the most success-ful songwriters derive the majority of theirincome from a tiny fraction of the songs they'vewritten. Formerly Sting's publisher, he esti-mates that between a quarter and a third ofSting's publishing income is owed to one song,EveTy BTeath You Take. "You go anywhere inthe world and turn on the local radio and you'llhear a Sting song within an hour, and it's quitelikely to be that one. Commercial radio is notinterested in music. It's interested in advertis-ing and therefore they programme the mostpopular songs all the time. Hence EveTyBTeath You Take."

How much is all this airplay worth? In 2007the alliance between MCPS (the MechanicalCopyright Protection Society, which repre-sents songwriters) and PRS (the PerformingRights Society, representing recording artists)paid £155 million to writers and performersof recorded works for the right to play them onthe radio. That's in the UK alone. At the end oflast year, Google, the owners of YouTube, paidan undisclosed lump sum to PRS for the musicthey'd been streaming on their sites. Theseare all revenue streams for the people whohold the rights. "Publishers have always takena longer view than record companies," saysBradley. "Airplay to publishers is not promo-tion. It's income."

IN THE PUB IN CAMBRIDGE WHERE HE'S PLAYING

his regular Wednesday-night show, KimberleyRew proudly shows me a battery-driven tooth-brush that plays his song Walking On Sun-shine. This is just one in the Tooth Tunesseries, promising "Music In Your Mouth"."Instantly change volume with brushing pres-sure," announces the packaging. Rew, who'spreserved it in its blister pack, produces it asan example of the unpredictable places a hitsong may take you. Still boyish in the latterhalf of his fifties, the unassuming Rew is thelast person you would suspect of havingpenned a money-spinning song. His websitefeatures pictures of him blinking alongsideCeline Dion (he wrote a song called That's JustThe Woman In Me for her album TakingChances)and a representative of the Americancollection agency BMI to mark the fact thatWalking On Sunshine has had 2 million playson US radio. That kind of airplay means youdon't have to work again. He looks like aslightly greyer version of theyoung man who played guitarwith Robyn Hitchcock in The SoftBoys, formed in Cambridge in1977. Unlike most veterans hedoesn't betray a trace of bitternessabout the hand rock has dealthim, not least because he's writtena couple of songs that on their ownwould be able to put a fairly decentroof over most heads.

After The Soft Boys split in 1981,he joined US Air Force brats Kat-rina Leskanich as singer and boy-friend Vince De La Cruz on bassplus his old drummer Alex Cooperto form Katrina & The Waves. Thisgroup married the pizzazz the band had devel-oped playing an unforgiving live circuit withRew's rare gift for writing pop songs.

"I can remember writing Walking On Sun-shine," he says. "I was living in a tiny rentedroom in somebody's house and I didn't have aproper tape recorder but Ijust wanted to writesomething that was upbeat in a kind of Motownvein. I lived in rooms like that for about tenyears. Then we had a hit record and I bought ahouse. I had the rifffirst and then the lyricscame very quickly. I played it to the band andfrom the start we did it in the way you hear ittoday. I knew it was pretty good. Some of mysongs are better than others but nobody said,'This is going to make us stars.' The song maycome quickly but getting the feeling that youneed, the bounce and energy that's going tocommunicate, that takes all your life up to thatpoint. It's a combination of something veryquick and something very slow. I've always had

to concentrate very hard. It's not somethingthat comes naturally to me."

The group financed their own album butcouldn't find a record company in Britain orthe US interested in putting it out and thereforein 1983 Walking On Sunshine emerged, to nogreat fanfare, on a small Canadian label. Theycontinued to tour and the song went down wellwith audiences. Meanwhile an earlier Rewsong, Going Down ToLiveTpool, was coveredby The Bangles on their successful albumAllOveTthe Place. In 1985, by now signed to EMIin the US, they released a reworked version ofWalking On Sunshine, punched up further bythe addition of horns. "On the second one Iplayed two guitars, the rhythm plugged intothe desk. I didn't think the horns would makeso much difference but, well, all power to thehorns. The second one was again produced byPat Collier but it was mixed by Scott Litt, whoworked with REM. He had a radio ear. Weweren't particularly extrovert people but when

we played we were. The record justcame to be associated with sun-shine." This time it went Top 10in the US, UK, Canada, Australiaand beyond and found its way intothe repertoire of radio program-mers the world over, a position ithas held ever since. In a recentAmerican radio poll it came sec-ond in the most programmedsummer records of the year.

Walking On Sunshine has fea-tured on the soundtrack of count-less films, including Look Who'sTalking, High Fidelity, AmeTicanPsycho, Bean, HeTbie: FullyLoaded and, most recently, Moon;

it has been danced to by competitors on USshow Dancing With TheStaTs, performed asan audition number onAmeTica's Got Talentand, most recently, appeared on the high-ratingshow Glee.Bob The Builder did a version calledWOTkingOn Sunshine. "It's very much biggerthan the band," he concedes. "People rememberthe song but not the band."

The group never matched its success but in1996 Rew wrote the British entry for the Euro-vision Song Contest and once again showed hisversatility by coming up with a winning tunein Love Shine A Light, performed by Katrina& The Waves. Leskanich left in 1999, sincewhen there have been the usual wrangles overuses of the name, with Katrina wanting to goout as Katrina & The New Wave while theremaining Waves briefly toured with anothersinger. Rew says he has "retired from the bigstage", although he still makes records andplays once a week at the Hopbine pub with his

"Six monthslater one of myex-wives rang

me to sayHandbags AndGladrags wasbeing usedon this new

programme onBBCcaliedThe Office"

girlfriend and musical partnerLee Cave-Berry. He also walksthe coastline of England andWales. De La Cruz has justgone back to the US, whileLesnacich, after a period as aDJ, plays on the oldies cir-cuit, where she fronts the oldEurovision hit and others.This year marks the 25thanniversary of the recordthat changed all oftheirlives. It's reissued andmade available on iTunes.

No good deed goesunpunished, and it'salmost inevitable that theauthorship of a big songcauses tension within agroup. No matter howmuch the rest of themmay have sweated overthe recording and howmuch of its appealmight be down to the qualities ofthe vocal or the drum sound, thelion's share of the credit and themoney goes to the writer. When TheAnimals' House Of The Rising Sunwas credited to "traditional arrangedAlan Price" in 1964, the rest of theband didn't realise that 50 years latertheir erstwhile keyboard player wouldstill be getting what publishing sourcesestimate as $50,000 a year out of thatcredit. But even in cases where theauthorship is not in dispute there areinevitable jealousies when, in middle age,the band notice that one of them has a farbigger house than the rest of them and nolonger feels the need to bash up and downthe motorway doing gigs to make the mortgagepayments. It's this that has occasioned courtcases involving the members ofSpandau Balletand accounts for why Procol Hamm's WhiterShade OfPale has put so many barristers' chil-dren through school.

Kimberley Rew isn't comfortable talkingabout his attempts to make sure that the restof the band shared in the rewards that flowedfrom the publishing of Walking On Sunshine."I've tried. It hasn't really worked out ideally,so I can't really say anything about it. It willbring up insoluble problems. It wouldn't be fairon the other guys to talk about it." One accountholds that he has shared the publishing with

~ the rest of the band but then subsequently~~ bought their shares back from them. He refuses'". ~ to confirm this. I ask him if he's set up for life.~ "I didn't have a house when I wrote this song.

Once Iwas a youngman: Mike O'Abowrote Handbags AndGladrags when hewas in Manfred Mann(top, far right); theRod Stewart version(on his disastroussolo debut) eventuallyearned him money,but it was the hit byThe Stereophonicsand the song's useon the titles of TheOffice that boughtthe glad rags for thetwins he fatheredin his sixties.

"Vougoanywhere in theworld and turn

on the localradio and you'll

hearaStingsong within anhour, and it'squite likely to

be Every BreathVouTake"

It's bought me a house and I can go to the barand buy a round of drinks and not worry aboutit. It's been very good to me. But if it hadn'thappened I would probably still be playing inthis pub but not quite in the same style."

MIKE DABO WAS 23 IN 1967 WHEN HE wroteHandbagsAnd Gladrags. He's 65 now. "Mychildren range in age from forty-two to two,"he says at his Gloucestershire home. The42-year-old is the actress Olivia D'Abo. Thetwo-year-olds are twins. Before they were bornhe was thinking of moving with his new wifeto New Zealand in order to lower his cost base.Years spent playing the oldies circuit, enter-taining at summer balls with variations on theformer members of his old groupManfred Mann and eking outwhat revenue he could from his oldpublishing credits had left himcontemplating retirement uneas-ily. Then, from two directions atonce, his old song enjoyed a secondwind and with it came a windfall.

"I wrote it in 1967 when I was inManfred Mann. I knew it wassomething rather special in that Iknew I'd got a bit of divine inspira-tion. In those days there were twotypes of songs. You either wroteaiming to be commercial, in whichcase you had to have a hook thatthe butcher boy would whistle. Onthe other hand there was the song that waswritten from the heart that people would say'that's beautiful', but you never expected it togenerate record sales because it was aiming toohigh. Build Me Up Buttercup (a hit for TheFoundations in 1968) falls into the first cate-gory and Handbags the second.

"Manfred Mann didn't know what to do withit. He didn't have a clue how to play the coun-tryish Floyd Cramer piano licks that were partof the song. I got a call one day from AndrewOldham and Tony Calder, who'd started Imme-diate, and they asked me to produce ChrisFarlowe, who was coming off a hit with Out OfTime, and the other was a totally unknown guycalled Rod Stewart. So Farlowe said he wantedto do Handbags and we did an arrangementand I played the piano and it got a certainamount of airplay and charted at 32 in 1968.

"I went down to a club to see Rod Stewartas the lead singer with the Jeff Beck Group. Iplayed him Handbags and he said he wantedto do it. I said he couldn't because I was alreadydoing it with Chris Farlowe. Nine months laterhe showed up at my door in Albion Street justoff Hyde Park and he said, 'Great news - I'vegot an album deal with Mercury and we're

going to record Handbags And Gladragstomorrow morning.' This was seven o'clock thenight before. He insisted on changing thearrangement. He didn't want my piano somuch. He wanted me to arrange somethingfor flutes. So I had to overnight produce awhole new arrangement, but I couldn't writea note of music.

"By nine o'clock I'd come up with the coun-ter-melodythat was to become the oboe part.By ten o'clock I was ringing round everyarranger in town that I knew and they all saidthey couldn't get it done by ten. I'd booked tenmusicians and I got through to this guy wholived in Finsbury Park and he said, 'If you payme for my time and a cab, I'll come over.' He

came over and stayed till five inthe morning writing down theparts. We showed up at ten thenext morning and Lou Reiznerwas producing. This was the firstsong. I'm playing the piano withIan McLagan on organ plus RonWood on bass and Micky Walleron drums. We did one take whichI thought was a bit all over theplace and I told Rod he'd got thewords wrong. Rod missed theinternal rhyme and I was nothappy with the grammatical sideof things, but that's the only takehe ever did. Lou said, 'That'll do,we're moving on to the next one.'

"By 10.30 we'd done and I left, tail betweenmy legs. The album sold a few thousandalbums all over the world. But Rod was slowlybuilding. Two years later, once Maggie Mayhas come out and the world had gone mad forRod Stewart, Mercury started recompiling hisold stuff and Handbags started turning up onSing ItAgain Rod and other compilations. SoI was not complaining. It wasn't until 1991 thathe re-recorded it - and again I didn't think hedid it very well - for his Unplugged album,which went to number one in America, so thatsuddenly earned me quite a lot of money outof the blue.

"Get to millennium eve 2000 and I was play-ing with my band The Mighty Quinn at a hotelin Southampton and somebody rang me to say,'Your song's on JoolsHolland.' Kelly Jones fromThe Stereo phonics was playing it. I'd neverheard of him. Six months later one of my ex-wives rang me to say it was being used on thisnew programme on BBC called The Office.They'd wanted to use the Rod Stewart version,couldn't afford it and so they'd re-recorded it.My publishers knew nothing about this. Any-way, I called The Stereophonics' managementand told them I'd written it. They said I was

wrong, it was Rod Stewart. Anyway, I said, whydon't they record it? Funny you should say that,they said, they're mixing it today and it's theirnext single." That single came out in 2001 andwent to number four in the charts. The albumwas number one.

Mike D'Abo and his new family never movedto New Zealand. "I have felt at times in my lifea little embittered because life hasn't dealt mea very fair hand. For instance, I never got paida penny on BuildMe UpButtercup when it gotto number one in America in 1968, because itwas infringing a Motown song and they got allthe royalties. But thankfully that's been recti-fied and that earns me something because it'sa big party favourite with young people thanksto it being featured in There'sSomethingAboutMary. Songs do come back. They've both beenvery good to me and updated my credentials.At the end of the day I'm delighted and verywell adjusted to it all."

LONG BEFORE THE MUSIC BUSINESS CAME TO BE

all about hit records, the holy grail of publish-ers was the song that everyone wanted to playon their piano at home and which consequentlysold a lot of sheet music. You Raise Me Up,which was written by the Norwegian Rolf Lov-land and the Irish novelist/songwriter BrendanGraham, has proved that's still possible, pro-vided you come up with a song that people wishto incorporate into their lives.

In the world where pop rubs shoulders withclassical in the approximate vicinity of ins pi-rational music, You Raise Me Up has been aphenomenon. Lovland, whose instrumentalmusic comes out under the Secret Gardenbrand, has written Eurovision-winning songs.In 2001 he came up with a melody and soughtout the Irish writer Brendan Graham (who hadpreviously written the lyrics for two IrishEurovision-winners) to pen some lyrics for it.Graham recalls how it happens:

"They called me and said they were in Leop-ardstown and could I come and listen to whatthey had. I said I could come in ten minutes.They were calling it Silent Story at the time.I thought it sounded like Danny Boy. I gotthe title You Raise Me Up that afternoon."The resulting song was released by BrianKennedy, Secret Garden and the London Com-munity Gospel Choir in 2002. Its refrain goesas follows:

"You raise me up, so I can stand on moun-tains;

You raise me up, to walk on stormy seas;I am strong, when I am on your shoulders;You raise me up ... To more than I can be".That version went to number one in Norway.

Daniel O'Donnell's version entered the Top 20 ~

in the UK the following year. Three years laterWestlife's version went to number one in theUK. In the United States the producer DavidFoster, the Canadian behind the success ofMichael Buble and other stars of the new MOR,was presented with the song by Peer Music anddecided that his charge Josh Groban was goingto record it that afternoon. This version wasnumber one for six weeks in the US Adult Con-temporary Charts. It has since been featuredon number-one albums by Paul Potts, II Divo,Russell Watson, Celtic Woman and many otheracts readers of this magazine may not thinkabout very much. It has been covered over 130times already.

It has also been widely used in a ceremonialcontext. In 2005 it was performed at the NobelPeace Prize ceremony. In 2007 it was sung atthe opening of the Northern Ireland Assembly.Brian Kennedy sang it at George Best's funeralin 2005. Olympic champions have skated to it.

"YouRaise Me Up appeals to abroad church of people whodon't know what it's about.Tosome it's parent, lover,

husband. It's the third mostpopular father/daughter dance

at American weddings now"

Peer Music's Nigel Elderton admits that heburied his own father to it.

Brendan Graham recognises that, unlikesongs in the hymn tradition from which itsprung, You Raise Me Up enjoys the advantageof never quite identifying who the "he" mightbe. "It appeals to a broad church of people whodon't know what it's about. To some it's parent,lover, husband. It's the third most popularfather/daughter dance at American weddingsnow. Josh Groban says it's all about his par-ents. His manager says it came along after9/11 when the American people wanted some-thing to draw them together. In these times,with institutions crumbling, people needsomething to hang on to, a kind of spiritualitythat fills the gap. There's a climb in the melodythat goes with the lines 'You raise me up' andthat helps."

Nigel Elderton estimated, quite early in thesong's commercial life, that Brendan Graham'sshare of the proceeds from You Raise Me Upwould amount to 2 million pounds. It's cer-tainly provided him with enough to move fromDublin to a house overlooking a lake. I askedthe 65-year-old lyricist if he is a believer.

He laughed. "If I wasn't then, I am now.".