Songfacts®:

• Katrina & the Waves pulled off a stunning comeback with "Love Shine A Light," which won the Eurovision Song Contest for the UK in 1997 by a landslide, breaking the record for most votes and biggest margin of victory.
  
  The group is best known for their jaunty 1985 hit "Walking On Sunshine," their first single after signing a record deal with Capitol. But the clouds rolled in and their fortunes soon faded, compounding the tension that was in the band from the start.
  
  The group was split into two factions: the Americans Katrina Leskanich (lead singer, rhythm guitar) and Vince De La Cruz (bass), and the Englishmen Kimberly Rew (lead guitar) and Alex Cooper (drums). They all wrote songs, but Rew was their primary writer and his songs were the ones they usually recorded (including "Walking On Sunshine"), which didn't go over well with Leskanich and De La Cruz. "Love Shine A Light" came about when Kimberly Rew tried to write a song no one in the band could possibly object to, something so upbeat and anodyne it would supersede their divisions. This spirit also made it a perfect Eurovision song, uniting listeners around the power of love. It was the group's first hit since 1989.
• After writing the song, Kimberly Rew recorded a demo with just him and Katrina, which they put on cassette and sent it to Terry Wogan, an influential DJ on BBC Radio 2 who was also a commentator for the Eurovision Song Contest. Wogan would play some of the songs musicians sent him on his show, and when he played the demo of "Love Shine A Light," it got a great listener response. The song was entered into the Great British Song Contest, where it made the semi-finals, and then to Eurovision.
• Kimberly Rew shed some light on this song when he spoke with PRS in 2022. "We've all walked on sunshine," he said. "This was also something everybody can relate to. The use of repetition was deliberate. There's three verses and I think you change just one word. 'Love a shine a light in every corner of my heart,' then it's in, 'Every corner of my dream' and, 'Every corner of my world. Then you're off — you're all shining a light together. All the factors are there, you just have to hope the audience can sing it well."
  
  "I hope that it is an elemental song about basic hopes and feelings that anybody could sing and relate to," he added. "It's difficult to do that without being obvious or simple, or without it being like a cartoon."
• The Eurovision victory for "Love Shine A Light" stands as one of the most memorable and thorough wins, even though Lordi's Hard Rock Hallelujah, was Finland's entry for the 2006 contest, broke the record for margin of victory. There were only 25 countries voting when Katrina & the Waves took the trophy in Dublin in 1997; in 2006 there were 38 countries participating in the contest.
• Don Airey, who has played keyboards with Deep Purple and Ozzy Osbourne, did the arrangement on this track.
• When Katrina & The Waves performed at Eurovision, Kimberly Rew didn't join them on stage. He watched from the audience as Phil Nichol took his place.
  
  The vocals and orchestra were live, but the other instruments were prerecorded, so Rew wouldn't have been playing anyway.
• Kimberley Rew originally penned the song for the Swindon branch of Samaritans. Drummer Alex Cooper's brother worked there and they needed a theme tune for their 50th anniversary celebrations, so Rew wrote "Love Shine A Light" and the band shoved it in the bottom drawer, thinking it was too Eurovision to put on one of their records. When they got an approach to put forward a song, they took it out of the drawer and submitted it.