SHE’S an integral part of an iconic American pop group and has collaborated with legends of music.
The B-52s’ Kate Pierson is as exuberant as ever now aged 76 and looks much younger than her years.
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The respected singer and multi-instrumentalist, who is unmistakable with her vibrant red hair colour, is best known for her band’s hits Love Shack, Rock Lobster and Wig to name but a few.
But she’s also worked with the likes of Iggy Pop on his early 90’s single Candy, The Ramones’ Chop Suey and R.E.M’ s stellar LP Out of Time.
Kate’s also released a solo album co-written with pop powerhouse Sia and had tracks produced by Jack White.
Her solo debut, Guitars and Microphones, came out in 2015 and allowed Kate to explore more personal subject matter than the eccentric themes of her group.
“I just wanted to be more real and emotional,” she told Spin. “The B-52s, you know, our songs are about volcanoes or lobsters.
“Cindy [Wilson] and I sing them like our lives depend on them. I feel very emotional when I’m singing ‘Rock Lobster,’ but I’ve wanted to sing more about my personal experience.
“I had a lot of lyrics. I had a lot of ideas for titles. We used most of those. With the B-52s, we would jam together. We might jam for days on one song and then we come back to it and then we’d jam more. Hours of jams. So much stuff we could make ten songs out of one.”
Kate’s influences and musical tastes are incredibly varied.
Jerry Lee Lewis’s 50’s classic Great Balls of Fire sits alongside David Bowie’s Space Oddity, Outkast’s Hey Ya and Patti Smith’s Horses in a list of her favourite tracks.
And she was recently pictured with 90s singer Lisa Loeb, who was responsible for the huge hit ‘Stay’ from the film Reality Bites, in Vegas.
Though it should come as no surprise to fans of The B-52s’ eclectic output.
The band formed in the late 70s when Kate, Fred Schneider, Keith Strickland, Cindy Wilson and the late Ricky Wilson jammed after a trip to a Chinese restaurant.
The band’s name was inspired by a dream Strickland had where the group were playing in a hotel and someone whispered the moniker, also the name of a wartime aircraft, in his ear.
Their first single, Rock Lobster, was something of an underground phenomenon, attracting a ground swell of popularity and earning celebrity fans such as Sandi Shaw and John Lennon on its way to topping the charts in Canada.
Tragedy struck in the mid-80s when guitarist Ricky, who was Cindy’s brother, died from AIDs aged 32.
Former drummer Strickland switched instruments and became the new guitarist, giving up his drum seat to session players and drum machines.
After a decade of toil, the band achieved huge commercial success with the release of 1989 album Cosmic Thing and its mega hit Love Shack.
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Cosmic thing reached the top five in the States, the top 10 in the UK and number one in Australia and New Zealand.
They had a big number three UK hit in 1994 when they recorded the theme song for The Flintstones movie starring John Goodman.
Their final album, Funplex, came out in 2008, some 16 years after 1992’s Good Stuff.
The band toured sporadically afterwards, though Strickland retired from the road in 2012.
Their final farewell run concluded in January 2023, though the band went on to have a Las Vegas residency which wrapped up in April of this year.
