917 songs have been sung in the Eurovision Song Contest between 1956 and 2003. In this blog I go through these songs in a random order and tell you what I think of them. What song would you like me to review?
The first years of Eurovision Song Contest is considered by many as an uninteresting cavalcade of dull French (or french sounding) ballads with really nothing else to remember them by than the winning entries. While I think this is partly true, I also once in a while try to highlight the great unsung and unremebered masterpieces from these early Eurovision years which I think there are plenty of. The 90th eurosong is not one of those. In fact the whole 1962 Eurovision song contest is one of the dullest and most unforgettable contests ever.
The french singing star François Deguelt had represented Monaco already two years previously with an excellent song Ce soir-là by Hubert Giraud (my review to this great song can be read here) resulting the third place in the final results list. In 1962 Deguelt managed to improve the rating with the 2nd place with 13 points. The winning song, Un premier amour by Isabelle Aubret (in my opinion one of the best songs ever in the Eurovision history) gathered twice the amount of points.
But unlike the result would suggest, Dis rien (penned by well known French singer Henri Salvador) is far inferior to François Deguelts earlier song. Lyrically the song consist mostly of cliches of a French love song and the melody is uninspired. The slightly jazzy arrangement does little to improve the overall impression, which makes me wonder what the juries saw and heard in this song that made them attribute their points to it. Even the singer himself looks like having trouble in keeping awake singins this dull ditty. Maybe the overall low quality of songs (except of the winner and one or two of the other songs) made the juries to follow the old formula. It is in french, it is a ballad, therefore it must be good.
The 1991 is not one of my fondest Eurovision memories. Finland was at the wrong end of the score board again, the winner was far from my favourite and the contest itself was a big mess. That may be the reason that I don't recall many good songs from that year. When the random nuber generator draw me the Luxembourg entry from 1991 I was almost ready to award the song the all too common two points out of five. Well let's just listen to the song once I thought. I was surprised.
Luxembourg was one of my favourite Eurovision countries right until it decided to withdraw from the contest in 1993. The 613th Eurosong was an attempt by the Luxembourg tv to repeat their former successes that had combined a traditional French ballad with a young female singer. Although they didn't succees this year (either), their 1991 entry was much better than I remembered.
Un baiser volé was very formulaic French Eurovision ballad. In first decades there were usually 2-4 of those taking part every year. So in 1991 I very much dismissed this song for being not among the best of those ballads. Nowadays when one has to wait sometimes couple of years to hear a decent French ballad on Eurovision stage this song feels not bad at all.
Also Sarah Bray was much better singer than I remembered and her performance is actually nice to hear and watch. And unlike most of the songs that year, the live version works much better than the studio version shown in the previews.
I tried but found almost no information at all of this young singer, who apparently vanished into oblivion after the contest. If anything, Sarah Bray (real name being Mick Wersant) at least was Luxembourg citizen unlike most of the others that had represented the grand duchy. Where are you and what are you doing, Sarah?
Ireland is famous for the high number of ballads sung by a male artist in Eurovision Song Contest (19 out of 48 between 1965 and 2015). Of these 19 four were sung during the first consecutive four years that the country took part in the contest. Looking back at those years it is hard for me to distinguish these four entries from another. The third Irish Eurovision entry is the best of these four.
The Irish entry from 1967 is a nice song. Not too slow and not too syrupy, but a positive love song dreaming of a home and a future that the protagonist wishes to build with his loved one. Nothing more. Sean Dunphy was a good singer and sympathetic enough to reach the romantic hearts watching the contest. If I could choose reached the glorious second place in the final results beating for example the more somber French ballads (like L'amour est bleue which later became a world wide best seller.)
I quite like the song. Among the staggering number of 33 different Eurovision ballads from the Green island this is among the best, but still not worth more than three points from me.
Four years prior to the preview videos (and during the era when music videos were a novelty) one was created for this song. See it here. Can't you sense the sparks flying between Sean and his sweetheart?
The French entry from 1988 is one of those songs that at the time did nothing to me, but during the last 27 years has become one of my favourites. In 1988 I thought that Gérard Lenorman was a new inexperienced singer whose insecurity made his voice tremble and shake. His voice was far from the strong and straightforward singing voices of Lara Fabian and Céline Dion who took most of my attention that year.
When I received the VHS copiy of the 1988 contest in the early 1990's and got to hear the French entry again, my opinion changed. I also learned that Gérard Lenorman was an established star in his home country and his trembly voice was his trademark. His performance was also far from insecure. He controlled the stage and it felt like he was not singing to the camera but personally to me sitting by the tv.
The song itself, written by the crooner himself, is nothing special, but a well crafted love song made to honor the French ballad traditions, not much different from French eurovision ballads from the 1960's. The orchestral arrangement by the Eurovision veteran Guy Matteoni emballishes the song which on stage is bigger and more pompous than the rather sparsely arranged recorded version.
The studio version of the song is completely another story. On his album Heureux qui communiquent and on single the song is over four minutes long. To make the song fit the three minutes maximum length the track was edited to leave out every other phrase rather than to edit out a verse or a refrain. So if you have only heard the Eurovision version of the song (available on the 1988 Eurovision compilation album), be prepared to surprises when you listen to the album version of the song. In either way Chanteur de charme is one of the better songs of the 1988 contest.
In the 1990's I developed a notorious touch of death. Not once or even twice but four times a song that I had pointed as one of my absolute favourites crashed at the dreaded last place in the final results. In 1999 I had a very good prediction that Spain would do well, and then what happened?
Four years previously Spain had done all but win the contest with their magnificent entry Vuelve conmigo. The 1999 Spanish entry was for me a clear follow-up to that song and sure to do at least as well. The elements were very much the same. An enigmatic melody with tasty arrangement which with a good singer and spanish lyrics (among songs mostly sung in english) created a enchanting package, at least on its recorded version. With, for the first time, no orchestra but a backing track the song did sound very much the same in Jerusalem.
At the time I didn't see much wrong in the performance. Lydia Rodríguez Fernández had couple of flat notes here and there, but otherwise she managed to keep her voice in control and delivered the song all right to the audience. Later I've realized that the small faults in the performance ruined the overall impression. Still I think that the last place was far from deserved. My points 3/5.
I have a difficult attitude to groups with three female singers and one male singer. Boney M. is maybe the only group that has used this formula successfully (although only half of the group actually sang on their records), but on other occasions I find this combination uneasy to follow. The Irish Eurovision representant of 1982 is a good example of a group that has a peculiar chemistry which all but ruins a plausible song in my opinion.
The Duskey sisters (consisting of two sisters Barbara Ellis and Sandy Kelly and their cousin Nina Duskey) had already participated in the Irish Eurovision selection one year earlier with a bouncy song Where does that love come from, and finished third in the results. Unfortunately the song that got the group finally to the Eurovision stage is much weaker.
Whereas the 1981 song is a charmingly old fashioned pop pearl with the threesome trading vocal lines and performing the song enthousiastically and inspiredly on stage, the 1982 song is very formulaic pseudo modern ditty with obvious lyrics and melody that stays the same after the first third is up. What makes the song interesting is a challenging orchestral arrangement which really gave the orchestra run for their money and the opportunity to spice up the otherwise rather tasteless soup. This wonderful orchestral backing is completely absent from a dull recorded version of the song.
To make the song more appealing the three Duskeys were joined by their Welsh cousin Danny Duskey, but this did very little to make the performance more interesting. Quite the contrary to me. The foursome sang together throughout the song without anyone (least of all poor Danny) having any moment to shine. Because the choreography of the four Duskey cousins was exactly the same and his voice was buried under the female voices, one wonders what the male member was doing in the group. Just like in the Belgian entry from five years prior, Danny seemed to be the silent boy who had been bossed around by the three female cousins to join them on stage to do exactly the same as they were doing. Well, that's the connotation I get from this song anyway.
Despite the mediocre result in the final results (11 among 18 participants) the group continued to be popular in their native Ireland. After a car accident the group broke up and the members continued their careers separately. Sandy Kelly found success in the country branch culminating with a recording done together with Johnny Cash. Danny Duskey would have his time to shine, when he participated in the Song for Europe contest in 1986 as a member of a group Palace. That song is also, in my opinion, better than the one he got to sing with his bossy cousins in Harrogate.
The French entries of the first Eurovision decade can be divided roughly in two categories: atmospheric ballads and cheery ditties sung with an artificially wide smile. After winning the contest 1960 with the latter style France tried to repeat the success with another happy go lucky song about spring and birds singing.
I don't have much to say about this song. Although Jean-Paul Mauric sung his entry Printemps, avril carillonne to the respectable 4th place in the final results, the song is nowhere as timeless and succesful as its predecessor, the winner of the 1960 contest.
The song has a catchy hook but you grow tired of it already at second or third listen. In the end of his exhaustingly cheery performance Jean-Paul is so exited himself that he is having trouble in singing the song in tune.
Despite of the relatively good placement Jean-Paul Mauric remained a small star, popular live performer but hardly seen in the record charts. Nine years after his Eurovision performance he died of a heart failure at only 37 years of age.
Each decade has one or two Eurovision winner that I don't get. The winner of the 1999 Eurovision Song Contest is one of the songs that I could not have predicted as a winner even in my wildest dreams and I am still puzzled how this particular song managed to please that many telephone voters to win the hela sjuttaballongen.
There is nothing particularly wrong in the Swedish entry in 1999. The melody of Take me to your heaven is catchy and Charlotte Nilsson (later to change her name to Charlotte Perelli) captures the attention of the viewers with ease.
The song was, already in 1999, violently out of date. This style was popular in Eurovision in the early 1980's, but among the neon tubes and laser lights of the Jerusalem Eurovision stage the song does not work at all. Originally titledTusen och en natt the song loses it's particular charm when translated to the lingua franca.
But I was in the minority. The Swedish entry won the contest with convincing margin before Iceland and Germany. If the song was old fashioned, the 2000 contest arranged by the Swedish Television started the new and considerable more modern era of the contest. So one could deem Sweden the right winner of the last Euroision Song Contest of the second milleniumafter all.
Quite a few artists have managed to make a succesful international career after their participation in the Eurovision song contest. But still I can come up with only three Eurovision singers that have earned a international superstar status by selling hundreds of millions of records. They are Céline Dion, of course, and Julio Iglesias. The third one is Nana Mouskouri.
I have a more personal relationship with Nana Mouskouri than any other Eurovision artist. When I was only three years old, my father brought an album (called Une voix qui vient du coeur) by Mouskouri from Paris and I fell in love with the album and the singer immediately. Night after night I fell to sleep listening to that album clutching the album cover (with the picture of the dark sweet lady with distinguishable glasses) in my hands. The cover of course fell into pieces, but the album itself remained and I still find it an exquisite piece music combining tastefully French and Greek popular cultures.
I wasn't particularly surprised when about 20 later I found out that this Greek lady had also taken part in the Eurovision Song Contest. When I saw a bad quality VHS copy of the 1963 contest it was not difficult to recognize the singer with trembling voice and dark framed specs representing Luxembourg. Just couple of years previously a talent scout for a French record company had brought this promising singer to Paris to start an international career. Before the Luxembourg TV asked Mouskouri to sing for them in London, she had scored a big hit in Germany with Weiße Rosen aus Athen and recorded an album in New York under the direction of Quincy Jones.
The 1963 Eurovision Song Contest was staged in a tv studio which made the visuals of that contest unique. For the Luxembourg entry the director Yvonne Littlewood decided to concentrate on the face of the singer and make no camera changes (and only minimal camera moves) during her performance. Mouskouri herself has pronounced dissatisfaction with her own performance stating, that she didn't sing that well and could not convey the meaning of the lyrics on a language that was still quite new to her.
I must disagree, her performance is top class and the minimalist approach by the director only enhances her stage presence. In the end she ended in the middle of the scoreboard (eighth among 16 participants), which was probably due more to the somber arrangement of the song than the melody or the performance itself. The song was recorded with two different arrangements, maybe this lighter version (recorded at the same time with the original version but released five years later) could have pleased the juries more? I love both.
Her participation in the Eurovision Song Contest opened even more international doors. She made friends with Littlewood which resulted her own tv series Presenting Nana Mouskouri in the BBC from 1968-1976. During her career she recorded regularly in Greek, French, English and German and occasionally in other languages as well. Long career and success in different language regions made her one of the best selling artists of all time, at least according to her record company, which awarded her a plaque representing 350 million records sold in 2009. Nana Mouskouri continued to record and perform regularly until her retirement in 2008.
From an established schlager queen to a newcomer who almost ruined her young career with a shaky Eurovision performance. Fortunately Petra Frey and her career recovered from the experience, which even now 21 years after the contest is almost impossible to watch and even more so to listen.
To be fair to Petra Frey, she wasn't really given a good song to go with. The composer Alfons Weindorf had already tried the "song about peace" formula in 1991, when his Dieser Traum darf niemals sterben drowned Germany to the 18th place. Fearlessly he wrote poor Petra Frey equally naive and one dimensional song that was to go nowhere near the success of the more sophisticated songs about peace and unity like the Ein bisschen Frieden (1982) and L'oiseau end l'enfant (1978).
To make matter worse, the performance of young Petra Frey (just about to celebrate her 16th birthday) is not far from disasterous. She starts the song with fearful look and almost unheardable voice and then blasts the refrain with brave face and strained voice that has big difficulties to carry the tune. The song that sounded acceptable in the previews became three minutes of agony that I believed was shared between the audience and the artist herself. Poor Petra, to whom the 17th (among 25 participants) position in the final results must have felt like a relief.
To end this negative post with a more positive way, the career of Petra Frey did not seem to suffer from these three unfortunate minutes on Millstreet stage. With 12 albums and further two attempts to represent Austria in the Eurovision Song Contest she has shown what a persevering trooper she is and how quick the record buying audience in Austria was willing to go on from the 1994 Eurovision Song Contest. Not many artists get that chance. To hear and see how well Petra Frey is doing check this performance from 2014.
If in the late 1960's and early 1970's Germany made a habit of borrowing their Eurovision artists from Scandinavia (Siw Malmkvist from Sweden, Wencke Myhre from Norway and Gitte Haenning from Denmark), the 1970's and 1980's belonged to established female stars, who did not find it awkward to boost their career on Eurovision Stage. Ingrid Peters was one of them.
What I love about these schlager queens is that when they came on stage you didn't have to be worried one bit about whether they could carry the tune and whether they were professional enough to handle the pressure and excitement of a popular, world wide television show. Like Katja Ebstein, Lena Valaitis, Mary Roos and Ireen Sheer before her, Ingrid Peters took the stage and sung her song with no nervousness in sight and no flat note anywhere to be found. A professional is always a professional.
The composer Hans Blum was no beginner either, he had already written the German entries of 1965, 1967 and 1969. Über die Brücke gehn was maybe not the most original song he'd ever written but it suited Ingrid Peters perfectly and with nice build up to the chorus and the change of key in the right place it went straight into my heart as a musical package well done and beautifully finished.
The final result of the song (8th place among 20 participants) correlates well with my feelings to the song. It did well but the final push needed to pass the perky uptempo pop songs like the entries from Belgium, Denmark, United Kingdom, Ireland and Sweden and the traditional French ballads (from Switzerland and Luxemburg) was missing.
Unfortunately the 1986 contest marked the end of era of established German stars on Eurovision stage. Like in so many countries, now also in Germany the big acts started to shy away from the Eurovision Song Contest which allegedly in more cases hurt already established careers than promoted them.
Like Germany, Spain is one of the big European countries taking part in the Eurovision song contest, with surprising few victories. The reason for this might be that Spain has rarely tried to please the pan-European musical tastes and hardly ever moulded their entries to sound more like the entries from other countries. The 1980 Spanish entry is good example of this.
I remember very fondly the 1980 Eurovision Song Contest, which had only few (if any) bad songs and some of the good songs were the best in the whole Eurovision history.
The Spanish entry that year differed from the norm in many ways. Melodically the song was very dynamic, each verse was different with interesting tempo changes. The icing is gorgeous orchestral arrangement (which can be heard in all its glory in the recorded version of the song, here synched to the preview video).
This combined with stylish and flawless performance by a popular Spanish trio Trigo Limpio made this song wonderful example of the early 1980's Eurosong at its best. The 13th position in the final results (among 19 songs) feels a bit too low, but as I said, the competition in 1980 was tough.
Yugoslavia provided soothing series of balkan ballads during the 1960's without notable success. The quality of these songs ranged from moving to pleasing but rather forgettable. The Eurosong number 119 falls in the latter category.
I cannot help but to feel warm when I hear this song chosen by the Bosnian branch of the Yugoslav television to represent the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in the 1964 Eurovision Song Contest. The singer Sabahudin Kurt is on the top of his game, singing the entry with tender yet strong voice, and the arrangement makes the good use of the orchestra (the live version of the song is almost complete replica of the studio version).
The song falls down because of its melody and the lack of any real substance in it. For this blog entry I've listened to the song several times trying to get a hold of it, but without success. Very soon after listening to the song, it slipped from my memory.
The juries didn't catch the song either, it received the dreaded null points in the contest and shared the last place with three other countries.
In 1985 Israel used a seemingly perfect recipe to create a perfect eurosong. Put together the singer who won the contest in 1978 with the composer who made the winning song of the 1979, add some singing dancers and make the song and the choreography emulate the two preceeding and higly succesful Israeli entries. In the preview video the song looked and sounded like a given winner. What could go wrong?
Quite a few things actually. Olé olé (written by Kobi Oshrat, who had composed Hallelujah six years previously) surely was a irresistibly catchy song and Izhar Cohen was still, seven years after his Eurovision victory, charismatic performer. Although the singing and dancing worked well together for Israel in 1982 and 1983 (Israel did not take part in 1984), this time the elements fitted together with unease. With a breath taking dance steps the backing group had hardly time to sing their few lines in tune, and the result sound more like shouting than singing. The wide white smiles that the group was able to present during their other activities did not look genuine anymore and the feeling "do we have to this again" could be read on their lips.
Watching the Gotheburg contest today the overall performance by the Israeli enseble seems ok, but I remember that in 1985 my reaction was quite similar, "the same thing again?". I may not have been the only one who thought that too much is too much, and that the entry was far from the perfection I was expecting after seeing the preview video. The song finally settled at 5th position, which must have been some kind of disappointment to the Israeli delegation, which was looking for the victory by the team that had secured the two previous victories.
I find the song a bit dated but still an enjoyable track, of which I prefer the studio version.
Often a most nondescript song turns into a masterpiece on a Eurovision stage with a tasteful arrangement, possibly a good stage setting and most importantly with a passionate delivery from the artist. Sometimes a complete opposite happens, a song with a great recording loses all its appeal when seen in the actual Eurovision song contest. This happened, in my opinion, to the Spanish entry from 1972.
The recorded version of Amanece (here linked to the original preview video clip) sung by Jaime Morey is not that special either, but I cannot say no to a good quality stereo recording of a song with powerful orchestral arrangement and the adequate performance of Jaime Morey with just enough pomp and circumstance. An ok song and an ok recording among many great entries by Spain.
I of course didn't have the opportunity to see and hear the song in person in Edinburgh 1972, so I cannot say what the song really looked and sounded like, but the video recording of the song is a real let down. Jaime Morey is slightly too earnest and tries too much to impress the audience, but the song is not enough for the audience to be impressed about.
Decades before the HD, digital surround sound and home theaters the average sound quality of a television broadcast was not suitable for big musical experiences and the elaborate arrangement by the composer Augusto Algueró is lost on its way from the Usher hall stage to the home of a television viewer.
The result is rather forgettable and bland Eurovision entry and not one of the better Spanish entries of the 1970's. Between the two runner-ups (En un mundo nuevo from 1971 and Eres tú from 1973) this song is mostly forgotten.
