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?
Nowadays when even the simplest love song is cluttered with background dancers, trapeze artists or figure skaters it is nice to be reminded of a song, that didn't need anything else than a singer, piano player and a rose to make an impact. That song was performed as the 420th Eurovision entry ever.
The Eurovision Song Contest of 1981 could almost be called an Eurovision Disco Contest, because almost half of the songs used to some extent the fashionable disco rhythms in their songs with mostly questionable results. Therefore the songs like the Greek entry were refreshing and welcome.
Feggari kalokerino was a marvellous piano driven ballad sung by the composer Yiannis Dimitras in a very convincing yet relaxed way. Without any backing singers he carried the song brilliantly on his shoulders singing with tenderness and personality that really didn't need any superfluous extravaganza to back him. Young female pianist and a simple rose on top of the grand piano was the perfect finishing touch for this Eurovision pearl.
The song received deserved 8th place in the final results and it remained for a long time one of the best results of Greece in the contest. To me it is a warm memory of the 1981 contest.
Nowadays it some times refreshing to hear a Eurovision song composed to the rhythm of a classic dance f.eg. waltz or tango. In the early decades of Eurovision this was more commonplace. The 55th eurosong was based on the rhythms of a latin dance bolero.
Wyn Hoop was only 23 years of age when he took part in the Eurovision Song Contest, that took place in London. His entry Bonne nuit ma chérie was a tender lullaby where the singer puts his love to sleep promising he will never forget or leave her.
To me everything is in place in this entry. The song is easy going, yet gentle song where the latin rhythms is used tastefully without clashing with the idea of a lullaby. The arrangement is superb and the young singer gives a confident and at the same time very relaxed performance on a stage.
This song continued Germany's good streak in the early years of Eurovision with 4th position in the final results and Wyn Hoop would continue to have a good career in the German showbusiness until the end of the 1970's. After retiring, he has written articles and books about sailing and travelling.
Portugal has always been one of the most interesting countries and their entries are eagaerly awaited every year even though the points awarded to the Portuguese entries have seldom correlated with their quality. However, it is obvious that sometimes the bad placing in the score board is justified even for Portugal.
In my opinion, the 1990's was exceptionally strong for Portugal with interesting and appealing entries almost every year. The 1990's awarded Portugal also their so far best result when fresh and fun O meu coração não tem cor sung by Lúcia Moniz climbed to the 6th position in 1996. Two years later my personal favourite, group Alma Lusa got to the respectable (but in my opinion too low) 12th place.
But the song between these two is to me one of the most forgettable Portuguese entries ever. Unfortunately for Portugal the juries (and the televoters who took part in five of the 25 participating countries) were unanimous: No-one was interested and, accordingly, no points at all were given to poor Célia Lawson. It was no confort to her, that the Norwegian singer Tor Endresen suffered the same fate and the last place was shared between Portugal and Norway.
I cannot blame either Ms Lawson or the Juries. She sang well (and was supported by weird backing speaking choir hiding behind dark glasses) and tried to give her all to the song. Juries also did their job well: The song was utterly uninteresting and even though there were even worse songs taking part, I can imagine that at the time of voting not many members of the juries remembered what the song was like.
The blame goes, therefore, to the composer. German born Thilo Krassman was the conductor, who conducted with the smile the portuguese entries in seventies and then again in the nineties. 1997 was the last time that the amiable veteran conducter took part in the Eurovision Song Contest and Antes do adeus was his only composition that took part in the international final. It is sad that he could not end his Eurovision career with a better song and better result.
Sometimes even a die hard Eurovision fan starts getting doubts. Sometimes the overwhelming "public opinion" gets over you: Eurovision is rubbish, it is just bunch of commercial crap without any meaning, any artistic integrity, musical value and nothing to do with real life, passion or the country it is representing. Fortunately it does not take but to hear a perfect Eurovision song like Austria 1971 to snap out of it and continue to enjoy the contest as it was and is supposed to.
Musik sung by Marianne Mendt is a song that combines all the ingredients that some people claim are missing from the Eurovision Song Contest. The song is full of energy and the singer belts the song out with passion without shouting. The orchestral arrangement is sublime, unfortunately the strings are almost unheard due to bad sound mixing (to hear the song in its full glory listen to the studio version of the song synced to the preview video). To give the song local flavour, Mendt sings the song in the local dialect of her home town Vienna. After listening to the song one has to stop to catch one's breath. And then listen to the song again.
The 1971 Eurovision Song Contest was packed with perfect entries and the Austrian one was the most difficult to digest, at least to the juries. The 16th position among 18 entries is pure madness.
Marianne Mendt has continued her career as an actress and a jazz singer. Listen and watch her recent interpretation of Cole Porter's Love for sale here.
After its fourth victory in 1981 the United Kingdom seemed to lose (at least for a while) the ambition to present interesting and memorable Eurovision entries. Still, for some reason it had become a habit for the international juries to give the UK high votes no matter how dispensable their song was. While not their worst song of the 1980´s, the 1989 English entry is a good example of that.
Actually the melody of Why do I always get it wrong is quite good and the soloist of Live ReportRay Caruana was one of the better singers of the 1989 Eurovision Song Contest. The jury seemed to agree and awarded the UK their 12th silver medal in this contest.
Still something is wrong with this package. The artists lack completely any enthousiasm whatsoever and even the singer seems to want out of the stage as soon as possible. The arrangement of the song is another lost opportunity. With tasteful use of the orchestra the song could have risen over the mediocrity to something special. Now the well built melody is buried under the 1980's most unimaginative synthesizer pling plong sound. Really a lost opportunity here.
The UK audience lost interest in this song very quickly. In the UK's singles chart the song rose no higher than at #73. Not many people kept the song in their memory after that. My points 3/5.
As mentioned in my earlier article, during the last twenty years lots of new countries have introduced themselves in the Eurovision Song Contest presenting their first entry ever to the European ears. It is easy to forget that even the most established countries in this occasion also had their first song sung at some point in the mists of history. Even France.
France took part in the Eurovision Song Contest of course from the very beginning. The first French entry was the fifth song ever to be sung in this television series that next year celebrates its 60th episode. The honor was given to Mathé Altéry, a soprano that sung both chanson and classical music. Her entry leaned more to the classical side of her talent, a short ballad sung with the prominent accompaniment of piano, oboe and some nice strings.
The good arrangement of the song managed hardly to hide the fact that the composition had not much to talk about. It is not terrible but nothing really to remember it by. The operatic vocals by Altéry alienates the song further from its audience. Apparently no studio recording of this song was ever made and I can understand why.
But what did it matter, no final results (except for the winner) have ever been released from the 1956 contest, so both French entries (as all seven participating countries had two songs in the contest) shared the second place in the final results. I doubt that if the results had been revealed, this song would not have been in the upper half of the list.
During the last 20 years we've had new countries flooding to the Eurovision Song Contest, but in the 1980's it was a completely different story. During that decade only two new countries debuted in the Eurovision Song Contest, Cyprus and Iceland. It took a while for Iceland to establish themselves in the Eurovision family, but from the beginning they took part with ambition and, most importantly, with good artists and songs.
Iceland's second Eurovision entry ever was a tender ballad sung delicately by 23 years old Halla Margrét. I considered this song as a nice but forgettable piece of music, but since 1987 it has grown on me and I believe that the juries (or the televoting audience) would have treated the song better 10 or 20 years later.
In 1987, when the eurovision songs did not circulate in the Internet for months before the contest, the song was not given the chance to grow and it was awarded the 16th place in the final results (among the record busting total of 22 songs).
The song was more or less forgotten after the contest held in Brussels, but I remember having a surprising encounter with it 7 or 8 years later. While visiting London I heard the loudspeakers of a fast food restaurant blasting out the english version of this particular Eurovision entry. How a UK restaurant ended up playing an english version of an almost ten years old Icelandic eurovision entry remains a mystery to me. Maybe there was a eurovision geek working in the restaurant that day.
According to some information found in the Internet Halla Margrét moved from popular music to classical music and had an operatic career. Could someone confirm is the soprano in this video singing Puccini actually the same Halla Margrét that represented Iceland in the Eurovision Song Contest 22 years earlier? My points 3/5.
