812/917 Charlotte Nilsson: Take me to your heaven (Sweden 1999)

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The song was, already in 1999, violently out of date.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 titled Tusen 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 millenium after all.

My points 2/5.

106/917 Nana Mouskouri: A force de prier (Luxembourg 1963)

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.

My points 5/5.

696/917 Petra Frey: Für den Frieden der Welt (Austria 1994)

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.

My points 1/5.

513/917 Ingrid Peters: Über die Brücke gehn (Germany 1986)

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.

My points 4/5.

402/917 Trigo Limpio: Quédate esta noche (Spain 1980)

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.

My points 5/5.

119/917 Sabahudin Kurt: Život je sklopio krug (Yugoslavia 1964)

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.

My points 2/5.

491/917 Izhar Cohen: Ole ole (Israel 1985)

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.

My points 3/5.