Why is Our Eurovision Love So Bittersweet
Tie Yourself to A Drink or Jam Yourself in a Grill - Eurovision Never Fails to surprise, delight and frustrate!
The annual Eurovision Song Contest has one job: find the best song of the 36 presented from across Europe, Australia and Israel. But something got lost along the way. In between the high tech, high wattage and high camp show and the trawl through Europe’s supposed ‘music experts’ we lost sight of what we thought the Eurovision Song Contest was about.
The eventual winner, Loreen from Sweden, emerged from between a giant panini toaster to scream a song that had lifted its verse directly from Abba’s The Winner Takes It All. The song, Tattoo, was a fairly standard dance belter from the point of view of someone who has lost a lot of self respect:
You're stuck on me like a tattoo
I don't care about the pain
I'll walk through fire and through rain
Just to get closer to you
In second place Finland’s Kaarija bust out of a packing crate with four electric pink clad dancers from Strictly for a totally bonkers piece of speedball driven electro headfuckery called Cha Cha Cha. I honestly thought that it was a piss take of ballroom dancing but it turns out that it is about drinking, drinking a lot, drinking a lot of different drinks and having your hands tied to the drinks your drinking. And having champagne poured all over yourself.
In the Euro bizarre stakes it was up with Croatia who finished with a Pagan High Priest holding on to two flaming cruise missiles (naturally) and Germany’s death metal anthem ‘Blood and Glitter’ performed by red rubber clad Lords of the Lost. The Lords’ lead singer was apparently ‘so happy I could die’. Germany placed last.
In third place was Israeli pop princess Noa Kirel who brought heat. Her song ‘Unicorn’ invoked the ‘power of the unicorn’ which I had not been aware until this point was actually a thing. What made Noa’s performance unbelievably stand out was when she stopped singing and screamed “Europe -Do you wanna see me dance?!” The 6,000 people in Liverpool’s M&S Arena were too scared to say no, so Noa stopped singing, danced her ass off for 30 seconds until the music stopped. Unfortunately, her song was also heavily inspired - this time it seems that the verse of Bowie’s Life on Mars had appeared to Unicorn’s songwriters in a dream.
But aside from the silliness and camp Eurovision also features some of the best songwriting from around Europe. Italy’s Marco Mengoni presented an outstanding example of la canzone Italiana with Due Vite which had already won at San Remo and channels the romance and melody of De Gregori and the energy of Eros Ramazzotti. In my opinion this song deserved much better than 4th place. While France’s La Barra with Evedimment deserved so much more.
Here in the UK we had high hopes for our own Mae Muller. Her number ‘I Wrote A Song’ is a pure pop banger in the mould of Dua Lipa and Mabel and is already a hit. Unfortunately, the music experts of Europe did not appreciate it as much as the UK public and the song finished second last which is kind of embarrassing on one level. But when you look at what songs were judged to be better you start to realise the Eurovision Song Contest is not really about clever song writing for a general pop audience but more about using your three minutes to make an impression on a very niche group of people with bizarre ideas about musical taste.
Forget the quality - Love the Show! And I’ll be back next year to enjoy Sweden hosting on the 50th anniversary of Abba’s victory in Brighton with Waterloo - funny how that worked out….