Wednesday, February 17, 2010

1983

At first I thought this was going to be a fairly average year, but I found myself trying to stuff a baker’s dozen into my top 10 and struggling on the rankings once I’d finally decided which songs to include. In the end, the winner picked itself. Surprising amount of quality all told, and nothing without a redeeming feature of some sort. The three languages and pregnant pauses are a bit much though.

01 France
B: The more I look at these lyrics, the more I’m sensing all sorts of metaphors.
A: I like the way this develops from straight ballad to soundtrack music. The structure is a bit off-putting at times though, and there’s a sense that it’s taking itself altogether too seriously. Fits together neatly enough, having said that.
V: Guy Bonnet looks like he’s just had something unexpected inserted in his person at times. Perhaps that’s where the lines “...aime à genoux / ...même si tu dois souffrir” come from. Nice vision mixing from the team at ARD. The big ending sounds a bit out of place.

02 Norway
B: “Så enkel og så fin.” I’ll be the judge of that.
A: The introduction does nothing to endear this song to me. In fact it irritates the crap out of me. But more than that: it almost seems out of place, despite the point of the whole song, because what follows is musically otherwise quite decent for Eurovision. And yet it’s so tired 
 it’s Jahn Teigen again, with a song written by him and Anita Skorgan again, from the same lyricist as their 1982 entry, and it really has no ambition whatsoever. Still, it’s nice to see that the ending is as bad as the start. At least they were consistent.
V: I remember my mum wearing outfits scarily similar to those sported by the backing vocalists, whose contribution here is more welcome than Mr Teigen’s. The orchestra does a good job of the music.

03 United Kingdom
B: These lyrics read like they were penned by a non-native speaker, which makes me wonder whether any of the fabulously named writing team of Roker, Pulsford and Wigger were foreigners. 
Is the title a threat or a promise?
A: As usual for the UK, this is very much a product of its time. You can see why it didn’t do that well, but it’s not bad. In fact the chorus is rather good:
 textbook stuff in more ways than one. There’s no need for a key change though.
V: And I thought the Norwegian outfits were bad! I’m gobsmacked at how good this sounds, which I suspect has something to do with the invisible backing singers.

04 Sweden
B: As clichés go, “Stjärnor jag ser dom, vill gärna ta ner nån till dig” is rather pretty.
A: At last I can refer to ABBA for good reason. The chorus is surprisingly underwhelming until it all gets turned up a notch at two minutes, but the production is very solid (as it should be coming from the prolific Lasse Holm). Is it an indictment against Sweden that this song could have come from Melodifestivalen 25 years later, only programmed?
V: 
Carola sounds her age, in a good way. If only there was as much power in her three-quarter pants and tank top as there is in her voice! I suppose I have to resign myself to the fashions. Another stellar turn from the backing vocals and orchestra here – you’d think you were listening to the studio version at times.

05 Italy
B: Now this is a set of lyrics. (Can you imagine anyone in the Balkans ever contemplating wasting this many words on one song? Of course in not doing so they’re denying themselves, and us, the poetry that so many Italian entries represent.) I love the lines “...quando spegnerai / Indosserai le stelle e... / Avrai ... / un silenzio quando vuoi parlare”.
A: The song’s secondary to the story it’s telling and simply carries it along rather than flowing in its own right. Which is not to say that it’s not good – it just doesn’t grab me, feven with those lyrics. More guns here, too, after France; was there some war going on around Christmas/New Year 1982-83? The Falklands was earlier than that, no?
V: If I was the drummer having to follow that plodding timing I’d be covering my ears with those giant headphones, too. Lovely performance by one and all, yet again, but there’s just not enough to the music to hold your interest. Riccardo’s little “I did it!” bit at the end is endearing, if somewhat self-deceptive.

06 Turkey
B: What a mystifying choice of ode for the Eurovision stage. And it’s a list song to boot.
A: Just doesn’t work.
V: Çetin Alp has a good voice, but he looks like he’s stepped out of a[n admittedly dapper] production of Dracula. The schadenfreude when novelty entries fall flat on their arse is *chef's kiss*.

07 Spain
B: Bonkers. “Las trenzas de tu madre… / Que dime quién se las peina… / Voy a pedirle que me trence, anda y sí” shows that the best hairdressers have always been gay.
A: I can understand why the juries were a bit reluctant to throw points Spain’s way. What I prefer to call Who Floats My Boat? probably has great artistic and musical value, but it isn’t ideally suited to 
a contest like Eurovision.
V: This is hard to take your eyes off, for many, many reasons. Ironically, or perhaps understandably, 
Ms Amaya looks pained. It’s odd how enthusiastic the audience is for it when the people giving out the points weren’t: you have to wonder how it would have fared if there’d been anything resembling a televote at the time.

08 Switzerland
B: “Così non mi va... / Si fa per amore oppure no” – give it a chance, love, or your husband will be out in search of a rent boy! For some reason Swiss Italian never comes across as entirely authentic to me; maybe the Swiss operating in about five languages simultaneously explains it. The lyricist of this is the same one behind Switzerland ’81, ’86 and ’88, and it shows, whatever the language.
A: Back to more traditional Eurovision territory then with the Swiss entry – surprise! – but I actually quite like it. The chorus is nothing like what I expected it to be, which is nice.
V: There
’s a real hair war going on here between Mariella and her band. She looks and sounds like she’s singing her own song at the beginning, completely ignorant of what’s going on around her. The performance, like the song, is competent but wholly unexciting.

09 Finland
B: I like the line “Huominen on kaiku eilisen”, but I have no idea what it’s supposed to mean.
A: So easy to pinpoint as Nordic. It
’s amazingly melodramatic, considering how accurate and ordinary a picture the lyrics paint. It has to be one of the least Finnish-sounding Finnish entries from back in the day. Good it is, too. (Coincidence?!)
V: Great direction again, and the sound certainly matches the visuals in quality. I assume it was always the Finnish itself that turned the juries off the country’s entries, since here, as so often, it sounds awful. But top marks for the performance.

10 Greece
B: The romance in these six lines of lyrics is rather sinister in a Fatal Attraction kind of way.
A: The contrast between Finland and this works in both their favour. The music is just lovely, and the arrangement is grea– oh. It turns into a show number two-thirds of the way through. Why couldn’t it content itself with being a gentle ballad?
V: They thought it was worth having a guy on stage just to play the triangle? I love this up to the two-minute mark, but can’t abide it after that. The nasty saxophone sums it up.

11 The Netherlands
B: Flash forward 20 years and “Hoe het daar is en wat doe je dan zo aldaar” could be a line out of Wadde hadde dudde da.
A: I was prepared to hate this, but it’s too well-produced. Yes, it’s twee and annoying, but unlike much that is twee and annoying, it still works. I’d rather it not have been done by the Dutch, but what can you do. At least the production is pretty much guaranteed to be good that way (and the arrangement here is terrific, with touches of Xanadu). But would you ever guess that it was composed by the same person as De troubadour and De eerste keer?
V: What on earth is Bernadette wearing, a garland of daffodils? She might have the range, but she hasn’t got the depth to her vocals to outshine the orchestra, let alone the backing vocalists, so she gets a bit lost in this.

12 Yugoslavia
B: Neat play on words in “I nju mi je odnio dan / Ostalo samo je sjećanje na jedan juli”.
A: For a long time, Bosnia was just as bad as Sweden for still producing the same music they’d been making for the previous 30 years. Is this Bosnian? [Checks.] Oh. Oh well, you get the idea. I don’t like it much at all, but I won’t necessarily mark it down because of it. Funny how this and Rock Me were their big success stories.
V: The slight injection of tempo here makes this come across a bit odd to my ears, and it’s the first time tonight that the music has sounded empty and far away. Danijel’s vocals are spot on.

13 Cyprus
B: Last year’s winner repackaged.
A: Pretty obvious attempt at Ein bißchen frieden in terms of composition, too (in the bits between verses and choruses). Still, it’s very solid, and the arrangement is both rich and imaginative in parts. Singer Dina went on to compose Mana mou, so of course I love her.
V: You could strip this of the language, the look, just about everything basically and the vocal technique alone would be enough to pinpoint it geographically. I wonder whether the beefed-up arrangement was a reaction to it all sounding a bit too much like E.B.F
Inot sure I like it as much, but it’s still well done. Elena Patroklou resembles a brunette Bette Midler.

14 Germany
B: Good lyrics, with none of the superficiality that many German entries are tarnished by. I love the lines “Fehlte uns die Kraft, uns zu vertrauen? / War es Angst vor ehrlichem Gefühl?”
A: Great chorus. Very solid overall, and a great entry on home soil.
V: Were they the Hoffmanns’ best matching blue and pea-green outfits, do you think? I love the fact that they just stand there and deliver this. I would have been as chuffed as this audience clearly are to have something of this quality representing me at home.

15 Denmark
B: Kloden drejer looks so un-Danish to me for some reason.
A: Nothing much to the music or lyrics here, but Denmark did this kind of thing very well back in the day. Strange how it morphed into guitars and mid-tempo.
V: Love the minimalist, bassy feel to the chorus, but Gry’s vocals are very exposed. Yes, let’s leave it at that.

16 Israel
B: Given that these lyrics combine the themes of songs, praying, the nation of Israel and friends from across the seas, they’re more quattro formaggi than anything you’d find on an Italian restaurant menu.
A: Completely Israeli, as you might expect it to be when composed by Avi Toledano and written by Ehud Manor, but good enough to overcome it, too. The arrangement is impressive, if a little busy at times, which nevertheless fits in with the lyrics. Ofra Haza has a lovely voice. Perfect stuff for Eurovision really. Takes ages to get to the first chorus, but soon makes up for it.
V: The political significance of this song being performed by Jews in Germany is as impossible to ignore as 
the audience’s enthusiasm for it. But then, on a purely Eurovision level it works a treat: its allure is undeniable.

17 Portugal
B: I wonder, with lines like “Mas não há nenhum mal em ser assim”, whether the ‘she’ of the opening line is his psychiatrist?
A: Everything about this is romantic, from the flow of the words and the way Armando delivers them to his oh-so-right voice and the orchestration of it all... bar the electric guitar, for which it automatically loses points. Otherwise lovely.
V: Mr Gama looks like the love child of Yoko Ono and Professor Snape. He sings beautifully, and there’s nothing wrong with any of it. But in the context of some of the other songs and performances, it’s just a bit too unremarkable for its own good.

18 Austria
B: Lyrics like “Ich leb’ in meinen Phantasien” and “Ganz allein mit meinem Kummer” would set off all sorts of alarms if this were the German entry, but you know Austria’s never going to be quite that interesting.
A: What a triumph for synthesisers everywhere this is, especially when paired with those strings. I bet it sounded nothing like this live.* It would be easy to dismiss it as yet another lame Austrian entry, but it’s not bad really.
V: Oh my god – those outfits! Gary Lux looks like Kenny Everett. *Actually it sounds exactly the same. I’m impressed. The routine makes perfect sense, and the vocals only get better as they go along.

19 Belgium
B: It took two people to write those lyrics?
A: Sounds like Bananarama. Never a hope in hell of impressing the juries, but it’s a little masterpiece. It’s like modern art, only you get it. I think.
V: Utterly, fabulously amazing. Pretty much everything has sounded good tonight, but nothing has sounded this good.

20 Luxembourg
B: Wonderful, terribly sad lyrics: “Mais le temps a tous les droits / Et l’enfant qui n’est pas là / C’est aujourd’hui mon seul bonheur imaginaire”.
A: The big French number none of the other French-speaking countries could manage in 1983. Is that (and the fact that it comes straight after the rather more off-beat Belgium) the reason the juries voted for it? It’s competent, certainly, but doesn’t strike me as being overwhelmingly good. Just good. The ending’s rubbish, after all.
V: Every time I see Corinne Hermes she looks like she’s just had a fan-forced convection oven opened in her face while baking in her dressing gown. She certainly overeggs the pudding here. I both can and can’t understand why this won, which is a bit of a shame really.


And so to the points…

1 point goes to Cyprus

2 points go to the Netherlands

3 points go to Denmark

4 points go to the United Kingdom

5 points go to Portugal

6 points go to Israel

7 points go to Finland

8 points go to Sweden

10 points go to Germany

and finally…

12 points go to...


Belgium!


The wooden spoon goes to Switzerland.

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