01 Italy
B: Great lyrics – “Ma l’orgoglio non è mai veloce / È soltanto un pretesto per coprire un errore”; “Quella ruga sul viso che chiamavi ‘espressione’ / Ora è il letto di un fiume” – as per the majority of Italian entries.
A: God, I’d forgotten we were still in the Electric Eighties. Sounds like a Meatloaf song. Anna has a lovely voice but Fausto has the kind I’ve never been a fan of.
V: Can’t argue with their professionalism, but the performance itself (and for that matter the song) just makes me shrug.
02 Israel
B: These lyrics start out interestingly enough, but you soon realise what they’re a front for (“El hayekum esa az tfila”!!).
A: Composition-wise, this is scraping the bottom of a very nearly empty barrel.
V: Where were the child labour inspectors, part 1. It’s like the babysitter and the kid she’s picked up (after his class at the expensive stage school with the embittered, dried up, cruel-for-their-own-good tutor) who she’s being forced to look after and pander to until both of his parents get home from their demanding high-powered 1980s jobs. Which is to say: appalling. Decent enough vocals, but: appalling.
03 Ireland
B: “If there’s a reason or meaning / Then I ain’t been told” indeed.
A: I know it’s only 1989, but this sounds very 1987. It could be something SAW did as a demo for some talentless TV star that/who never came to anything. I hope it did sufficiently badly, as above all else it’s as boring as fuck. Finding enough songs for a top 10 (and only one candidate for the wooden spoon) is clearly going to be a tough task this year.
V: The synthesisers lend this an unflattering contemporary significance. Kiev and his passengers are wholly unconvincing, not least because the song seems to be sung within a range of about four notes.
04 The Netherlands
B: The sentiment is nice enough, I suppose, if a bit monotone. “Blijf jezelf, verander niet” only underscores the point.
A: Normally, as a focal point of energy and emotion and whatever, a chorus is designed to bring the other parts of a song together into a seamless whole. This one just plods along, which is perhaps in keeping with what the lyrics are saying, but still. Justine tries to lift it a bit towards the end, to little avail.
V: It’s nice to see they’ve actually rearranged this for the orchestra: coming straight after the Irish entry it could have been another example of how not to sound. It’s more understated, but that works in its favour, and makes the fact that she cracks at the end endearing rather than potentially embarrassing.
05 Turkey
B: “Bir ömür böyle geçmez.” Tell me about it.
A: Turkey goes off the deep end. It’s 10 years or more too late, if there was ever a time for it, but at least it’s different to everything else so far.
V: Melodrama! The audience is clearly up for some, and you’ve got to hand it to Pan: it’s not an easy song to sing.
06 Belgium
B: I like some of what this is saying. “En ik zou willen schreeuwen / Maar ik kan alleen zingen” is inviting ridicule if the exact opposite turns out to be true.
A: Bland music.
V: Ingeborg has such an annoying voice. Nothing to do with this song or performance reflects the months of preparation that presumably went into both: it’s like they’ve randomly picked some dowdy housewife and told her to get up on stage and sing whatever song they could be arsed chucking her way.
07 United Kingdom
B: I’m sure the idea of someone being both your one and only weakness and your one and only regret would ring true for a lot of people.
A: Chris de Burgh sings for the United Kingdom! Only without the Belinda Carlisle vocal effects. At the start, anyway. If Ireland was ’87, this is definitely ’86. There’s a distinct sense that the words to the chorus were in place well before the music. Even if the studio version I have wasn’t from crackly 7” vinyl, it has that feel about it anyway. Stands out to this point, but that’s not saying much.
V: How I wish this would crank up a notch or 10. Since it’s not going to, however, I’ll have to make do. Thankfully, it’s the strongest song and performance yet, although the backing vocals are a bit half-hearted. And I’m not sure I’d try to compensate for male pattern baldness by growing a ponytail.
08 Norway
B: I’ll be buggered if I know what she’s on about through most of this.
A: Almost everything seems to be striving to sound exactly the same so far. This comes together OK by the time it changes key, but musically it remains very dull.
V: God, everything’s so unpityingly slow. At least Britt overcomes her hideous outfit and gives a decent rendition of her less than thrilling song.
09 Portugal
B: I love the idea of “todo um povo / Guiado pelos ceus”. Portugal has one of the richest histories in Europe to pick from, and here it works quite well as a metaphor.
A: Still not much to write home about musically, but it’s more immediate than almost anything else to this point, so thumbs up for that. You can hear every note in the chorus coming a mile off, but it works.
V: The mysteriously monickered Iei Or is eclipsed by her female backing vocalists here, but the arrangement outshines everything and sounds fantastic.
10 Sweden
B: “Allt det vi söker, det finns här intill” – no arguments from me.
A: This manages to sound like everything else and completely Swedish at the same time, so it gets an extra gold star for that alone. (It rather strikes me as being the point.) Much more accessible than most so far. Actually, it sounds like a winner.
V: What an about-face after Conquistador: the orchestra sucks every last breath out of this like it’s on the verge of oxygen starvation. Whoever’s on drums sounds like he only has one good arm. It’s such a shame, since it’s a strong song and an even stronger vocal performance. In better news, backing vocalist Jean-Paul Well is probably the best-looking man in the contest.
11 Luxembourg
B: I like the way the central character is so scornful and yet shows herself to be just as deluded.
A: I want to say, about five seconds in: I know I’m going to hate this. But I should give it a chance. [Gives it a chance] Well, it sure is irritating, but it’s not as bad as Ireland.
V: Decent enough performance, but I’m trying to figure out when exactly it was that Luxembourg lost the plot. Yet again the brass is too low in the mix.
12 Denmark
B: “Sidder du stadig derinde?” That whole bridge reads like a serial masturbator being simultaneously chastised and condoned.
A: Love it! Funny how it only really sounds like Danish in said bridge.
V: Sounds amazing. Camp as a row of tents, of course, so the gimmick with the conductor works a treat. They must have had high hopes for this, and you can understand why.
13 Austria
B: “Und die Waffen werden Blumen irgendwann” is surely one of the most awful lyrics ever written.
A: Ditto initial Luxembourgish misgivings. Makes me think of Ich Troje, right down to the delivery. Why do all these would-be anthems employ so much echo?
V: A triumph of mascara, mauve lapels and cans and cans of hairspray. As late ’80s anthems go, this doesn’t sound too bad. Thomas makes a decent fist of it.
14 Finland
B: Some lovely stuff here, including “Sateenkaari kun taivalla taipuu / ...(on) Rauha sielussa rikkomaton”.
A: Something different at last! The guitars are fabulous. I’d like there to be a little more emotion to it, but you can’t have everything. I imagine it all coming across 100 times more powerful live.
V: [Does it?] More or less. It has the sound of a song you’d have thought the juries would go for. Anneli is wonderfully statuesque, but/and therefore far too static. Great vocals though.
15 France
B: Oh dear. “J’ai grandi ortie sauvage / Sure des ecorces de goudron” is all well and good, but poodlesque Nathalie is way too young to be peddling something like this.
A: Musically it’s rather good, with some nice touches to it, but I’m still struggling to get past the underagedness of it all. Lovely ending.
V: How wrong this is, on any number of levels! Ms Pâque will clearly be graduating from the same school of cheesy children forced to smile all the time as the Israeli kid. To her credit (as it was to his) she has very good vocal control.
16 Spain
B: So pathetic; so painful and delusional: the kind of lyrics I fall for, for some reason. I love the couplet “Llevo en mi piel la primavera / ...Y mucho mas amor del que quisera”.
A: Strings – at last! I’d like it to be a bit more hopeless and less lovely, but still.
V: I’d forgotten it takes us until song #16 to get to the first big ballad of the night. Under the circumstances, the Spaniards must have thought they were a shoe-in. Nina certainly does them proud, managing to keep it just the right side of completely OTT. The warm reception it receives is entirely deserved.
17 Cyprus
B: Is it just me or there only about five different lines in this song?
A: Hopeless keyboards. The bridge gives this the lift it so desperately needs, but it’s way too little, way too late. I just want to throttle them for their fakeness and failure to seem at all convincing.
V: And for their awful dress sense: Fanny, in a perfect example of nominative determinism, looks like a twat. By rights, she and Yiannis should be stood on top of a wedding cake because, let’s face it, singing at weddings is pretty much all they’re good for.
18 Switzerland
B: Who needs Andorra when you’ve got Switzerland singing in Romansch? “Cartessel strusch da vegnir veglia sut da quellas cundiziuns” – me neither: I’d be constantly scratching my head trying to figure out whether it was German, French, Italian, Spanish, Romanian or Latin. In fact the only language in the group it doesn’t resemble to some extent is Portuguese.
A: As usual though, they seem to be aiming at a Eurovision sound rather than an inspired piece of music.
V: Princess Diana’s stunt double singt für Switzerland. This is workmanlike, but not bad. The three guys on backing vocals are a bit harsh in a how-low-can-you-go kind of way.
19 Greece
B: Positively Turkish in its (lack of) lyrics that repeat over and over. With a touch of Enya to them.
A: Not very exciting, but pleasant enough.
V: Nice flute.
20 Iceland
B: “Og þú færð að sjá það sem enginn sér” is a bit of a mouthful.
A: I wouldn’t have said this was worth zero, but boy is it boring. There are some early ’80s, late ABBA touches, particularly in the chorus.
V: I fail to see what distinguishes this as being worse than many of the other entries this year. (Perhaps that’s the problem.) Daníel seems to think that in the absence of a cummerbund he might as well just pull his pants up a bit further.
21 Germany
B: I sympathise with what Nino’s saying, but it’s the hours of refuelling I’m nostalgic for rather than the flight itself. Wink wink.
A: Doesn’t he know he’s on a hiding to nothing? At least there’s some passion to the melody and his delivery.
V: Not surprisingly, this and Austria are two peas in a pod – the only difference being that this has a beat. Very dependable turn from the squintastic Mr de Angelo.
22 Yugoslavia
B: “Nije važno sta je” – Yugoslavia must win!
A: Given there were much better stick-out numbers in 1989, I can’t see why this uninspired offering took the trophy. It’s not the most diabolical of winners, but it comes close.
V: I hadn’t realised those lights in the back did anything other than be on. I suppose this has a kind of poor man’s Cyndi Lauper appeal, but there were much stronger performances, so I still fail to see why it won.
And so to the points...
1 point goes to Italy
2 points go to Austria
3 points go to France
4 points go to Portugal
5 points go to Germany
6 points go to Spain
7 points go to Finland
8 points go to the United Kingdom
10 points go to Sweden
and finally...
12 points go to...
Denmark!
The wooden spoon is awarded to Cyprus.
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