01 Yugoslavia
B: I love the fact this contains the lines ‘Take it all off / Take your pants off’! (And that ‘take it all off’ in Serbian is ‘skini sve’!)
A: Now I know why so many songs like this have cropped up in Serbian semi-finals ever since. What can I say about it? Upbeat and oh so Yugoslav. There’s something about the arrangement that makes me think it’s going to do a Finland ’94 and sound terrible live, stripped of its programming.
V: Well, it certainly got the performance it deserved. Ms Dol looks like it’s all she can do not to collapse in a heap.
02 Iceland
B: Why are they both singing about Nina? Are they a throuple?
A: Iceland gave us a string of mid-tempo piano-led pop ballads around this time, none of them to much effect, however together they were. I’m not surprised they’ve never returned to them. There are some nice touches to this one, particularly the harmonies, but the tune itself doesn’t go anywhere that hooks you.
V: Good lord, those outfits! Did he really think the purple headband would offset his turquoise jacket? Nice vocals, but it’s all so Icelandic.
03 Malta
B: “Our lines of love ain’t rhyming and the rhythm is all gone” – but surprisingly for Malta these lyrics aren’t at all garbled. Still bog-standard though, and a precursor for the saccharine onslaught to follow.
A: The lyrics might be decent, but Paul Giordimaina’s accent is awful, so this might as well be in Maltese. As their first entry since the abortive attempts of the early ’70s it’s pretty shrewd, and I can see why it did well. Not that I like it much.
V: They look like two characters out of a soap opera. Works pretty well live.
04 Greece
B: Poetic lyrics with a pleasing fnaar-fnaar twist here and there.
A: Bit of a fanboy favourite, this, unless I’m mistaken. I know it’s only 1991, but not surprisingly for Greece this still sounds very ’80s with those synths, that saxophone solo and the slightly overwrought vocals. Comes together quite well as a whole, probably because it’s accessible.
V: The cast of Dynasty continues, this time with the rich bitch stepmother.* Fantastic vocals. Did the old boy on the sax have a collapsed lung?
05 Switzerland
B: How many entries in Italian does that make which feature the words ‘stringimi forte’? I see that songs in the language came 1st and 2nd in the Swiss national final that year. It’s like they knew which country was hosting...
A: Bless the composer for signposting just about everything in the song. Not exactly challenging, is it? Except that Sandra sounds like she’s entered a karaoke competition during social night at the residential school for students of Italian as a second language.
V: *Followed by the glamorous daughter of the rich mogul, who is beautiful but fragile and has ridiculous dream sequences. This sounds a lot better than it perhaps ought to, so I get its appeal.
06 Austria
B: “Stilles Begreifen und Sehnsucht nach mehr” could well have been used to describe their numb scrutiny of the scoreboard during the voting.
A: However mediocre a song might be, nothing ever truly deserves to end up at the bottom of the scoreboard with no points at all. It’s understandable why they do, when they’re as pedestrian as this, but still. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with it that should set it apart from at least two or three songs so far; I’m assuming the performance must have sealed its ignominious fate.
V: It’s outrageous that he’s wearing mauve eye shadow. I mean, come on, it’s a good decade at least since it was last fashionable.
07 Luxembourg
B: The English translation of the lyrics paints them in a very unflattering light that sees me yawning and rolling my eyes from about the second line. I wonder if they’ll sound any more palatable in French.
A: Nope. I still feel like I’m being preached at, so there’s no saving it. You can give me Austria over this dated tripe any day. The arrangement in the middle eight is a lifeline too late, especially with that electric guitar in the final chorus.
V: Was purple really that big in 1991? Giant silver earrings obviously were. This comes across about as convincingly as I expected it to. The vocals are almost entirely drowned out after the bridge, which is possibly a good thing. The orchestra make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear throughout.
08 Sweden
B: Love the shaggy dog look Carola’s got going. “Det är dags att ge sig av / För stunder som har flytt kommer aldrig mer” might have come back to haunt her after failing to conquer all in Athens.
A: What a breath of fresh air this is! No pun intended. You can see why juries would have sat up and taken notice. It’s no more early ’90s than Greece is, and certainly no more inspired or complex, but it has an energy about it you can’t deny.
V: Wind machine! Huge vocals from the start. The choreography is hilariously bad. During the verses it sounds like there’s a drum and not much else happening in the music. Vocally this is a winner, but overall it doesn’t stand out the way I thought it might.
09 France
B: These lyrics are rather deep, but a bit clunky in their everything-must-rhymeness. Perhaps they’ll come across better when I hear them sung.
A: Of course they do. Love it! Not as much as some of France’s similarly interesting and more left-field entries, but it stands out a mile from everything else we’ve had so far (and are likely to get after it). It coming 2nd is a bit Lane moje having to bow to Wild Dances.
V: Now that’s choreography. Très classy.
10 Turkey
B: Under the circumstances, wouldn’t it have made more sense to call it Üc dakika?
A: It’s dumbfounding how much this sounds like a UK entry from the early ’80s, right down to the vocals, and it says a lot about the juries that this was one of the country’s more successful entries (as relative a term as that was) pre-1997. It leaves me completely cold.
V: Apart from the language, this is about as non-Turkish as Turkey ever got in their pre-victory era. They really should leave this stuff to Israel.
11 Ireland
B: Lyrics so middle of the road you don’t need lane markings.
A: The opening bars are enough to tell you this comes from the fingers of Liam Somewhere in Europe Reilly. How sad for Ireland that it sounds like a Maltese entry. (Even this year’s Maltese entry!) At least it shows that the rot set in well before the end of the decade.
V: Initially, I had this down as being better than Luxembourg.
12 Portugal
B: Another wonderful set of lyrics here from the Portuguese, especially in lines like “Eu não... pedirei perdão / Quando gozar o pecado / E voltar a dar de mim”. I love how they can put fado on such a pedestal most of the time and then come up with something like this! Makes me understand now why Sabrina was such a schlager princess.
A: Powerful vocals here which still have a lightness of touch. This is better than just about anything else and has the best chorus of the contest to this point, showing once again that Portugal was hard done by pretty much forever at Eurovision back in the day. (So saying, I’m not a big fan of the mouth organ.)
V: The big hair and dangly earrings are back! Fantastic arrangement for the orchestra.
13 Denmark
B: Another set of say-nothing lyrics. Was it the overarching theme for 1991 (along with all the backing singers standing in a line)?
A: If it wasn’t for its very easy-listening chorus – which sounds like endless others, admittedly – this would go precisely nowhere. But then it does sound like a lot of the pop that made the charts in the late ’80s, so maybe it’s doing something right. Perhaps surprisingly, the Danish sounds like the least foreign foreign language of the contest.
V: Is that the world’s tallest man on backing vocals?
14 Norway
B: I quite like what these lyrics are giving. And who’d have thought you’d get thematic resonance between this and Turkey, or anything and Turkey!
A: OK, it might be the ‘extended version’, but that intro at least shows that this is well-produced. I can only repeat what I said about Denmark: it certainly sounds like something you’d have seen on any chart show around at the time, and perhaps even a little more contemporary. The vocals work well together.
V: Bit of a fish out of water on stage, thrashing about with a very dead kind of energy. Good vocals though.
15 Israel
B: Confirmation that when they aren’t doing boring anthems, outdated love songs or brainless bops, they’re almost always defending their rights.
A: There’s an engaging arrangement here, inspired instrumentation and some fantastic harmonies, but they all still scream ISRAEL!!! from the rooftops. Could be a winning entry from the ’70s.
V: I quite like the motif running through their outfits, which for a change aren’t hideous to look at. The dance routine is as Israel-at-Eurovision as it could get. Everything comes together very nicely.
16 Finland
B: From a linguistic point of view, this is a great song to showcase the similarities between Finnish and Estonian: “Rauhaa sydän mulle anna ei” > “Rahu süda mulle ei anna” et al. But I can’t think of anything else to say about it.
A: From a linguistic point of view, this is also a great song to showcase how awful Finnish sounds, to my ears at least. (Did they seriously think the word yö or anything that rhymed with it deserved a prominent place in any chorus?) I can’t see any other reason the country’s entries were so completely overlooked for 40 years, and it doesn’t explain Portugal, but there you go. Here, a ponderous composition means the chorus tries to take off, but only manages it in the same way that a chicken is technically capable of flying.
V: A static performance that underscores the problems with the song.
17 Germany
B: Nice to see that Ralph & Berndt didn’t have a complete stranglehold on the cheesy anthem market in Deutschland.
A: Hate it from the first line. Woefully German in every way.
V: Ned Flanders sing-diddly-ings for Germany! What with the line-up and the knitwear (or is it appliqué?), Atlantis 2000 look like a Bible studies group. Their song sounds absolutely huge live, without having any right to, since the vocals are fake and lacklustre.
18 Belgium
B: What happened to the Netherlands in 1991? Nice of this lot to roll up with a bit of Flemish in their stead.
A: This vaguely resembles Sister in the chorus, and goes a long way to explaining the kinds of things that often turned up in Belgian pre-selections. It’s much more attractive as a piece of music than I would have expected it to be. The chorus sounds exactly like something else I can’t put my finger on.
V: Red skin-tight pants! There’s a sense of fun between these two a la Re-Union.
19 Spain
B: Romantic lyrics, even if I don’t understand whether Sergio is telling us he’s a pole dancer. The rhymes in the second to last verse are simple but effective.
A: Did this get lots of points chucked at it by Yugoslavia? He has the kind of voice which makes me think it should have. [It got 8.] Plenty of scope for this to go places live, but it’s a little flat in studio, and it just kind of stops.
V: Alas, it doesn’t make all that much of itself. What was it with Spanish male artists dressing for Eurovision in the early ’90s like they were expected at the altar?
20 United Kingdom
B: Samantha Janus was great in Pie in the Sky. “Every day is a compromise for a grain of corn” sounds like it’s alluding to the songwriters trying to make anything of this paper-thin anthem.
A: My god, those opening lines! Atrocious.
V: Borders on disastrous from the off, but somehow they keep it together. I’m fascinated by the way she blinks.
21 Cyprus
B: The Greek/Cypriot Eurovision bubble is a very small one, isn’t it. This is another trite anthem, although at least Elena admits she hasn’t got a clue what to do about the state of the world.
A: And here’s another very predictable arrangement to go with it. Irritating chorus. Irritating everything, frankly.
V: She looks like she’s airing her fingers for the nail polish to dry for most of the song. Until the beat comes in halfway through the chorus it all sounds way too slow, and even then. I hate the backing vocalists’ “I’m leaning forward while rooted to the spot, so I must have something important to say” stance.
22 Italy
B: It’s nice to see (and hear) an Italian dialect in Eurovision. There are so many double letters you’d almost think it was Finnish.
A: Lush arrangement from the opening bars, and it certainly makes a name for itself in the opening verse. Come the chorus though and it all gets a little bland. As much as I like it, there’s an underlying sense of it not being as good as it ought to be.
V: This sounds better live than it does in studio. It sounds wonderful live, in fact. Peppino is definitely in the music.
And so to the points...
1 point goes to Iceland
2 points go to Denmark
3 points go to Norway
4 points go to Israel
5 points go to Belgium
6 points go to Greece
7 points go to Italy
8 points go to Sweden
10 points go to France
and finally...
12 points go to...
Portugal!
The wooden spoon is awarded to Ireland, although there were plenty of contenders.
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