0.19.2 - London calling, and we ain't got no swing
That kind of unnecessarily confrontational rant is hard to pull off. A few years ago, I heard the hosts of the podcast My Brother, My Brother and Me (yes, I am referencing them again) talk about Eurovision as people who were only just discovering it. In amongst some of that discussion of the spectacle of Eurovision from on outsider perspective came this description from Griffin McElroy, which I will transcribe here because I don't trust any of you to click the link to the episode and listen to the 150 seconds of audio I want to deputise into my argument.
" The boys would get up there and they would just do - they had a guitar, and once I saw a guitar I was like 'I'm not going to enjoy this' ; what I want is a woman in a dress made out of crystals and light, and then she does a Final Fantasy summon, those were the best ones...the Ukraine did one where she was dancing and light came out of her feet, and then she sucked up all the light in the entire stadium, like all the light flew into her body, and she was glowing, and then she scream-sang a sad dirge into the air and a tree made out of light, fuckin' Ygdrasil barfed out of her mouth and filled the place with life and beauty..."
If that doesn't sound like a good time to you, I don't know what to tell you.
Before we venture too much further, let's address the elephant in the room. Yes, there are people who very reasonably call for a boycott of Eurovision because of the ongoing inclusion of Israel as an aggressor and criminal regime involved in the active occupation of Gaza. I dearly wish the EBU would exclude Israel from the proceedings as they did with Russia in 2022, and reading the recent news it seems that things are trending in that direction following vocal protests from performers, former winners, and competing nations. If you are choosing to boycott Eurovision this year for those reasons I understand and support that decision. However, in the context of which this show means and what it has represented in terms of both national cultural exchange, and the huge significance it has in the LBTQIA+ community, should those people be forced to sacrifice one of the few universally appreciated moments of joy and togetherness just because the EBU are too cowardly to do the right thing?
So, I'm going to a Eurovision watch party tomorrow night with my friends and I'm very excited about it. To keep things square in my mind, I also did this:-
OK, let's talk Eurovision.
While my parents may be inconceivable forces for chaos and drama, they're also massive hippies at heart, so the fact that I grew up watching Eurovision should be pretty predictable. My early Eurovision memories are very much rooted in watching bits of the final then being sent to bed, then watching a repeat of the UK performance somewhere on TV in the days following, usually accompanied with news of how close to winning we had come. I grew up watching the era of Eurovision where we'd routinely place in the top 10, coming second multiple times, and the Eurovision entries would become big chart hits of their own accord. I remember Gina G's Oh-Ah, Just A Little Bit and Sonia's Better The Devil You Know far better than the songs which won Eurovision in their respective years (The Voice by Eimarr Quinn and In Your Eyes by Niamh Kavanagh if you care, back in the Era when Ireland just won constantly). When I moved into my own places over the years, Eurovision always provided a decent context for a night of gathering and drinking, even if minimal attention was paid to the actual music. The quiet year, post breakup, I stayed at home in my flat on my own but still lay on my very beat up couch with a bottle of wine and watched the show.
Now, though, I know real Eurovision fans, people for whom the show is a cultural touchstone, for whom Eurovision trivia can be instantly summoned from years of watching and digesting and enjoying the show not from a nationalistic, UK centric position, but from a place of multi-national and cultural interest which comes from speaking another language, immersing yourself in the zeitgeist of a nation other than your own. I've got huge respect for them, and always feel grateful when I'm allowed to share in their far deeper connection to the show as a 'casual' fan.
This year I had a unique opportunity, to combine my Eurovision viewing with this project, to go back and listen to the full studio albums of past Eurovision winners. Eurovision winners always feel like they're somewhat doomed to be one-hit wonders (past the era of the 1980s where acts like ABBA and Celine Dion were Eurovision winners); but surely each of those winning songs is out there, somewhere, holding pride of place on an album of other songs by the same artist. What if I stumbled back, blindly, into those albums and, free from the context of the show, just listened to them to see how they hold up? That seemed like a good way to get another nine albums under my belt, so that's what I did this week.
So here, on this Blog with 20 readers, the majority of whom could have this conversation in real life, I'm going to answer the question; Is Eurovision music good actually?
Winning Eurovision is hard. You have to get selected by your country from a bunch of of other performers and songs; you have to win through a semi-final performance (unless you happen to be representing one of the nations who foots a large part of the bill for the event, then you can skip that part), then you have to perform for the judges and score well, then perform live during the finals and also score well from a huge cast of nations with varying tastes. Loreen has done it twice; one of only two people to do so, winning in 2012 and 2023 for Sweden. I was told by my friend Lottie that she'd heard UK Radio DJ and TV Personality Rylan say that Heal by Loreen is his favourite album. It seemed like a good place to start.
Eurovision tracks are intended as a feast for the senses. It's not just about the music, it's about costume, choreography, lighting, and effects operating together to convey something; it's closer to performance art than it is to pure musical performance. I've always worried a little that stripped of their trappings they might lose some of what makes them work, but this album at least is a fully whole musical experience, no gimmicks required. It's all very heavy electrobeat power pop, and if you don't like that style of synth/drums combined with Loreen's soaring vocals, this isn't going to convert you. But in a world where Katy Perry and Miley Cyrus can become chart mainstays, this is at least as good (if not better), Loreen deserves some respect on her name.
As someone who holds Italian citizenship by birth (since I was born on the island of Sardinia) Måneskin winning in 2021 is the closest I will get to a national Eurovision win now that the majority of the people in the Eurozone look down on the UK as little more than a convenient funding partner, and we in turn continue to send the most vanilla, least interesting acts imaginable to represent the UK. While the perception that to win Eurovision you have to either be some kind of novelty dance song or a cheesy ballad, tastes are shifting and nations are willing to take bigger swings with their entries, such as Italy sending a straight up guitar rock group to represent them. Teatro d'ira was the album I was most interested to listen to all the way through from this group because I'd heard surprisingly positive receptions to it and to their live performances, and frankly this album is great. What's truly indicative of that is that for the vast majority of the albums I listened to, the Eurovision-winning track is the most streamed by a factor of 5 to 10 over any other track on the album. For Teatro d'ira, Zitti e Buoni is only the 3rd most played song of the 8 songs on this album - sure sign that their music has transcended their Eurovision performance.
Honestly, they are like a real interesting rock band. If you ever wondered what an Italian Rage Against The Machine would sound like, In Nome Del Padre will answer that question for you. Vent'anni is Måneskin's take on Metallica's Unforgiven. I can't get over lead vocalist Daimano David's weird Lily Allen-esque accent when he sings in English on I Wanna Be Your Slave but I'm certain it's better than my attempt to sing anything in Italian so maybe I should keep my voice down. This album is just genuinely great; the only novelty about them is them playing in a musical style which is a relative Eurovision rarity. Go listen to this, honestly, its less then 30 minutes long and it worth every minute.
Instead of just doing the last few years winners, I tried to jump around to get multi-national representation to my listening, and that was hamstrung by a couple of factors - one, Sweden would not stop winning the damn competition, and two, a lot of the other recent winners just didn't seem to have an album that went with their win. In keeping with the spirit of the exercise, here we wind back to 2010 where Lena took Germany to first place. Honestly, I am pretty sure I watched this Eurovision but had no memory of the song or performance or anything. Just a name on a list.
Do you happen to remember the Vanessa Carlton song A Thousand Miles also from 2010? How about Nelly Furtado's I'm Like A Bird, also coincidentally from 2010? Well, if you are in the mood for some Vanessa Carlton or Nelly Furtado music but your cupboard is bare, your local Aldi is sure to have a copy of Lena's My Cassette Player in the central aisle which will provide 95% of what you are looking for at a fraction of the price. I know I beat myself up for being reductive a lot, but in this case I feel no guilt - this is so obviously what Lena's entire album is aimed at, and she does it well. She won Eurovision with it! Sometimes you are in the mood for music which sounds like Nerina Pallot's 2010 hit (what a coincidence?!) Idaho and if you're looking for new music that sounds like that, well, add Lena to your list of favourite artists.
I'm not proud. I own a Nerina Pallot CD and a Nelly Furtado CD. I even wrote about Nerina Pallot for the 2017 version of this blog. Let them who is without sin throw the first stone. Lena is fine, this album is a-ok.
It gets very cold and it's dark a lot of the year in Finland so sometimes you have to make your own fun, which means you decide to send your equivalent of GWAR to represent you at Eurovision and they win because they rock the place to the ground are are the most fun anyone has had playing at Eurovision for like a decade. Out of all the albums I've listened to for this, this is the only one I'd actually listened to before because when they won a lot of metal fans assumed they were a gimmick, and word quickly spread that they were, in fact, a legit metal band. The Arockalypse is just a really solid Hard Rock album with no clunkers apart from the weird intro track which has it veer towards concept album before revealing that the concept is "metal band ushers in end of world through amazing hard rock songs", putting them just slightly ahead of Tenacious D in terms of legitimacy.
Lordi's win was critical in the development and variety of Eurovision, which could easily have become completely trapped in it's emotional-lament-your-way-to-victory bubble before Lordi guitar-ed it straight to hell. Now, you can send someone to Eurovision who have that special quality that defines a winner, and musical genre is no obstacle.
Did you know that we used to win Eurovision? Back before the idea of Brexit was just a twinkle in the eye of far right ideologues, we were a tolerated partner in the European experiment, and other nations didn't feel bad about voting for us, and we in turn actually occasionally sent a good song which was performed well*. As the fashion evident above might make clear though, you have to reach back to the late 1990's to find a British winner, and Walk On Water is now old enough, and seemingly strong enough in the memories of whomever is listening to Katrina and the Waves unironically 27 years after they won, to have deserved the classic Spotify Expanded Edition treatment, adding two more versions of winning song Love Shine A Light along with an acoustic version of another track on the album. I'm not sure they should have gone to the effort, considering the non-Love Shine A Light songs on the album have about 10,000 streams to their name, vs the 3.1m for the Eurovision winning song.
Now, I listened to this album today. This morning, I put it on while I was getting ready for work. I can tell you now, ten-ish hours later, that I had no memory of any of these songs to the point where I had to put some of them back on in 20 second bursts to try and get any sense of what I was going to talk about. It's like the musical equivalent of Snapchat, it just erases itself from your memory moments after you've heard it; if you wanted to pass self-erasing messages through your resistance cell, recording them over a bed of such hits as Shakin' In One Spot or Don't Keep You Knocking would guarantee no-one would retain the information for more than a few minutes at a time.
Coincidentally, we were browsing TV channels a week or so ago and came across the film The Commitments, which is about an irish band which decide to get together to play Blues/Soul music; the soundtrack was very popular with people who like their music to be acceptable and totally unthreatening, and Walk On Water feels like its aimed squarely at people who's favourite album is The Commitments soundtrack.
Were it not for ABBA, there would be little doubt that Celine Dion would be the most respected and successful act ever to win a Eurovision Song Contest. Representing Switzerland, with little knowledge of English, a Canadian performer sang in French and won the whole competition. Incognito, her earliest album on Spotify and sung entirely in French, is probably the best representation of who she was at that show (by 1990 she'd had a style makeover and learned to speak and sing in English, setting her on a course for international megastardom), though her Eurovision winning song doesn't feature on any of her studio releases.
I like a power ballad, and Celine is an undeniable force, so Incognito was a very easy listen; it was also only 8 songs and 37 minutes long, which helped with my albums-per-day count for sure. I can't really say much else about this - it sounds like Celine Dion and the late 80s, you could construct an idea of what this album is in your head from those two facts, and you'd be pretty close to the truth.
God, I have to talk about ABBA again? Look, they are, in my mind at least, the quintessential Eurovision band. If someone said "name a Eurovision winner as fast as possible", ABBA would be the first name on my list. Waterloo, like Super Trouper before it, is an album which has a bunch of future Greatest Hits material on it scattered around a bunch of songs which are undoubtedly ABBA, but just not as well worn. It's easy to forget quite how goofy some of the ABBA stuff can be when you think about The Winner Takes It All and Lay All Your Love On Me but this is also a band which has, on this album, a song about a giant ape which is called The King Kong Song.
Remember when I said before I tried not to pick the same nationality winners to listen to for this? That somehow has not stopped the nation of Sweden being represented three times in these nine albums. Why are they so good at winning Eurovision? They are the bookies favourites again this year (though I will be cheering for Finland who have sent something truly interesting for this years competition) and they've won a staggering seven times, tied only with Ireland. The secret is, as a nation, they take the competition seriously; their selection process itself is a weeks long television event in the nation, and there are entire studios filled with Swedish pop song writers and producers crafting carefully honed musical daggers aimed squarely at the heart of the Eurovision voting public each year.
Perhaps here is the point to reveal that I have an unusual direct link into the Swedish Eurovision operation in the form of Swedish journalist and tv producer Bella Qvist who provides the English language commentary for Sweden's Melodifestivalen which selects their Eurovision entry. I met Bella through my friend Andy who was housesharing with her while she lived in the UK before relocating back to her homeland to great success. Bella does an amazing job, and I can personally attest she is both extremely funny and creative. During COVID lockdown, Bella would remotely participate in our online Taskmaster recreation and some of the videos she provided remain amongst the most truly joyous experiences we had during those dark times. Hi Bella!
Oh, right, Måns Zelmerlöw. I distinctly remember seeing this Sweden win live in Andy's front room. This is one of those performances which has that unique Eurovision combination of song, uplifting message, interesting visuals and rousing performance where when stripped away from the presentation, it loses some of its impact. There's nothing wrong with Perfectly Damaged; it's extremely well crafted guitar pop - imagine a handsome, buff Ed Sheeran with all the dangerous edge sanded off. Yes. The dangerous edge of Ed Sheeran. This album is technically perfectly crafted, but in the same way that the safety features of a Volvo are. Now, that's no shade on Måns Zelmerlöw, he gives it the gusto and much much worse music has been far more successful, but there's nothing on here which is going to challenge you.
Now, before our last album, a little aside.
This is Ireland's Johnny Logan. the other two-time winner (as a performer) along with Loreen. I was going to listen to his album What's Another Year, which features his Eurovision-winning song. However, it wasn't possible; this is an album which has fallen into the streaming service vortex - Logan himself has music on spotify, but not this record - it took me a while to confirm that it even existed and had a track list and was an album. I could have bought it on Vinyl for £7 but it would never have arrived in time (and would have been a terrible use of £7), so I had to abandon Johnny and leave Ireland, the joint most-successful nation in Eurovision history, off the list. Sorry Johnny, go talk to Spotify if you are upset.
Fortunately, I had a sub waiting in the wings.
You might ask why Austrian drag queen Conchita Wurst was not by default already in the top 9 of the albums I was going to listen to. God knows its not for any reason to do with representation or discomfort at his presentation etc etc. I hope everyone reading this knows I am not that person.
However, I really kinda don't like the song they won with, and I had a hunch I wouldn't like the album much either. Now, I fully get me not liking this is fine because it is very much Not For Me. I can totally understand people finding this album uplifting and a liberating celebration of people being themselves. If this is your favourite song, favourite album, I'm so pleased for you. Please don't judge me when I say the song - and by extension the whole album - is the purest distillation of what people imagine Eurovision music to be. They've got a great voice, but the Conchita is a 70/30 mix of pretty derivative 80's disco and songs like Rise Like A Phoenix which have Big Shirley Bassey Energy.
I feel bad going out like this because I wanted to demonstrate how comparable to modern, respected music Eurovision music is nowadays - to show that Final's winners can stand toe to toe with the successful artists in their genre and give them a run for them money. Maybe it's just the genre itself that lets the album down, but I can't help but feel it's also extremely true to the performers vision. Art, as I've mentioned, is subjective, and even if it's unlikely to trouble my record player again soon, for someone, somewhere, this album is the most important thing in the world, so I'm happy it exists, if for that reason alone.
Hopefully, I've managed to convince you to give Eurovision some consideration. Find a group of friends, get some prosecco, and open your minds to new possibilities; you never know what good might come out of it.
* I have a lot of respect for Sam Ryder and his performance but it felt like the exception rather than the rule.
