It's Nice Here
…but then it’s always nice at the Eurovision Song Contest, particularly on a sunny day in down town Brighton. And the thoroughly nice ANDREW TYLER wishes you’d been there…(sigh)…
I’M GOING to need some involved surgery before I start believing that a piece of Swedish glitter dinkum “Waterloo” is Europe’s finest song of the moment. So before those impetuous Euromoguls remove my brains we’re going to make an attempt at sorting out just what it was that took place at Brighton this past weekend.
The strangest part of the whole inane affair was the casual way you got sucked into rooting for one brand of fatuous drivel against another, so that by the end of the weekend you’d been rapidly retuned from a state of noisy scepticism to a rubbery kind of mute admiration.
It’s only when you get back to London and volunteer your last meal into the handiest sink that you realise the nausea was always for real.
OK, maybe that last explosive act was partly to do with the excitement at Polydor’s hospitality suite following the victory roll; where Bill Martin, co-writer of previous Eurovision adornments “Puppet On A String” and “Celebration”, clasped my shoulder and announced: “Every British entry since Puppet On A String, including my own, have been watered down versions sons of Puppet. That’s why the Swedish win is so good, because it opens the thing to the pop market.”
Is that really what happened? Wasn’t that four-piece Swedish combo, Abba, last year’s space cowboys hustling last year’s stale Chinn/Chapman, Cooke/Greenaway merchandise?
“Puppet”, says Martin was the Rembrandt and everything since has been a shoddy print, and lately he’s been having a recurring fantasy involving Gary Glitter in lurex and feathers against a De Mille/Busby Berkley setting with a panorama of chorus fanning themselves and crossing and uncrossing their legs.
Ah yes. From there it takes a mere touch to the cerebral scanner before Olivia Newton-John ranges into view, pretty as a Thunderbird puppet.
A ruffled powder blue dress that caresses the Pavilion stage floor as she jerks in time to “Long Live Love”. She pauses mid-song, grabs at her bodice and howls:
“That’s it. I never liked this crappy song from the start and you can tell those berks who watch “Clunk Click” lumbered me with this pathetic bilge that they can jolly well send Lulu next time.”
THE FIRST note of scandal was sounded around mid-week when word began rebounding around Brighton’s Dome, where 300 newsmen were playing five-card brag and smoking Manikins, that Lovely Livvy, the bookies’ favourite, didn’t fancy her chances with the likes of “Long Live Love”.
At the Friday night in-costume work-out I got to check out this worrying item of gossip after discovering Livvy posed rigid in her creton evening frock somewhere on the outer perimeter of the hall.
She’d be happy to talk, she said, but couldn’t sit down without screwing up her dress. She apologised with a smile of such violent intensity I had to steady myself on a passing Spaniard.
So what do you think of your own song, Livvy, and don’t you think this Eurovision business is a load of old bananas.
“Maybe it doesn’t show what’s going on in the charts,” she agreed. “But everyone has the chance to send in songs There were about 400 to begin with before the committees listened to them and got it down to six.”
Does “Long Live Love” meet with your approval?
“I don’t know. I’d like to win the contest, of course. It’s not the song I’d have chosen, but it’s a good gutsy record and it was picked up by the viewers.”
“I’ll tell you my favourite after Saturday night. It’s not fair now. It might sound like sour grapes.”
So it was true..</strong>
For a neat study, in opposites, consider the case of Miss Ireland, a girl called Tina who blew her mind out in a car last June after a gig with the Real McCoy. She almost played for her country last year at Luxembourg when the official Irish entry went daft in the final hours, and Tina was rushed across as first reserve.
The crash blotted out most of her memory, and it’s only just returning, so she’s playing safe by scribbling key words of her dippy song on the inside of her palm. Added to these troubles are the Special Squad contingent, conspicuous by their John Collier suit/desert suedes ensemble, who’ve cut off most of the Bedford’s fourth floor and ranged themselves around the Irish, Greeks and Israelis.
There’s talk of machine guns behind the front desk, and there’s no mistaking the two loafers who spend the whole weekend drinking coffee in the ground floor lounge and staring fixedly at anyone idling by.
There are supposed to be 16 or 20 Specials in the Bedford alone, and that’s apart from the uniformed gendarmes who pace outside the Metropole, The Grand and, in denser numbers, outside the Dome that’s been wired up with detectors, deflectors, screening devices and all kinds of Star Trek counter-insurgency machinery aimed at the balls of every shade of urban guerilla..
Tina says she’s not bothered, and brushes the hair from her forehead to show off the damage from the car smash.
“Every day there’s something to do,” she reports. “Pictures, radio interviews. But I’m so happy no matter what I do.”
Tina says she loves her song. and loves just about every other song in the contest, and loves all the contestants.
“Long Live Love” is one of my favourites. I met Olivia at the BBC reception and she’s so nice and charming for a superstar.. so down to earth. I was so pleased because I was a bit nervous about talking to her.”</strong>
We’re doing quite nicely when a bulky man in a grey suit comes over to wrap up the conversation.
“It’s time to do the numbers, he tells her.
Bbbbbut…
“Oh don’t mind him.”
The pair march away to the performing arena, and red-haired Irishman called Desi Reynolds comes forward and says “don’t mind him,” and chases after Tina and the bulky man, who’s a producer for RTE and called Tom McGrath.
WHILE ALL this is going on Miss Italy, the eleganze Gigliola Cinquetti, is being chased along Brighton seafront by three giormalesi whose job it is to get photographs of Miss Cinquetti looking as if she doesn’t want to be photographed.
Miss Italy began as a rank outsider with a rank Euroballad called “Si” (which is the Italian word for the English word of this kind of commotion) the odds have been narrowed to a respectable 7-1.
Katie (who would have guessed she’s 50) Boyle, has shown up in the press room to break up the card game and talk to reporters. She says of her job as Eurovision compress (sic) that it’s rather confusing and rather like being the new girl at school with so many faces to get used to and so many names to remember, and just when you think you’ve got it all sorted out, bugger, your mind empties. Rather like learning French.
“I’ve got terrible butterflies,” she confides. “Either I get them in my stomach, which makes my face go skew-whiff, or I get them in my legs, which go wobbly but it doesn’t notice. I’m hoping I get it in the legs.”
An Irish reporter, who’s made the perilous journey to Brighton on crutches, asks her if she’s surprised to be asked to compere the pop Olympics for the third year.
“I’m delighted to be asked,” she says, staring nervously at the man doubled up in front of her.
“The standard is very much higher this year. Monaco’s got a really good ballad. Or is it Italy. It really is so difficult.”
A Mr. Monaco is a smooth Angelino de Suave character from France called Romuald who’s been landed traditionally morbid French accordion song.
His general air of crease-proof invincibility has won him few admirers around town, and during the warm-ups when he enters the stage, arms outstretched, he’s greeted with zero reaction although on the night he scores a useful 14 to tie for fourth place with the much-fancied Luxembourg entry and our own Livvy.
MUCH-FANCIED in their own quarters were veteran Eurovisionaries Mouth and McNeal of the Netherlands who, like the Swedish team, pre-canned their backing track and McMouthed to their song. “I See A Star”.
Despite the visually incongruous attraction of the bloated Mouth body against the mousy frame of McNeal, the pair could do no better than third place. Which brings to mind the humbling experience of one of the Irish background singers called John Curran.
As Desi Reynolds tells it. Curran returns to the Bedford from an ATV reception with a stick of goodwill Brighton rock that he leaves in his room while he makes a phone call from a hotel booth. Mid-conversation, three detectives approach Curran commanche fashion, set fire to the rock’s cellophane wrapper, thrust it inside the booth and howl from a squatting position while Curran lapses into a distressed state.
“It was all in good fun,” reports Reynolds. “As for real trouble, the most I heard about was one threatening call that turned out to be a hoax.”
Back at the Polydor hospitality suite Patsy and Barry, a jovial strong-armed duo from Artist Services, are pussying around serving up drinks and wondering why Polydor didn’t make do with a couple of muscular barmaids. “It’s just like being a bloody waiter,” says Patsy. “No-one’s acting bad. There’s no Keith Richard here. I mean, it’s more or less a glorified piss-up for the record companies, innit.”
Julia from Polydor suspects that the great Euroyawn has actually been trumped up as an elaborate publicity drive for Olivia Newton-John, though Pye, who’ve just even transferred her to MCA in the States (EMI in Britain) for a reported £250,000, have performed no more than the rudimentary publicity rituals.
“she’s been bounding along at this contest saying how confident she is and generally stealing the show,” says Julia. “I don’t know who’s doing her publicity but she seems to be getting in the press every day with a picture of her with one leg in a car, one leg out, or something farcical like that.”
IT ALL came to nothing in the end, of course, following a night of unparalleled tedium. And there were sour grapes and raspberries all round. Olivia said: “I’d have preferred a nice ballad. I was never really happy with the song I had to sing”, and abruptly withdrew from a BBC party laid on for delegates and was later reported to be “sobbing”.</strong>
And Adrian Rudge of Intersong, a member of the judging panel that whittled the 400 entries down to 16, noted: “I wanted to be on the voting panel and put my name forward not so much for a youthful element but because I thought I could provide contemporary ideas. But the songs people in my group voted on I, frankly, didn’t want anything to do with. In fact I didn’t vote for any of the 80 songs that came into our group.”
“It’s all very rushed. You play one verse and one chorus and that’s it. Then they read out a list of all the titles and you put up your hand for the ones you fancy. I didn’t like any of them.” Even the Wombles, the litter collecting mutants from Wimbledon, who made an in-person appearance at the Dome, get a working over.
“They’re not very clean, are they,” a hotel maid was heard complaining “You should see the state of their room. Not like that nice Italian singer upstairs. Such a lovely song, that is.”
Pics: Ian Dickson (he’s fairly nice too)