Eurovision 1996 – The year with the purest voice ever

Ireland took a one-year break from winning the previous year, so this year the contest was held in Oslo, Norway. Morten Harkett from A-Ha was one of the hosts, but while he’s very pleasant to look at, the hosting itself was unfortunately rather slow and stilted. He and his female co-host tried to crack the odd joke, and objectively there were a few funny ones in there, but the delivery was terrible, so it all fell rather flat.

The relegation system of the previous years was ditched for this contest, and instead the 30 countries who wanted to participate had to compete in what was, essentially, a semi-final (apart from Norway of course, since they were the previous winners). The total limit was still set to 23 countries, so seven countries had to be eliminated. Again, since this pre-selection was not televised I am not going to review the missing countries here, but if you go over to Cookiefonster’s review of this year you can see his opinion on them. The short version is that they were all pretty shit, except Germany. Germany’s entry not making it to the final baffles pretty much everyone who ever listened to it (including me), and again it caused a lot of controversy because this broke their perfect attendance record – there is now not a single country left which participated in every Eurovision since its inception (and I should note that Germany haven’t missed one since).

The other six countries eliminated were Denmark, Hungary, Israel, FYR Macedonia, Romania and Russia. In the final itself there were no nul pointers, and the winner was pretty convincing, bringing the contest back to Ireland again, for the last time (so far, of course).

I rather liked the postcards – all the contestants were clearly given a branded rucksack that they packed on video with their favourite things (a lot of kids and pets) in their home country. It then switched to the classic touristy promo of the host country (nice, because Norway is a stunningly beautiful country), and ended with a good luck message to the contestant from an important person in their home country, in their own language. Some were very short, but others clearly made an effort, and I wish I’d been able to understand them all.

How to rank a Eurovision Song Contest

Back in 2020 when I first did this project I simply set out to listen to all the contests and see what it was all like before I got interested. I wanted the full experience of watching the whole show, including the several hours of voting sequences. This time around it’s more about the songs, and I set myself the challenge of ranking each song as if I were a jury member and had to vote each year. Okay, the juries never have to rank all the songs, of course, but where’s the fun if you don’t set yourself a real challenge?

Eurovision 1995 – The year that went minimalist and esoteric

By no means all of the songs, of course, but compared to the ballad bonanza that was 1994, this year was a lot less ballad-tastic. I like to think that people looked at the minimalist approach of Rock ‘n’ Roll Kids and did the usual thing of trying to emulate that winner. This is all fine by me – I’d rather have an understated quiet song than an overwrought, over-loud and over-emoted ballad. There’s at least one of those tonight, but let’s not get ahead of myself here.

Third year in a row in Ireland, and the organisers decided to stay in Dublin, just as the year before. The postcards too are incredibly similar, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they simply recycled some of the footage from the previous year and then added some shots of the performing artists from this year in there. Also, I didn’t mention this for 1994, but I’m surprised at the blatant insertion of Northern Irish locations into these postcards. Belfast? Armagh? They are on the island of Ireland, but they are part of the UK, so I’m surprised that they got away with that, especially since we’re still at the tail end of The Troubles here. Aside from that they’re all much of a muchness – everyone’s doing Irish things which involves a lot of food, guinness, Baileys and water(sports).

Due to the relegation system, Estonia, Finland, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Romania, Slovakia and Switzerland had to sit this year out. Returners were Belgium, Denmark, Israel, Slovenia and Turkey, giving a total of 23 countries. I’m surprised that they didn’t allow two others in to bring the number back up to 25 – there were 25 countries in 1994, so why not this year? It’s still a dumb system.

There were no nul points tonight, but Germany got damn close. A taste of things to come for them… Lastly, I liked the stage much better this year, last year’s city-scape really didn’t do it for me.

Eurovision 1994 – The year with Riverdance

Oh, this year is known for many other things – the first time a country won for the third time in a row. The first country to host two successive contests. The first year with seven new participating countries. The first year with the relegation system. Yet what it will always be most remembered for is Riverdance. We’ll get to that once I’ve discussed the songs.

Oh yeah, the songs. Sigh. This is yet another year with an overabundance of ballads, and I am genuinely running out of things to say about them. I’m not shitting on ballads just for the hell of it, or to piss people off, I simply don’t click with 98% of them, and I do not understand the difference between a good one and a bad one, or one that will score well and one that will score badly. The best I can do is say ‘yeah, this person can sing’ and then I lose interest. So this is yet another year where I don’t love any of the songs, and where the winner is the ‘best of a bad (or at most mediocrely meh) bunch’.

Anyway, about the other things. So yes, Ireland won for the third time in a row, and as at today they are still the only country to have managed this, even if Sweden have equaled them in total wins. Ireland has one more win to go (their best, in my opinion), and then it’s the long slide towards eternal non-qualification for them. Maybe they’ll break their NQ streak this year – by all accounts their song is a little different this year, but we’ll see.

About non-qualifications: by this time Eurovision had got so popular that there were more countries wanting to participate than the EBU had room for. They set the maximum number of songs at 25 and as at 1993/94 introduced a system where the lowest-scoring countries were not allowed to participate the next year. As such we have no entries from Belgium, Denmark, Israel, Luxembourg, Slovenia or Turkey this year (and, of course, Luxembourg decided not to return at all in the end). Italy also did not participate, but of their own choice. Instead there were seven new countries: Estonia, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Russia and Slovakia, with varying levels of success.

(A note on Russia in Eurovision: as I said before, I do not intend to go political in this blog and I will judge each Russian entry on its own merits in relation to my taste. That said, Russia is a shithole country ruled by a megalomanic despot who cares for nothing but his own power and comfort, and who is making the life of every single Ukranian a total misery with his completely unjustified and idiotic war. If Russia were to sink into the ocean, the world would be a much better place.)

Back to the relegation system – it was an absolutely idiotic decision to bar countries from participating on the merit of their song the previous year, rather than the way they do it now, i.e. by judging them on their song for this year. Unfortunately it stayed in place for a decade before they finally introduced the semi-finals that happen to this day. (At least, I think it was a decade – I’m reasonably sure that 2004 had the first semi-final.) The stupid relegation system caused countries like Belgium and later Germany to break their perfect participation record, meaning there is now not a single country that has participated in every Eurovision since it started.

The winner was a runaway one, and there is one nul pointer this year, plus a few that got pretty close. Relegation for you, you failures.

Eurovision 1993 – The year that inspired the Barbara Dex award

We’ll get to her when I get to Belgium. This is the first of three consecutive years in Ireland, and the chosen venue was Millstreet – a tiny village in county Cork, at that point only known as a venue for equestrian events. The contest itself was more popular than ever though – there were too many countries that wanted to compete (especially after the falling apart of Yugoslavia) even with the EBU raising the limit to 25 countries. This meant that for the first time there was a kind of semi-final to determine which three out of the seven interested countries would compete. I’m not bothering here to review the non-qualifying songs – this wasn’t a televised semi-final like we have now (because of course at the time there was no televote yet, so this was all decided by juries), and these non-qualifying songs just don’t fall within the scope of what I aim to do with these Eurovision reviews (i.e. official Eurovision televised contests only). Suffice to say that Bosnia & Herzegovina, Slovenia and Croatia qualified, and Estonia, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia did not. The remaining 22 countries were all the ones from 1992 except Yugoslavia, which now did not exist anymore.

The hosting is reassuringly Irish – a welcoming hostess, postcards that show the contestants doing Irish things (there’s a lot of fishing, eating and livestock, and of course the Dutchie ends up on a bicycle) and a lot of Irish music of the non-ballad variety. If only I could say that of the rest of the contest… There were no nul pointers this year.

Joost Klein – Europapa

I don’t think I’ve made this clear before, but I’m the kind of Eurovision watcher who doesn’t like to see or hear any of the songs before the actual contest happens. In fact, there were many years when I didn’t even watch the semi-finals, because I wanted to get the first impact of all the songs at the contest itself. I’ve long since changed my mind on the semis, because I did at some point realise that by not watching those I was missing out on nearly a third of all the songs, but I still stick to my guns otherwise. I’ll follow all the hype, and I will always be really looking forward to seeing some of the hyped up songs to see if I like them as much as other people do, but I will resist the temptation to watch or listen to them.

Well, I usually do, that is. The only previous time I broke this rule was when I heard that Jedward were going to represent Ireland, so I wanted to hear what kind of crap they’d come up with. (Instead I discovered an insanely catchy song, but we’ll save that story for when I get to that year.) And then the hype started building about the Netherlands’ entry for this year…

Let me start by saying I was pretty excited when I heard that Joost Klein had been selected to represent my country. I’d never heard of the guy before, but I looked up a couple of his songs and read some background, and I took away three main things: 1) whatever he was going to bring would be completely different from the Dutch entries of the past few years, which were all sad boi/sad girl/sad duo ballads. 2) He’s an experienced performer and knows how to work a crowd and 3) he is absolutely stoked to be going to Eurovision, because it’s something he’s wanted to do since he was a kid. All of these are really good things.

Let me continue by saying that I wasn’t really expecting to actually like his song. From my research I gathered that he’s very nineties and into gabber, and neither of those are up my street. I’m an eighties girl, and I’ve never been into gabber at all. Still, whether I was going to like it or not, I knew it was going to be something different, and something pretty good.

So yes, the hype. I’m normally pretty good at resisting hype. Käärijä was a massive hype last year, and I managed not to listen to it until the semis (and was blown away, but again, that’s another story). But this is my country that’s being hyped. So two days ago I caved in and I watched the official video for Joost Klein’s Europapa on YouTube.

Oh. My. Fucking. God. This song is fucking awesome, and the more I listen to it, the more awesome it gets. Yes, it’s ridiculously nineties, and yes, it’s got some gabber in it, but it’s insanely catchy, and the lyrics are fucking genius. He doesn’t just effortlessly mix in several other languages, the lyrics flow amazingly well and have some genius rhymes in them, including a few internal rhymes. The video is bonkers and stuffed full of famous Dutch people, including S10 from two years ago, and it’s just impossible to not sit there and bounce along to the beat. All the European references also make it an absolutely perfect song for Eurovision.

And then you hit the end and you get the lines about his dad, and the whole mood ends up unexpectedly melancholy, and it just adds a whole extra dimension to the song. Up until that point it was just a totally bonkers entry along the lines of Verka Serduchka or Little Big, but when you then look deeper into it you find that it’s stuffed full of references to his dad (Euro-papa, anyone?), down to the mention of Papaoutai by Stromae, and that it’s unexpectedly deep.

So yeah, I’m totally and completely over the moon about this entry. Is it going to win? I doubt it – it’ll score well with the televote, but there are several other countries that have quite a lot of hype around them (hello Croatia!). I’ll also have to see what he does live to see whether he might win over the juries. However, I will be incredibly surprised (and disappointed) if it doesn’t qualify, because this is without a doubt the most Eurovision entry I have ever seen, and I absolutely love the fuck out of it.

Go Joost! Dream big!

Eurovision 1992 – The year of bland mediocrity

The downside to watching a really good year like 1991 (hosting crap notwithstanding) is that it’s such a letdown when you get to the next year, especially when that year is full of mediocre shit and dull as fuck ballads. Yes, this is another year where I don’t truly like any of the songs, and the winner is a ‘yeah this is okay’ song rather than an ‘omg I LOVE it’ one.

Held in Malmö, Sweden, with two presenters who do start off in French and English, but then switch to Swedish like last year’s Italian shitfest never showed us what NOT to do. Actually, after Toto and Gigliola, this year’s hosting is also rather bland in comparison. The postcards are pretty crap – just a montage of pretty places in whichever country is next. Austria inexplicably features a prancing ballerina, and France and the Netherlands sent in a video that manages to show neither the Eiffel Tower nor any windmills, respectively. Actually, I’m not 100% sure about no Eiffel Tower – they may have snuck it in near the start, but I lost interest in the postcards pretty early on.

Anyway, there were 23 competing countries (highest number yet!) – the same ones as the previous year, plus the Netherlands returned. Carola kicked off the show with a DAF power ballad, nicely setting the tone for this celebration of blandness. No nul pointers this year, and no controversial tied winner – just a top three of all English-speaking countries.

Eurovision 1991 – The year with the narcissistic host

Oh dear god what a year… As far as hosting is concerned this was the biggest heap of ill-organised, self-indulgent shit you could possibly sit through, which is downright embarrassing for a country the size of Italy. Rather than choosing one or two experienced television hosts who would be able to run the show in either English or (probably more likely) French, Italian broadcaster RAI chose to have their two previous winners host the show. As far as Gigliola Cinquetti is concerned that wasn’t too much of a fuck-up – she’s charming and easy on the eyes, which goes some way towards not being able to speak a single word across the Italian border – but Toto Cutugno very clearly loved the sound of his own voice and seemed convinced that he was the most charming host who ever hosted.

After a lengthy starting sequence (full of credits for all and sundry involved in the production) the pair walk onto the stage (which incidentally looked like a badly-rendered copy of the Valley of the Kings or something – something that wouldn’t look out of place in Vegas) beaming like they’ve just won the lottery. Bonsoir! Good evening! they proclaim, and that’s all the foreign you’re getting, mateys, because the entire rest of the contest was held in Italian. Thankfully my Italian is good enough that I could follow pretty much all of it, but some of the contestants were obviously left baffled when Toto addressed them, because he appeared oblivious to the fact that people from other countries might, maybe, possibly not speak more Italian than ‘grazie’ and ‘ciao’. On top of that, not only does Toto sing his winning song from 1990 again (this time without visible backing singers – this is about me, bitches!), Gigliola also sings her winning song from way back in 1964. Oh, and Toto muscles his way into that one as well, turning it into a duet. I’m surprised that he was able to step out of the way of the actual contestants this year, but I’m also pretty sure that he did twice as many pre-song announcements than Gigliola did. This was the Toto Cutugno show, with Eurovision an unimportant secondary affair.

The postcards are just as much of a joke – each contestant singing a well-known Italian song, with a blurry part-picture of some Italian landmark in the background. Wherever they were able to shove Italy into the contest, they did. There was the same number of competing countries as in 1990, with one difference – the Netherlands skipped a year because the contest was on the 4th of May, which is our Remembrance day, and their place was filled by Malta, who returned after a sixteen (!) year absence. There was one nul points entry, and the contest famously ended in a draw and had to be decided by the tie-breaker rules, first implemented (and subsequently changed several times) after the fiasco of 1969.

Eurovision 1990 – The year after the Berlin Wall fell

Yes, that is significant, not only because several songs this year reference this fact, but also because there was just a giant wave of pro-European sentiment washing through Europe, which is very much reflected in this year’s winner. My poor, bleeding, post-Brexit heart can barely take it.

So, we’re in Zagreb, Yugoslavia, which is of course in Croatia nowadays. Apparently the whole hosting was a mostly Croatian affair, mainly because the various Serbian people who were slated to be involved (a presenter, the conductor) were starting to receive death threats. The pro-European wave of love for one’s neighbours clearly didn’t feed through into the host country itself, given that it fell apart a few years later. (I don’t really want to get into that because politics, but it wasn’t pretty.)

One thing we find out (repeatedly) from this contest is that 1990 was the European Year of Tourism, meaning that the postcards are all images from the competing country, showing off that country’s most appealing touristy spots. At least, I guess that’s what the brief was – some countries succeeded better than others. The postcards also featured Eurocat – possibly the worst-drawn cartoon cat I’ve ever seen. There were twenty-two competing countries (the same line-up as in 1989), and while there was no nul points entry this year, two countries shared last place. There were also two countries sharing second place – one totally deserved, one not. We’ll get to that.

Eurovision 1989 – The year with the only win from a country that no longer exists

God, what a title… Maybe I should have just gone with DAF ballads mark 2, because that’s what this year was, unfortunately. It was held in Lausanne, Switzerland, with two fairly stiff hosts who spoke all four of the Swiss languages, without consideration to any viewers who might only speak one of them, or maybe even none. There was very little English used, and all other commentary just flowed from one language into another, without translation. Not good, though I know it could be even worse. (We’ll get to that in a few years time…)

The opening film is way too long and features some kid who travels all over Switzerland yet never actually does anything anywhere. She’s holding a violin but never plays it, takes a pair of skis somewhere yet never uses them, etc. etc. until she finally fetches Celine Dion (in a too-tight blue leather (pleather?) outfit) out of a car so she can sing Ne partez pas sans moi again, plus her new single. Fuck off, Celine, this year isn’t about you anymore. I’m actually glad that the contest is as big as it is these days, because now at least you don’t get these stupid song reprises anymore.

The postcards were pretty shit too, unfortunately, occasionally using slow-mo but mostly using… um, what’s the opposite of slow-mo? Fast-mo? Whatever, it’s fecking annoying, especially when the images also randomly stop for a second to focus on someone or something. They showed some nice Swiss scenery, but the filming style was just too annoying. Also, the music playing over them was pretty crap – wherever possible they played something that mimicked the classic music of that country (you know, Strauss-like waltz for Austria, sirtaki-like music for Greece and for some reason crappy pseudo bagpipe music (on a synthesizer!) for the UK), but the quality was pretty shite.

There were 22 countries competing – all countries from 1988 plus Cyprus – and there was one nul pointer. Also, I’ll say it now: Finland was robbed! Fecking clueless juries…