Eurovision 1973 – The year when the language rule was dropped

This is the contest of my birth year (though I wasn’t born yet when it was held), hosted by Luxembourg City, and participants no longer had to sing in their own language. What prompted the EBU to drop the language rule I have no idea, but the Scandinavian countries in particular immediately jumped at the chance to sing in English.

There were seventeen participating countries – Austria and Malta dropped out this year, but Israel joined for the first time. I was a little disappointed that there were no postcards again this year (not in 1972 either), especially since each song was only preceded by a still of the singer(s), taken during what I presume was the dress rehearsal, and often catching them in less than flattering poses. You know, mouth wide open, that sort of stuff.

Eurovision 1972 – The year with all the verse/chorus mismatches

Participating countries might have expected a nice trip to sunny Monaco for this contest, but predictably such a tiny country simply did not have the facilities to host such a big thing (even if it wasn’t nearly as big as these days), so equally predictably the United Kingdom stepped in to host, though this time in Edinburgh rather than in London. And I must say, it was actually now that I first wondered why there was barely any acknowledgement that the UK wasn’t the winning country. Eurovision 2023 tried as much as possible to acknowledge that Ukraine should have hosted, but back in the early days that clearly wasn’t a thing. Maybe the contest was still too young for the ‘winner must host’ tradition to be truly embedded.

Participating countries were exactly the same as the previous year, so there were a total of eighteen contestants. I was expecting this year to be as much of a slog as 1971, but thankfully not – not so much because the songs were better, but it felt like there was more variety, making them easier to rank, and this year I do have a very clear favourite song rather than a ‘well, this isn’t as bad as the rest’ winner.

Also, in case it wasn’t already apparent, I will comment on outfits that I like or hate. I will defend anyone’s right to wear whatever the hell they like, but I also reserve the right to judge the fuck out of it.

Eurovision 1971 – The year with all the middling songs with shouty choruses

I don’t remember this year being so hard when I first reviewed it – I even called it a half-decent year! Then again, I wasn’t trying to rank all the songs three years ago, and by god it was a hard task for this year…

Anyway, the contest was held in Dublin, Ireland, and all the countries who threw a strop in 1970 came back, presumably because the voting system was once again overhauled for this year. It’s a bit of a weird scoring system, and it only lasted three years I think, but it did ensure that even the lowest-ranking countries got a good amount of points. Number 18 got 52 points in total!

Denmark was still on hiatus, but Malta was a newcomer, so there were eighteen countries competing in total.

Eurovision 1970 – The first year with postcards

They’re very much a staple of Eurovision, but it took fifteen years before they first appeared – the pre-song postcards for each country. Every host country puts their own little spin on it, but it all started in 1970 in the Netherlands. The host could have been any of four countries, of course, but Spain and the UK had already hosted it the previous two years, so there was a ballot drawn between France and the Netherlands and the Netherlands got the job, and the contest was held in Amsterdam. This does, of course, totally confirm my view that Lenny Kuhr was the real winner the year before.

Back to the postcards, because they weren’t just a new little gimmick for Eurovision. After the disastrous four-way tie of the year before, a staggering five countries decided to boycott the next edition, so no Finland, Norway, Sweden, Portugal or Austria this year. As a result this was the smallest contest since 1959: only twelve countries participated. The postcards were introduced to pad things out a little bit, and featured a short video of each artist in their own country (except four of them were in Paris, for some reason.) These days they’re mostly there so that the in-house crew can quickly clear away all the props and set up the new ones in between the songs, but personally I love seeing what they do with the postcards each year, so keep them coming!

Eurovision 1969 – The year with the four winners

Yes, this year is mostly notorious for its farcical result of four winners. Up until this point there were no rules for what would happen if there was a tied winner, and there really ought to have been. Apparently Clifford Brown, the executive supervisor at the time, confidently stated that it had never happened, and never would happen. Never mind that in the previous year there was only one measly point between winner and runner up! Each jury had ten points to dish out, so with 16 countries competing (Austria had dropped out for a year) there were only 160 points to divvy up. The four winners each scored 18 points, so that goes to show how spread the board was.

Watching the result is comical. The presenter asks who has won, and Clifford replies that there are four winners. The presenter seems taken aback and asks him to repeat that please, and he does – four winners. Bizarrely enough they actually had enough plaques to hand out to all the winners (would they have gone to the singer and composers otherwise?) and previous-year-winner Massiel struts around on stage to hand them out in a fur outfit that seriously made me wonder how many animals died for it, given that fur wasn’t frowned upon yet back in the sixties. It’s not even a nice outfit, it looks hideous.

As far as the songs go, I found that a lot of the songs suffered from what I’ve called ‘title repetitis’, i.e. too many repetitions of the title. Still, there’s one super-clear winner for me which makes the whole year worth it.

Eurovision 1968 – The first year in colour

Once again held in London, UK, but this time for the right reason! The first time I watched this, the only videos on YouTube had atrocious sound quality, but since then there’s a new one which has been remastered, and that one didn’t sound too bad, though all the colours seem to have got a lot more washed out than I remember them from my first watch (and from what my comments then seem to suggest).

I’m not going to post any previous comments this time, because there really isn’t much that I said then that I’m not saying this second time around. The contest features the same seventeen countries as 1967, and there were no nul pointers! Two songs only received one point though, so the lowest official ranking is 16th. I had, again, some difficulty ranking some songs, Belgium and the UK in particular – I’ll explain why when I get to those.

Eurovision 1967 – The year when the UK won for the first time

This contest was held in Vienna, Austria, now that Udo finally managed to snag a win for his country. This of course meant oodles of Strauss, both at the start and during the interval. Like I said in some earlier post, I’m not a huge Strauss fan, but it could definitely be worse.

The number of contestants went down from eighteen to seventeen, because Denmark left for a few years. Maybe the financial shock of hosting it in 1964 was so big that they didn’t want to chance winning again, or I might just be making things up to fill some space. You decide. There was only one nul pointer, so officially the ranking goes down to 17th this time, but there were a few songs that only got a few points, so I think there’s two 12th places and three 14th places. This is mainly because this year had a ludicrously runaway winner – the song scored more than twice the points of the runner-up.

I’m going to have some previous commentary to share from my original Reddit post, and whenever this happens I will post them in italics.

Eurovision 1966 – The year with the first German-language winner

When I first did my Eurovision commentary on Reddit, I didn’t comment on every single song for the first ten or so years. Right about now I’m getting to the point where I did start to do that, and once those comments start getting a bit more substantial I intend to post them here together with my new commentary, just to see whether I’ve changed my mind at all. I’m not doing it for this year yet though, because most of what I wrote were one-liners, so it’s not really worth it. I’m also going to stop posting death years/ages once I hit 1970, because that’s getting close enough to my birth year that I feel it’s starting to be much more likely that contestants are still alive. Also, we’re getting more duets and bands, and I simply can’t be arsed to list all of their ages or death years.

We’re back in Luxembourg City (no proxy hosting this year) and all countries from 1965 returned in this year, so there’s eighteen contestants again. Two of them scored nul points, so the lowest official ranking is 17th.

Eurovision 1965 – The year with the first song I truly adore

Sometimes my ‘favourite’ in the contest is a matter of which song is the least boring, or which song can I tolerate the best, or which song actually sounds reasonably pleasant. Not so this year – this year my favourite is a genuinely great song that I never skip when it comes on my playlist. Hey, it’s only taken ten years for the contest to get this result!

It is also sometimes quite funny to read my own commentary back, because while in 1963 I overused the word ‘boring’, it seems that in this year my favourite word was ‘dull’. I actually have a bloody thesaurus sitting on my desk, so maybe I ought to consult that occasionally.

This contest was held in Napoli, Italy, after Gigliola Cinquetti’s win in 1964. The number of contestants went up to eighteen – Sweden returned and Ireland was another newcomer. However, yet again there were four songs that scored zilch, so the lowest official ranking is 15th. Personally I had a lot of difficulty ranking this year. I mean, I always have difficulty ranking the ballads (because how do you define which boring bit is worse than the next boring bit?) but then there’s also the faster songs that aren’t ballads but which I dislike for other reasons. Sweden was an especially difficult customer this year, because where the hell do you put opera amongst all that?? The only really easy one was the first (because duh, it’s just so much better than everything else combined), and for the rest I’ve basically gone as follows: fast but a little annoying > opera > ballads > songs where annoyance is the overriding emotion.

Eurovision 1964 – The year without video

Like the very first Eurovision there is no surviving video of this contest, other than the winner reprise and a few clips here and there. The contest was held in Copenhagen, Denmark, after their win the previous year, and the reasons for the lack of video are a bit murky. I originally read that the recording had been destroyed in a fire, but Wikipedia now claims that that’s just a persistent rumour, and there just never was a recording in the first place. When I watched this the first time round I only found a YouTube video with stills, but this time there was a new video where someone tried to reconstruct the contest by using video clips of other performances by the artists. This becomes relevant later!

Portugal was a newcomer this year, but there were still sixteen participants, because Sweden skipped the contest due to a strike of some sort. I’m also very glad to say that this year was much more enjoyable than 1963 – far fewer balladic dirges, and the piano is doing overtime, as you’ll find very soon. Yet again there were four songs that scored no points, so the lowest official score is once again 13th.