I have always been a fan of the Eurovision Song Contest, the 62nd instalment of which takes place in Kiev on 13 May. At least I hope it takes place – this has been one of the more troubled stagings, with the hostility between Ukraine and Russia spilling over into a competition that is supposed to be an expression of European solidarity.
There is one qualification to my fandom: I don’t think I have ever managed to sit through the contest’s entirety, which these days runs to more than three hours. The bit I like is the judging, which usually occupies the last quarter of the show. That’s when the amities and enmities between the nations of Europe – the centuries-old frictions that have always tended to undermine the grand ambitions of the Eurovision project – come to the fore. Cyprus and Greece vote for each other; Belarus backs Russia; the Scandinavian and Balkan countries vote as a bloc; and over the last 20 years, as the UK has increasingly become the odd one out in the EU, no one has voted for us. It was all too much for Terry Wogan, whose mordant commentaries kept the contest afloat in the UK. He quit in 2008, complaining that the event was now about politics rather than music.
But in many ways, as Chris West sets out to demonstrate in Eurovision!, it always was. The first contest took place in 1956, within a month of the meeting in Brussels that paved the way for a customs union comprising Germany, France, Italy and the Benelux countries. Those countries, plus Switzerland, which staged the event, were also the only representatives at the first competition. Eurovision and the EU are twins, and it is no surprise that the UK now feels less well disposed to the contest than it did, say, in 1967 when Sandie Shaw won with “Puppet on a String”. It was the UK’s first success in the show, and the song and the performance encapsulated “swinging London”.
As West says, the early stagings tended to be very francophone: full of Gallic balladeers singing about love and existential angst. In the third contest, in 1958, André Claveau won for France with the soporific “Dors, Mon Amour” (“Sleep, my love / The Sun is still far from the day / We have all the time to love / And the night understands us”). The Italian entry “Volare”, sung by Domenico Modugno, which has claims to be the competition’s all-time best song (Abba fans will disagree), was beaten into third place – an early indication that the juries in the contest, however composed, are often deranged.
Amid all the engaging pop trivia, West works hard to make his political points, and his introduction is persuasive. “Eurovision asks, and always has asked, what it means to be ‘European’,” he says solemnly. “Estonia had no doubt in 2001, when it won the contest: it meant liberty. ‘We freed ourselves from the Soviet Union through song,’ said prime minister Mart Laar.” West pinpoints other instances of the contest colliding with hard-nosed politics. Franco’s regime managed to put a fascist emblem on stage in Madrid in 1969. Portuguese composers wrote anti-dictatorship songs in the 1960s, and in 1974 the playing of that year’s Eurovision entry on Portuguese radio was the signal for the start of a successful coup. Georgia’s original 2009 entry was “We Don’t Wanna Put In” (the organisers spotted the reference to the then Russian prime minister and banned it). And Ukraine’s winning song in 2016, clearly eliciting a sympathy vote after Russia’s annexation of Crimea, was a denunciation of Stalin’s deportation of the Crimean Tatars.
The contest has also been a barometer of social change. There was a gay subtext to the winning song as early as 1961. In 1964 the Dutch chose the contest’s first non-white performer, making a point about the country’s growing social diversity. Sexual fluidity has become increasingly central over the last two decades, with an Israeli transgender winner, Dana International, as far back as 1998. And the show’s evolution from a staid parade of baritones in bow ties to outlandish pop bands mirrors the breakdown of deference and conformity in European society.
These intriguing crosscurrents only get us so far, however, and in the end West’s claims are overstated. The direct connections between the contest and the bigger political and social picture are intermittent, and half a dozen political flashpoints do not quite justify the book’s subtitle: “A History of Modern Europe Through the World’s Greatest Song Contest”. It may have been born out of the same burst of European idealism that eventually produced the EU, and we are unquestionably now seeing former Soviet republics using the contest to attack Russia and its overbearing president, but in between there have been an awful lot of apolitical glitter balls. The history book on the shelf may, indeed, always be repeating itself, but that aperçu cannot really be said to give a political edge to Abba’s “Waterloo”, Sweden’s winning song in 1974 and the entry that propelled the contest out of the stone age and into the rock age.
West seems to accept the limitations of the politics-Eurovision interface. After all, as he admits, in the febrile year of 1968 when France and much of the rest of the western world were convulsed by protest, the winner was a bouncy number from Spain called “La, La, La”, which pipped Cliff Richard’s equally inane “Congratulations” by one point. There was not much anticipation at the Royal Albert Hall on that April evening of the événements that would grip France a month later, though West does highlight one interesting political angle: “La, La, La” was supposed to be sung in Catalan, but the anti-separatist Franco insisted on Castilian. “The irony that a row should take place about the language a song called ‘La, La, La’ should be sung in is delightfully Eurovision,” he says drily.
The real point about 1968, though, is that the contest was living in a dream world: it both failed to represent the great political upheavals sweeping across Europe and the US, and equally failed to embody the marvellous pop music of the era. This was the year of “Hey Jude” and “Sympathy for the Devil”; Eurovision, which has generally favoured schmaltz over devilry, seems not to have noticed.
More often than not, in his dutiful year-by-year guide, West provides some largely tangential social and political context, and then describes the convolutions of the contest itself. There is a lot about the cold war and the threat of imminent nuclear destruction in his description of the 1963 competition, but it is far from clear how that influenced Denmark’s appealing winning entry “Dansevise”, though the lyrics are so peculiar you can probably read them any way you want (“A whistle of silver from the treetop / A faint sound of a cat grabbing / A ripple in the stream / A whisper in the hedge / That says that it isn’t night any more”). I suppose this might portend nuclear immolation, but to be effective as a political statement it probably needed to be a touch more direct.
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