Intro Post

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Introduction

Hosted in Luxembourg City, Luxembourg, this edition of Eurovision was remarkably similar to the last one. It had the same 16 countries, marking the first Eurovision with the exact same country lineup as last year, and the votes were again skewed towards late entries. The biggest difference is that the voting system was simplified. This time, the juries gave three, two, and one points to their top three favorite songs respectively. If I was a Eurovision fan back then, I would’ve been a little peeved at this change, but I would understand that it was probably done to speed up the process of tallying votes.

This contest had three singers return from 1960, one of whom also performed in 1958 and 1956. One singer returned from 1959 but for a different country. It looks like this contest will be a similar experience to 1961, except I’ll be listening to Dutch commentary this time.

One more amusing observation: The French-speaking presenter said early on, “Luxembourg, la cœur de l’Europe, va battre ce soir.” (Luxembourg, the heart of Europe, will beat this evening.) Poland’s national selection since 2022 would object to this designation, since its name claims that they’re the heart of Europe. The only explanation is that Europe had a disastrous heart transplant last year.

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Finland: Tipi-tii

Artist: Marion Rung

Language: Finnish

Key: G major

We’ve known since the first contest that playful songs about springtime are a perfect Eurovision opener. However, putting a Finnish-language song at the start means it’ll get lost to the sidelines, which it did. Finnish sounds unlike most other European languages, has only one major close relative (Estonian), isn’t a popular foreign language, and has few speakers outside its country. Most other national languages have some advantage: the Germanic, Romance, and Slavic languages are all closely related, Greek has a similar phonology to Spanish, Hebrew is a popular foreign language, Hungarian and Albanian are common in their respective countries’ neighbors, and Turkish has tons of immigrant speakers abroad. Finnish Eurovision fans were resigned to accept their language would never perform well, until the massive success of 2023.

Anyway, this is a nice opener to the contest. It’s fun and upbeat and feels like a standalone song, not a part of a stage play. The phrase “tipi-tii”, Finnish onomatopoeia for bird tweeting, is used as a hook to make this song more memorable for non-Finnish speakers. It also has a call-and-response between flute and “la la la” in the middle, like Sweden’s “Lilla stjärna” a few years prior.

Belgium: Ton nom

Artist: Fud Leclerc, for the fourth and last time

Language: French

Key: F major

This time, Fud Leclerc gives us a ballad about romance again, mostly in a 6/8 time signature. He sings about his lover playing with his heart, and it feels both joyful and reflective. I wonder if people were annoyed that French-speaking Belgium sent the same guy four times while Dutch-speaking Belgium didn’t? This is the last Fud Leclerc song in Eurovision, and I’m not sure whether to admire his versatility or be confused by his songs’ inconsistency.

Unfortunately, Leclerc’s last song got zero points, as did the next two.

Spain: Llámame (not to be confused with Romania 2022)

Artist: Victor Balaguer

Language: Spanish

Key: B♭ major

At the start, the singer puts on a dramatic opera voice set to slow backing, but the rest of the song sounds much more characteristically Spanish, especially with those trumpet riffs. In the choruses, the opera voice continues, and it’s easy to tell the lyrics are about desperate romance. In early Eurovision, Spain and the UK were the quickest to develop their own musical styles, and it benefited both of them.

Frankly, I’m surprised this song got zero points. Must have been since it was placed early and each jury could only pick three songs now.

Austria: Nur in der Wiener Luft

Artist: Eleonore Schwarz

Language: German

Key: D major

There’s nothing more Eurovisiony than singing about a goofy topic in a serious genre. It’s a dramatic opera piece, and by opera, I mean opera. The extravagant, barely understandable singing that scared the shit out of me as a kid. The topic, on the other hand, is “look how great Vienna is, it has all these cultural icons and is better than anywhere else in the entire world”, because Austrians are less conflicted about national pride than Germans are. I kind of love that this song fully commits to the opera style. Most Eurovision songs of this type tone down the opera singing a little, like Spain the same year.

Sadly, this is another zero-pointer.

Denmark: Vuggevise

Artist: Ellen Winther

Language: Danish

Key: E♭ major, E major in the last chorus

A lullaby tune with opera vocals from a mother to child, telling them not to worry about all the troubles of adult life. Even if you don’t understand the lyrics, the instrumental has that jazzy, nostalgic kids’ movie feel, so it’s easy to guess what it’s about. It sounds comfortable but not too sugary or cheesy, but it only got two points. I’m convinced that the low scores of early songs were because of late performance bias. This is easily one of my favorites so far.

Sweden: Sol och vår

Artist: Inger Berggren

Language: Swedish

Key: E major, F major

My brain got overwhelmed with thoughts (good ones!) as I heard this song for the first time, so I’ll break it down piece by piece. Language, lyrics, instrumental.

First off, language. You can’t deny that some European languages are more rhyme friendly than others. Italian is famously easy to rhyme in since almost all words end in vowels, while Slavic languages seem like an ordeal to rhyme in and often settle for slant rhymes. Between these extremes, there’s something so satisfying about hearing Swedish lyrics rhyme. The language has many different vowels and ways a syllable can end, so when a line ends with one strongly enunciated vowel and consonant, and the next line ends with the same vowel and consonant, that just feels so pleasing. I get that feeling a lot listening to this song.

Second, the lyrics. Boy oh boy, they tell quite a story. It’s about a woman recounting a tale when she was nineteen years old. She encountered a friendly-looking man who got advice from her, had lunch with her, then disappeared and snatched her coat; she got it back in the end. She regrets doing this and warns people not to be fooled. I’m glad I was curious enough to look at a German translation of the lyrics too, because otherwise, I wouldn’t have known the title meant “romance scammer”! “Sol och vår” translates to “sun and spring”, and I learned it’s the signature of a notorious Swedish fraudster from the 1910’s.

Finally, the instrumental. Singing about a romantic scam is one thing, but the message totally changes when the instrumental is this upbeat! It heavily uses piano and brass, and when the key changes, the singer takes a break from lyrics to sing “ba-da-ba” type lyrics over trumpets, then sings the final verse. She’s smiling throughout, and her energetic tone gives an additional message to this song: if you made a terrible mistake, you should treat it as a learning experience, and it’s OK to laugh about your mistakes.

Germany: Zwei kleine Italiener

Artist: Cornelia Froboess

Language: German. Come on Germany, bring it back for 2024 please. So many fans would be excited!

Key: B♭ major in the verses, E♭ major in the chorus

Everything about this song is so extremely German. It’s the kind of song my mom probably heard a lot as a kid. It’s not just the language, but also the playful simplicity that belies a complex theme. It’s about two Italian guest workers in Germany who view the “glamorous tourist destination” of Italy as the home where they’d prefer to be. I view a lot of tension between the instrumental, with its joyful simple chord progression, and the lyrics about a real-world problem. It’s an interesting mix of playfulness and scorn, and I can see why it became such a big German hit. I can’t totally explain why, but this song just feels like Germany.

One random observation: The lyrics use the phrase “am Strande” (on the beach), which is an example of dated German grammar. The word for beach is “Strand”, and like many nouns, it used to end with an extra letter when following some prepositions. Modern German has simplified it to “am Strand”. I know antique grammar is preserved slightly more in poetry and lyrics, and the same is true in English.

Another random observation: German is one of the harder languages to rhyme in, due to its high use of consonant clusters, but it’s possible if you’re creative! I’ve noticed that “-ein” is one of the most common rhyming syllables in German, and it’s prevalent in this song with words like “fein”, “sein”, and “allein”.

Netherlands: Katinka

Artist: De Spelbrekers (Theo Rekkers, Huug Kok)

Language: Dutch

Key: G major in the first verse, A♭ major in the rest

It’s believed that a power failure on screen caused this fun, energetic duet about a meeting an attractive girl at work to receive zero points. That’s strange because it didn’t even interrupt the song! It just caused most of the screen to black out a few times. This song became successful in the Netherlands anyway, which should make you feel better about whichever times your favorite song scored last.

This is another song where I can see some evolution in musical style. The instrumental break plays a melody using simultaneous trumpets, pizzicato strings, and glockenspiels to make a fresh new sound, showing that even when constrained to an orchestra, you can vary instruments if you’re creative. It’s exactly like making a new sound by layering two sounds on a digital piano, which I spent so many hours of my childhood doing.

France: Un premier amour (the winner)

Artist: Isabelle Aubret

Language: French

Key: D minor

For France early on, sticking to a formula paid off. This is once more in the chanson format, a ballad about first-time love. I can only imagine how many fans complained that France hogged up the spotlight… just like people say about Sweden today. I can sense some relative modernity in the usage of piano and repeated phrases, and it sounds modern enough that if I close my eyes, I can imagine colored TV. Still, there have been more innovative entries in this contest so far.

Norway: Kom sol, kom regn

Artist: Inger Jacobsen

Language: Norwegian

Key: B♭ major

Inger Jacobsen’s voice sounds older than most contestants, which makes sense because she was 38 years old. It helps this song stand out. The instrumental is halfway between “conventionally jazzy” and “nostalgic kids’ movie song”. The title means “come sun, come rain”, and the lyrics promise that her romance will prevail no matter the external conditions. For a moment near the end, it sounds like it’s about to change keys, but it doesn’t after all; perhaps symbolic of a rainstorm failing to impede romance.

In this contest, I’m struggling to say “I enjoy it but it’s probably not my favorite” for most entries, and that’s how I feel about this one.

Switzerland: Le Retour

Artist: Jean Philippe, who represented France in 1959

Language: French

Key: D minor

This song’s title means “the return”, which is appropriate knowing its singer. It’s another plain French chanson, and it’s basically like France’s from the same year but older-sounding and weaker. Weird that Jean Philippe’s first Eurovision song was about a goofy world tour, but his second is just about, as far as I can tell, returning to the joys of the past. After going flashy the first three years with Lys Assia, I’ve had little to say about Swiss entries since then.

Yugoslavia: Ne pali svetla u sumrak (Не пали светла у сумрак)

Artist: Lola Novaković

Language: Serbo-Croatian (Serbian)

Key: D♭ major, D major

It starts with a bombastic intro that heavily uses bongo drums, and I almost thought it would lead to something unusual sounding. Instead, it’s another ballad with the same comfy, nostalgic vibe as the majority of this contest’s songs, where I can recognize the word “cigarette”. I’m running out of things to say about this genre of music, so I’ll point out that since the language rule was dropped in 1999, every contest has had at least one Serbo-Croatian entry except 2017. I think that’s pretty cool.

United Kingdom: Ring-a-Ding Girl

Artist: Ronnie Carroll

Language: English; it feels weird that back then, it was only in one song per contest

Key: F major in the first two verses/choruses, F♯ major in the last two

The Dutch commentator said this song had a similar style to “Sing, Little Birdie”, and it does! It uses the motif “ring ding-a-ding” in the same way as the titles of “Sing, Little Birdie” and “Looking High, High, High”. It uses a varied, bright chord progression in the verses and choruses, but a progression alternating between two chords in the post-chorus and instrumental breaks, which helps make the song sticky. It differs from the other entries with a higher, smoother voice that sounds fairly close to speech.

By this point, British entries developed a clear style, and they’re one of the most enjoyable parts of early contests. However, in previous contests I’ve always found a different entry to stand out a more than the British one. We’ll have to see if the same holds this time!

Luxembourg: Petit bonhomme

Artist: Camillo Felgen, returning from 1960

Language: French, unlike his last song

Key: C major

Camillo’s voice contrasts against Ronnie Carroll’s in the last song; it sounds far deeper and more dramatic. I enjoy the brief parts alternating between 6/8 and 4/4 time, and between major and minor key, but otherwise, I have the exact same thoughts as most songs in this contest. It’s decent but doesn’t stick out.

Italy: Addio, addio

Artist: Claudio Villa; composed by a previous Italian entrant, Domenico Modugno

Language: Italian

Key: F major, though it gradually becomes more minor and ends on a D minor chord

A ballad about the pain of a man saying goodbye to his love, the title means “goodbye, goodbye”. The instrumental replicates a guitar sound with plucked strings, or at least, I think that’s what it does. That and the opera singing are the main distinguishing features of this song. Maybe it’s because of the surrounding tunes, but this song doesn’t leave me thinking it’s part of a bigger story, even though it would obviously fit at the sad ending of a stage play. It’s one of the most moving songs from this contest.

Monaco: Dis rien

Artist: François Deguelt, returning from 1960

Language: French

Key: A major

Another 6/8 ballad with a good amount of piano, the title means “say nothing” and the lyrics are about a man comforting his love. This simple theme makes it a fitting closer to the contest, especially with the dramatic ending where he sings “cent fois” (a hundred times).

Near the end, we get the lyrics “tu es femme et moi, un homme”, which means “you are a woman and I, a man”. It’s interesting that this is specified, because even today, most people assume by default that romantic songs are about straight relationships. This specification almost feels like this song came from a parallel universe where most people are gay instead of straight. In this parallel universe, “straight” would probably mean “homosexual”.

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Who’s my favorite?

To judge my favorite, I’ll do what I did in my 1960 review and narrow it down to a few that stood out: Spain, Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands, and the UK. I enjoyed listening to and reviewing all these songs, so my winner would have to be something really sticky. Something that I can easily remember and enjoy singing or humming to myself. This eliminates Sweden and the Netherlands; they’re fun songs, but not the catchiest. Spain’s was musically unique, but lacking in catching hooks.

So which country will I side with then? The UK or Germany? My birthplace which I haven’t visited since infancy, or my mother’s birthplace which I last visited in 2016? Catchiness doesn’t necessarily mean I like a song, but catchiness and a good message helps. “Ring-a-Ding Girl” has only catchiness, but “Zwei kleine Italiener” has both, so my winner is Germany, Zwei kleine Italiener. It has a strong message, it’s extremely catchy, and most of all, it’s extremely German. My list now looks like this:

• Germany, 2
• Luxembourg, 1
• Netherlands, 2
• Norway, 1
• Sweden, 1
• (3 winners)

France may have won three times so far, but no country has been my favorite more than twice. Not yet, anyway.

General thoughts:

This contest was a lot more fun to review than 1961. The main focus, besides the ballads prominent in every Eurovision, was nostalgic kids’ movie sounding music. I almost wanted to go right ahead and list Sweden as my favorite, since I said so much about their song, but when I stopped to think about each entry, I came to a different conclusion. It seems this was another contest where the most popular song wasn’t its winner; “Zwei kleine Italiener” was a big commercial success in Germany. Like 1961, the songs didn’t do much with staging, even though the late 50’s had quite a few staging shenanigans. It doesn’t matter too much, because a good song can stand on its own.

The voting for this contest was massively imbalanced between the first half and the second half. Out of the 96 points distributed, only 19 went to songs in the first half, and all four zero-point songs were in the first half. Of the 16 countries that voted, only eight of them gave any points in the first half. The cause of this is clear: the voting system was simplified too much. The next contest went slightly closer to the points system we know today, with one to five points given to the fifth through first place countries.

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See you next time as Denmark becomes the first Nordic country to win Eurovision.

>> 1963: A Narrow Nordic Victory