Intro Post

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Two days ago, Belgium was the first country to confirm their representative for Eurovision 2024: a singer from Brussels named Mustii. Going by his discography, he’ll probably send a song in English. I’m looking forward to what he’s got in store!

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Introduction

Hosted in Luxembourg for the most recent time, Eurovision 1984 had 19 countries participate. Ireland returned after skipping last year, whereas Israel and Greece skipped, due to a national holiday and the broadcaster’s lack of interest respectively. Sweden narrowly won with the first of two Eurovision songs in Swedish. Ireland got second place with a song composed by a prior winner and sung by a future winner.

This contest had the youngest presenter in Eurovision history, at only 19 years old. The presenter’s style is just, oh my god. You have to see it to believe it. She switches back and forth between English, French, German, and Luxembourgish and makes tons of irreverent side remarks, exactly like you’d expect a 19-year-old on TV to do. For people who can only speak one of those languages, this must be like hearing someone from the Philippines alternate between English and Tagalog. I don’t know why this analogy came to mind, but it did. Considering the language mishaps of the last presenter, as well as the next presenter’s famous underwear incident, it’s safe to say we’re in the era of crazy presenters.

The contest begins with a montage of Luxembourg set to an orchestral medley of all five of their winners, plus “L’amour est bleu”, proof that Luxembourg was a Eurovision powerhouse. Oh, how I missed these medleys. As with last time, I watched the contest with British commentary.

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Sweden: Diggi-Loo Diggi-Ley (the winner)

Artist: Herreys (Per, Richard, and Louis Herrey)

Language: Swedish

Key: E major, F major

This is the last of three times the opening entry has won Eurovision—the other two were in 1975 and 1976. Maybe it’s because it’s at the beginning, but I would have absolutely not expected it to win. Not because it’s a bad song, but because simple lighthearted songs at a moderate tempo have never historically done well, especially not when placed at the start. The lyrics are as silly as the title: they’re about a man who discovered a pair of golden shoes and entered a magical world. As is usual with songs originally in Swedish, the English translation is very faithful. I’m gonna be real, the whole song feels like an advertisement for a shoe brand. If nothing else, the performance is certainly memorable: three blonde brothers in colorful shirts doing tons of dance moves. Maybe that’s what won the juries over, or could it be the vocal harmonies in the chorus?

As of this writing, I don’t know what it’s like to be surprised by a Eurovision winner, because 2023 was my first time watching it live, and the winner was exactly what I expected. I hope someday I get the sensation of surprise, because it’s exciting when your expectations are thrown off.

I will say, I’m happy a song in Swedish won for the first time. Norway would complete the trifecta of mutually intelligible Scandinavian languages next year. Sweden has won in their own language twice, which makes me wonder why they’re the most reluctant country in the 21st century to use their own language. The good thing is, the more time passes without a song in Swedish, the more excited fans will be if the language comes back. (Yes, I know Finland sang in Swedish in 2012.)

Luxembourg: 100% d’amour (pronounced “cent pour cent d’amour”)

Artist: Sophie Carle, the first Luxembourger contestant since 1971

Language: French

Key: F major

The postcards of this contest are vaguely unsettling 3D animations (or short films) showing, well, an interesting perception of the performing country. For instance, this postcard is trying to tell us that Luxembourg has oil rigs??? The good part is, this is perfect fodder for Terry Wogan to snark about. He was just as confused by the oil.

A mostly pre-recorded instrumental was definitely the best approach for this track. It’s very 80’s and heavy in synths. Sophie’s overly childish voice gets on my nerves, and thus the whole song does. It’s too sugary for me.

France: Autant d’amoureux que d’étoiles

Artist: Annick Thoumazeau

Language: French

Key: B♭ major in the ballad parts, F major in the rest

This contest is even more stereotypically 80’s than the last one, which I didn’t even know was possible. This song starts as a stereotypical 80’s ballad in heavy electric piano, then it becomes an average 80’s pop song with chanson style lyrics. For me, it goes in one ear and out the other.

Spain: Lady, Lady

Artist: Bravo

Language: Spanish

Key: D minor in the verses, D major in the chorus

This song doesn’t blow me away, but it’s far better than the last two songs. Unlike Spain’s song last year, it hits the right balance between recognizably Spanish music and accessible 80’s pop. The lead singer has a good voice too. The lyrics tell the story of a lady who lives a strange, disillusioned life in the hopes that her lover will return. Usually I complain when the verses are in minor key and the chorus is in major, but this song does it well. The transitions between minor and major key feel natural and not slammed in your face; perhaps they symbolize the titular lady’s hope.

I’ve read that after Spain got zero points last year, viewers didn’t expect much this time, so they were pleasantly surprised when this song got third place. This shows the value of keeping your expectations low.

Norway: Lenge leve livet

Artist: Dollie de Luxe, another female duo

Language: Norwegian

Key: Let’s just keep things simple and say it’s all in F major, then G major at the end.

After all those years of Jahn Teigen and Anita Skorgan, we’re back to one-time contestants from Norway (but not next year). For Norwegian entries in the 70’s and 80’s, returning artists are the rule rather than the exception.

I expected the title to mean “long live love”, but it’s actually “long live life”. This song is an attempt at a catchy girl duet, but it misses the mark for several reasons. It’s not very easy to sing along to, the instrumental is kind of flat, and the girls don’t have much chemistry on stage. But the biggest problem is that the song doesn’t start with an intro. The beginning feels like someone unpaused a song in the middle of a dramatic part. It starts right away with the two girls singing together, one letting out a shrill high note for absolutely no reason. Luckily, Norway’s next entry would fix every single one of those problems.

United Kingdom: Love Games

Artist: Belle and the Devotions

Language: English

Key: D major in the chorus, F major in the verses

This song is best known for two controversies. The first is that it was the first Eurovision entry to be booed on stage because of unrelated sports drama. The second is that two of the three singers were lip syncing to offstage backing singers, ostensibly because one of them was pregnant. All of this drama knocked a potential winner down to 7th place.

Anyway, this is a swing pop song that exists. I would say the backing singers sound strangely quiet if I didn’t know about the lip syncing, but either way, the backing lyrics sound like muttering. I hate when songs’ lyrics sound like muttering, especially if they’re in a language I’m supposed to understand. If it had more audible backing singers (and perhaps outfits that didn’t look terrible), I might have really liked this song. It doesn’t help that the backing singers face backwards for half the song, as if they’re ashamed of their lip syncing.

Cyprus: Ánna Marí-Élena (Άννα Μαρί-Έλενα)

Artist: Andy Paul

Language: Greek

Key: A major

The postcard is an incredibly silly video game skit where two players place several Mediterranean islands on a map, the last of which is Cyprus. This marks the first ever reference to video games in Eurovision.

As a song, this is just an unexciting pop tune that does nothing to me. It totally lacks any progression or buildup and just stays the same throughout, except a short instrumental bridge section.

Belgium: Avanti la vie

Artist: Jacques Zegers

Language: French

Key: A major, B♭ major

Strange fact: The two Belgian commentators’ booths are labeled “België” and “Belgique” respectively, to distinguish between the languages, but the Swiss commentators’ booths don’t get a similar distinction. All three are labeled “Suisse”.

It’s worth noting that “avanti” is an Italian word and the title is a mix of French and Italian (means “go on with your life”). But I’ve decided a song needs at least two different consecutive words in a language for me to count it. Otherwise, you may as well list a song as partly Japanese just because it mentions sushi.

This is certainly more interesting than the last three songs. It features a man with a dramatic voice over a slow but intriguing instrumental that invites gradual buildup, singing to possibly his love interest as he encourages them to progress with life, so they can one day achieve something as great as building Rome. It doesn’t wow me that much, but it’s a breath of fresh air compared to what came before.

Ireland: Terminal 3

Artist: Linda Martin, who would win in 1992

Language: English

Key: C♯ minor

This song featured a combo of power players: sung by a future winner and composed by a past and future winner, none other than Johnny Logan. It’s such a nice breath of energy and has so much more winner energy than Sweden, especially due to the singer’s strong voice. This song could have won if the Portuguese jury right at the end wasn’t so contrarian. It cleverly combines two seemingly contradictory genres—bombastic 80’s rock and mellow Irish ballads—into something that doesn’t seem like a mishmash of two genres, but a cohesive song that stands on its own. The transitions between these two styles don’t feel like genre switches, but rather add structural variety to this song. The only thing this song lacks is an extra catchy hook, which may have cost its victory.

As is typical of entries that Johnny Logan was involved in, this song tells a moving romantic story. This time, it’s about a woman who’s waiting for her love interest to return from a flight at the titular Terminal 3, hoping that he’s still into her. It’s crazy that out of the four entries that Johnny Logan was involved in, this was the only one that didn’t win, and it was the runner-up by eight points.

Denmark: Det’ lige det

Artist: Hot Eyes (Kirsten Siggard, Søren Bundgaard)

Language: Danish

Key: A major, B♭ major

EDIT: I mistakenly said this song was a “husband and wife duet” at first. When I wrote my 1988 review, I found out they weren’t actually married.

Denmark’s best result since their victory in 1963 had something in common with their winner: it was a man and woman duet where the woman sang and the man played an instrument. It’s most famous for an incident at the national final, Dansk Melodi Grand Prix: Kirsten shoved Søren into a swimming pool near the end of the song. No, really. I’m not making this up. If they thought this would let them win their national selection, then they were right. It also scored highly in Eurovision, at a hefty fourth place. The Eurovision stage had no swimming pool underneath, so Kirsten did the next best thing, which was to push Søren aside in the last chorus, as if to say “if you know, you know”.

The song itself is Denmark’s take on the upbeat swing song formula that their northern neighbors loved so much, combined with the sappiness that you’d expect from Danish entries. The lyrics are about the joy of seeing your husband come home after a long day, which is the kind of dainty lyrics we heard a lot of in the first two decades. It’s very 80’s and very bouncy, held back only by the lead singer’s muffled voice. Also, the chorus is scarily similar to that of “La det swinge” from next year. It even has the same chord progression at the start, 1-4-5-1. That means you can sing the chorus of one while listening to the other!

I don’t think this song would have scored so high without the swimming pool incident, nor would a song with a swimming pool incident score high if it wasn’t this upbeat. The song had to combine both traits to achieve fourth place.

Netherlands: Ik hou von jou

Artist: Maribelle (Marie Kwakman)

Language: Dutch

Key: D major, F major

For a slow ballad titled “I love you”, this is surprisingly decent. It commits to the ballad style thoroughly, never taking a moment to add drums or complexify the instrumentation beyond piano, strings, and bass. The only percussion is a few cymbals near the end. Because of the simple instrumentation and her strong voice, the song sounds extra touching. Some people believe this song scored low (13th place out of 19) because of her slightly weird outfit, but I think the jury just wasn’t in the mood for slow songs.

Yugoslavia: Ciao, amore

Artist: Vlado and Isoda

Language: Serbo-Croatian (Montenegrin), plus a phrase in Italian

Key: C major

Ugh, why did the male singer have to have an over-the-top gravelly voice??? He sounds like he’s extremely sick and needs to get some sleep. That prevents me from enjoying would otherwise be a pretty good upbeat romantic duet. I’m also not sure how I feel about those high plucked synths in the verses.

Austria: Einfach weg

Artist: Anita Spanner

Language: German

Key: A major

Oh my fucking god, this postcard looks like it was animated in PowerPoint. I know that because I made a lot of animations in PowerPoint as a teenager, which you might have seen if you follow my YouTube channel.

This song is one of the better ones in this contest so far. The singer has a clear voice and sings about her desire to leave her current life behind and run away. Unfortunately, the instrumental feels like a default 80’s pop song, like it’s assembled from all the default options in a song generator, if such a thing were to exist. Well OK, AI-generated music exists now, so maybe there is such a song generator. What I’m saying is that this song sounds pleasant but too safe.

Germany: Aufrecht gehen

Artist: Mary Roos, returning from 1972

Language: German

Key: E major

I’m not listing this song as “Aufrecht geh’n” because I think that looks very silly.

This song is similar in style to Mary Roos’s prior entry, “Nur die Liebe lässt uns leben”, just a bit slower and more of a ballad. It sounds more 70’s than 80’s, thus a little dated for this competition, but that never inherently bothers me. In fact, this song brings back memories of blogging about 1970’s Eurovision, which was much more fun to review than any other decade. It would have scored high a decade prior, in this contest, it got 13th place (tied with the Netherlands). Shame because I quite enjoy it.

Turkey: Halay

Artist: Beş Yıl Önce, On Yıl Sonra (Five Years Ago, Ten Years Later)

Language: Turkish

Key: D minor, E♭ minor

Hell yes, finally a song that wows me! You can never go wrong with Turkish funk, like seriously. I didn’t even know Turkish funk existed before making this blog post series. This is exactly the kind of music I love to discover from Eurovision: familiar genres performed by countries whose musical scene I don’t know much about.

Yet again, Turkey pulled the two men, two women formula (with a band inspired by ABBA) and sent a song that the juries did dirty. Seriously, those vocal harmonies are so glorious and manage to sound Middle Eastern but still fit Eurovision, and the disco instrumental is so simple but so effective. Plus, I like their matching teal outfits.

There is one problem with this song: it ends too soon, right when I get really into it. Don’t interpret this as “the worst part of this song is that it ends”, that’s not what I’m saying. A song should ideally end after it’s explored all the ideas it should, but this song ends too abruptly. The Eurovision performance was only two and a half minutes, so they totally had more time. Still, thank you, thank you, thank you Turkey for putting something actually good into this boring-ass year! In 80’s Eurovision, you can count on Turkey to do their own Turkish thing.

Finland: Hengailaan

Artist: Kirka (Kirill Babitzin)

Language: Finnish

Key: B♭ major, C major

Another Finnish entry that tries to use an instrument as a gimmick (the harmonica), but it’s used far too little and sounds muffled. It’s just another attempt at an upbeat song that sounds unfocused and doesn’t do much to me, as enthusiastic as the singer may be. The lyrics have an interesting theme at least: they tell a story of a man and friends who missed a train and have to wait for hours, so they decide to chill out and party while they wait.

Switzerland: Welche Farbe hat der Sonnenschein?

Artist: Rainy Day

Language: German

Key: B♭ minor in the verses, B♭ major in the chorus, then C major

This year, Switzerland sent a trio of two men and one woman, except they weren’t Peter, Sue, and Marc. This is a ballad that starts with a vaguely similar vibe to “Io senza te”, but it does the annoying thing of scrapping the interesting minor key progression in the verses in favor of major key drivel when the chorus arrives. Then it does the annoying thing of continuing the last chorus with a key change, as though the verses never existed. That second thing isn’t inherently annoying, but it’s extremely annoying when it happens alongside the first thing, which it usually does. These two grating ballad tropes go hand in hand.

Italy: I treni di Tozeur

Artist: Alice (Carla Bissi) and Franco Battiato

Language: Italian, plus a line in German

Key: E♭ major, with a few interludes in C major

This is one of the most popular entries of 1984, but I’m not sure what people see in it. The main thing I notice about it is a conflict between the simple, bare bones 80’s instrumental and the elaborate vocal melodies. I don’t think those go very well together, but to some people, maybe that’s what makes it interesting. The most interesting parts about this song are the story behind the lyrics, which are about a train line in Tunisia that reopened when its kingdom fell, and the few seconds of opera lyrics in German taken from Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte. It slightly grew on me through repeated listens, but a truly great song will wow me the first time.

Portugal: Silêncio e tanta gente

Artist: Maria Guinot

Language: Portuguese

Key: G major, A♭ major

If I had watched this contest in 1984, this is what I would have expected to win. After a whole bunch of entries that ranged from “boring as all fuck” to “pretty good but has a gaping flaw”, the contest finishes with a gorgeous piano piece with a passionate voice and strong backing singer (singular), which manages to be moving and soothing at the same time. It could have been this contest’s “L’oiseau et l’enfant” or “Ein bisschen Frieden”, a song right at the end that blows the rest out of the water. Imagine how cool it would be if this was Portugal’s first victory! But instead, it got 11th place.

The title means “silence and so many people”, and the lyrics are poetic but hard to describe. I’d describe it as an earnest reflection on the mysteries and solitude of life, which is vague and probably not that accurate. What I can more easily describe is the story behind this song. The Portuguese national final was to have every artist sing over a backing track this year, but Maria Guinot refused and performed this song solely with a piano and one backing singer, which was more than enough to win the competition. At Eurovision, the song had a few orchestra parts in the backing, but the piano was front and center.

Maria Guinot recorded this song in English, French, and German too, and she sings exceptionally well in the first two and reasonably well in the third. Seriously, I’m blown away by how well she can sing in English and French. Her German singing could probably pass as a regional accent.

This song may not have won or even come close, but thankfully, Portugal’s first winner is one of the most beautiful songs in Eurovision history. So not all is lost!

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Who’s my favorite?

If you skipped to this section, read my review of Portugal, Silêncio e tanta gente if you want to know why it’s by far my favorite of this year. No need to repeat myself.

• Austria, 1
• Belgium, 1
• Denmark, 1
• Finland, 2
• France, 1
• Germany, 4
• Ireland, 2
• Luxembourg, 2
• Netherlands, 6
• Norway, 2
• Portugal, 2
• Sweden, 3
• Turkey, 1
• United Kingdom, 1
• (13 winners)

This is the first year where I passionately feel that the song I chose as my winner should have won. Like sure, “Dschinghis Khan” is a million times better than the winner of 1979, but it was always going to become a cult classic either way. But “Silêncio e tanta gente” would have only gotten the attention it deserved if it won the contest.

General thoughts:

I don’t know who thought it was a good idea to get a 19-year-old to present this contest, but I can’t complain. Her presentation was complete hilarity, and I mean that in a good way. Not hilariously bad, just hilarious. Right at the end, she said she had so much fun presenting the contest, which was really sweet. I would have felt the same if I was in her shoes.

The interval act was more of the old-school type, focused on keeping the viewer’s eyes entertained instead of their ears. It was a skit featuring a man and an animated horse controlled by seven people behind the stage, to showcase the power of all this amazing technology. Once again, the interval act entertained me more than most of the songs, which is not a good sign.

Like last year, the voting was all over the place, which is usually a sign of a weak year. Also like last year, Terry Wogan felt exactly like I did about the voting. At least there were almost no voting mishaps (just one from a jury spokesperson), so maybe that’s why this 19-year-old was chosen for the job. Plus, every country got at least some points; Austria was the lowest at 5, then Yugoslavia at 26. I had to laugh when the Portuguese jury threw us off by giving Ireland just two points, which confirmed Sweden as the winner. I’ve already forgotten how most entries sound, so I just hope 1985 will be a better year.

I’m obligated to mention that the winner’s reprise had the second verse onwards in English. Wait, I barely gave overall thoughts on the contest, so I’ll just say it was the weakest year since 1970. That should be enough.

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See you next time for Norway’s great moment of triumph.

>> 1985: A Dual Veteran Burst of Joy