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Only ten days left till I go to Basel for Eurovision 2025! The trip is pretty much all I can think about right now. I’ll try to get at least one more round 2 review done before I leave.
Introduction
The host didn’t do the whole show in Russian of course—she spoke other languages too. I’ll get to that in a moment.
After Udo Jürgens gave Austria their first victory, Eurovision 1967 came to Vienna in the Großer Festsaal der Wiener Hofburg, a hall in the palace that was once the summer residence of the Habsburg dynasty, and is now the residency of the president of Austria. Austria went all out showcasing their culture in the show, as much as they could in a grayscale broadcast. We begin with the theme song “Te Deum” arranged in the style of a Johann Strauss waltz, then a piece composed by Strauss himself. Following that, Udo Jürgens conducts an orchestral arrangement of “Merci, Chérie”, and I love how happy he looks.
The contest featured a lineup of seventeen countries, one less than the last year because Denmark began an eleven-year break from Eurovision. That’s because the director of TV entertainment in their broadcaster thought Eurovision was a waste of money, sadly. The voting system was changed back to how it was from 1957 to 1961: each country’s jury gets ten votes to distribute across various countries. The top three were all power players of 20th century Eurovision: France went back to their usual high results with a third place, Ireland scored their first ever second place, and the UK won for the first time with a Europe-wide hit, “Puppet on a String”. The only nul-pointer this year was Switzerland, and they deserved it because their song is fucking awful.
As a presenter, we have the Austrian actress Erica Vaal, and she was pretty awesome. She opened the show with a friendly yet professional speech in German, which was neither too long nor too short. She continued with the same speech in French, English, Italian, Spanish, and Russian. I give hats off to her for that speech, especially because of the Russian part because she didn’t need to do so but did it anyway, and made viewers in the Soviet Union feel welcome as a result. Then she finished with a sweet addendum: “Ladies and gentlemen of Sweden, Netherland, Norway, Finland, Portugal, and Yugoslavia: I would have also liked to welcome you in your native tongue, but time was too short for me to learn them. But should there be another contest in the near future in Vienna, I shall do my best to also please you.” Also, her voice is quite pleasant to listen to—I went off in my last post about how much I love the sound of deep female voices, and we get even more of that here. Once she finishes her multilingual speech, the pleasantries are done and the songs begin.
I can only find two countries’ commentary on Eurovision 1967 on YouTube: the Austrian commentary and the French commentary. I’ll watch with Emil Kollpacher’s Austrian commentary once again, because I can understand the host and don’t need to hear her being talked over. Also, here’s a good point to promote my German-language commentary spreadsheet! It contains all the Eurovision commentary from the DACH countries that I could possibly find, and I’ll be sure to update it after Eurovision 2025.
I already ranked this year a few months ago when deciding what song to 8-bit cover for 1967, so the rankings for this post should be easy. I don’t expect them to change much.
Netherlands: Ring-dinge-ding
Artist: Thérèse Steinmetz
Language: Dutch
Key: B major, C major, D♭ major, D major. Yes, four keys.
My ranking: 1st
Yeah, this is still my winner of the year—for once, we have a year where my winner has never changed! I still like this song, but it’s not quite as runaway of a winner as it used to be. At this point, it’s largely my winner due to familiarity, because I encountered it a lot when I would repeatedly listen to all my winners in a row. I’m afraid I don’t have much to add to my round 1 review of this, so I’ll quote some interesting analysis I wrote back then:
I’d like to talk about this song’s structure, since I think it’s really interesting. It’s a simple alternation between the chorus and verse, without any bridge or pre-chorus sections or anything like that. Instead, it keeps the listener engaged through not one, not two, but three key changes. It’s extremely common and normal for music to have one key change; a second key change often comes off as tacky, trying too hard to be dramatic. But when a song has a full three key changes, it fully embraces silliness and doesn’t take itself seriously. The first two key changes come before the next verse, and the last key change leads to a repetition of the chorus.
I think I was totally right about the triple key change. The song is fun and playful and takes my ears on a wild ride, but I need to be in the mood for something silly to enjoy it. Still, it’s a great choice to open the contest because it puts viewers in the right mood for something lighthearted.
Luxembourg: L’amour est bleu
Artist: Vicky Leandros, who later won in 1972
Language: French
Key: D minor (verses), D major (chorus)
My ranking: 2nd, though I like it about equally to the Netherlands
My first place is performed first and my second place comes second, which means it’s all downhill from here. This song is an absolute classic throughout western Europe and has been covered by Vicky herself, as well as many other artists, in lots of languages. It felt like the right choice for me to 8-bit cover for 1967, so that’s what I did. I can’t help but wonder if I heard it somewhere as a kid, because the title and melody have always sounded vaguely familiar to me.
This is quite a lovely song overall: great melodies, lyrics heavy with metaphors about love, and a moody instrumental. It’s also an exception to my hatred of minor key verses and major key chorus. I think it’s because the verses sound moody and the chorus sounds dreamy, so both contribute a lot to the song.
The one thing that isn’t so great about this song is Vicky’s vocals. You can hear the stage fright in her voice and it explains why she only got fourth place instead of something higher. I can forgive Vicky because she was only 17 years old, and because she gave an absolutely perfect performance when she came back to Eurovision five years later.
According to the Austrian commentator, Vicky Leandros was wearing an orange dress. I’m kind of glad the broadcast is in black and white, because an orange dress doesn’t fit the song at all. Plus, the design of the dress is a little weird. Again, I can forgive Vicky’s fashion choices, because they’d be much better next time she went to Eurovision.
I relistened to the Dutch version of this song because I was curious if I still think she has a French and German accent at the same time. Oh my god, she totally does. It’s because she uses the German “ich” sound in the Dutch words “dicht” and “flucht”, and she ends all the Dutch words ending in R with a French-style R, which isn’t done in German or Dutch. Well, the Dutch pronunciation of R is all over the place, so maybe there’s a dialect somewhere that does that?
Austria: Warum es hunderttausend Sterne gibt
Artist: Peter Horten
Language: German
Key: C major
My ranking: 13th
After these two great songs, it’s a letdown to hear the host nation send a DAF ballad. For those who don’t know, “DAF ballad” is a term Erica Dakin coined and it means “dull as fuck ballad”. I’ve noticed some nuance in which types of ballads she calls DAF: they’re the ones that are intended solely to showcase the singer’s vocal skills and have nothing interesting in the music beneath. The instrumental tries to be interesting by adding a harpsichord, but it’s just too slow and low-energy. I can actually understand the lyrics, yet the song is too boring for me to pay attention to it, and his singing is too loud. I don’t like this at all and it’s a real mood killer.
France: Il doit faire beau là-bas
Artist: Noëlle Cordier
Language: French
Key: F major
My ranking: 8th
I have exactly the same thoughts on this as I did in round 1, but I’ll recap my thoughts anyway.
This got third place, so either the juries saw something in it that I don’t, or (more likely) they’re biased towards France. This song has a few good ideas, and I like the theme of hoping her old love interest returns. But the song suffers from trying too hard to mix different genres. It’s a mix of a dreamy theater tune, bossa nova, and orchestral ballad. The crazy harp chords, bossa nova bassline, and chromatic scale flute all don’t really fit together. The singer is decent enough, but too shouty and high-pitched for my tastes. Basically, this song isn’t awful, but it’s not really memorable either.
Portugal: O vento mudou
Artist: Eduardo Nascimento
Language: Portuguese
Key: A minor (verses), A major (chorus)
My ranking: 3rd
Random fact: this seems to be the first Eurovision entry that causes trouble for people uploading broadcasts of the show to YouTube. This upload of the Austrian commentary skips big parts of Portugal’s song probably to evade copyright. This sort of thing is common on the ESC Stuff channel, unfortunately.
My first and second place are a bit of a toss-up (which I’ve decided to keep as is), whereas this is confidently my third. I always get impressed by how much the orchestra makes this sound like a rock song without using any rock guitars or keyboards. I also think the song uses major key verses and minor key chorus in a way that works well, but not as cleverly as Luxembourg’s song did, and I definitely prefer the verses here. This is nothing mind-blowing, but it’s an enjoyable listen overall.
Switzerland: Quel cœur vas-tu briser ?
Artist: Géraldine Gaulier
Language: French
Key: E♭ minor
My ranking: 17th (last)
Bad news: I have to listen to this utterly horrific piece of crap again. Good news: I get to rant about it again.
This is without a doubt my least favorite entry of grayscale Eurovision, and my least favorite entry ever until… hm, I don’t know. Probably until “Quién maneja mi barca” from 1983. I’ve mentioned before how much I fucking hate songs whose lyrics are about a nasty breakup but sound like “you’re the greatest and I’m in love with you” songs, and this is a perfect example. In the lyrics, she says that—oh my fucking god, how many times do you have to repeat the title?—since her boyfriend broke her heart, she wonders—oh Christ, another “quel cœur vas-tu briser”—whose heart he will break next. The weird thing is, even though I can understand the lyrics—please, I beg you, stop singing the title over and over—it doesn’t feel like she’s singing about a breakup. It feels like she’s singing about the boy who she dreams of marrying. Not even that, it feels like she’s reciting a poem someone else wrote about the boy she dreams of marrying. Actually, not even reciting, she’s reading that poem for the first time. She looks completely emotionless on stage and clearly can’t sing for shit. Her vocals sound so stiff all I can do is flinch, and then the high note near the end feels like the world’s biggest nail scratching a chalkboard. In the end, she sings that if her ex keeps behaving the same way, he will break his own heart, and of course she delivers that with zero emotion.
And worse yet, the music isn’t any good either. It has the most boring, uncreative melody in the chorus—fuck me, if she sings the title one more time I’m gonna strangle someone—that’s repeated and driven into the ground, and even is played in a different key as if that makes it a more interesting composition (it doesn’t). The chorus repeats over and over and the verses practically don’t exist in comparison. Wait, the plural noun “verses” isn’t even right, because the song has two choruses, one verse, then two choruses again.
There are very few Eurovision entries I hate more than this. Aside from “Quién maneja mi barca”, my least favorite Eurovision entry ever, I’m hard-pressed to think of any that I hate more than this. I think I hate “The Moon Is Rising” slightly more than this too, but other than that, I’m stumped. Is this worse than “Chains on You” or “Leto svet” or “Suus”? Fuck if I know.
I am glad that this song got zero points, because that’s exactly the score this hideous abomination deserves. But what I’m not glad about is that this isn’t the only entry this year that makes me murderous.
Sweden: Som en dröm
Artist: Östen Warnerbring
Language: Swedish
Key: E minor, E major, F minor, F major
My ranking: 5th
Impressive, we now have three songs that use the “major key verses, minor key chorus” trope in a way that I’m actually OK with, even though the verses are still better than the chorus. I especially hate it when ballads do it, and this song is most certainly a ballad, but it pulls off the trope in a respectable way. It probably helps that the song is about how being with his love interest feels like a dream, so the key alternation helps convey a mix of moods. The song is nothing too amazing, but it’s enjoyable enough to listen to.
Finland: Varjoon – suojaan
Artist: Fredi (Matti Kalevi Siitonen)
Language: Finnish
Key: B♭ major
My ranking: 15th
Ah, and here’s Fredi with the huge hips—we’ll see him again nine years later. His first Eurovision entry is weird and unfocused to me, and his raspy voice doesn’t fit it at all. As I said last time: This starts with a little harpsichord tune for some reason, then a slow dramatic intro where harpsichords gradually come in, both of which are unrelated to the main part of the song. Then those three sections all play in order again for some reason, then the harpsichord tune once more. The song isn’t awful, I just don’t get it at all.
I’m frankly surprised this got any points, because the juries were normally averse to giving Finland points, especially if they sent a song as weak as this. But maybe I just got used to the 5, 3, 1 points voting system from the last few years. Three jurors—one each from Italy, the Netherlands, and Portugal—liked this enough to give it a vote, so the song ended up with three points.
Germany: Anouschka
Artist: Inge Brück
Language: German
Key: B major (chorus), B minor (verses)
My ranking: 10th
And now we have a minor key verses, major key chorus song that doesn’t work. That’s because the song feels like two different tunes stitched together, or maybe three. If you don’t mind me quoting my round 1 review again: It uses lots of tropes from these types of songs—major and minor key alternation, backing singers, hooks with meaningless lyrics like “da da da”—but fails to combine them into something cohesive. It’s not bad to listen to and the singer has a decent voice, but it’s almost as unfocused as the last one.
Belgium: Ik heb zorgen
Artist: Louis Neefs, who died at age 43
Language: Dutch
Key: D major
My ranking: 6th
In round 1, I said that the mischievous sound of the song doesn’t fit the lyrics, which say that a man worries that his crush isn’t into him despite a great first kiss. But now I actually think it fits the song. It sounds fun yet nervous and conflicted, like a man who’s going through a storm of emotions. It’s a sort of jazzy waltz that sounds a tiny bit like Christmas, and it’s a shame it has so much title repetition and whoa-oh, because otherwise I’d like this a lot more. 21 repetitions of the title is way too much. It’s still still good enough to be my sixth place.
And you know what? The fake ending is funny as fuck and totally throws the viewer off guard. And it leads to a more satisfying real ending.
United Kingdom: Puppet on a String (the winner)
Artist: Sandie Shaw
Language: English
Key: C major, D♭ major
My ranking: 9th
I still agree with everything I said in my round 1 review of this song and I’m still not a big fan of it. It’s a total earworm, yes, but I’d probably like it more if I wasn’t aware of how much Sandie Shaw hated the song. Since I do know that, she really comes off like she’s singing this through gritted teeth. You can see in her eyes that she’s forcing herself to smile. The lyrics are a whole bunch of “I’ll do anything for a man because I have no brain” and I can ignore annoying lyrics in some songs, but not this one.
This won by quite a big margin: 47 points while the runner-up got 22. I can see why, because it’s the catchiest song of the night and nothing else was truly outstanding. Unfortunately, the UK would continue sending women singing dainty songs that they hate for the next decade or two.
Spain: Hablemos del amor
Artist: Raphael (Miguel Rafael Martos Sánchez), returning from 1966
Language: Spanish
Key: D♭ major
My ranking: 14th
Unlike Raphael’s last entry, I’m afraid this doesn’t really work for me. He’s still a good singer, but he doesn’t make as good use of his vocal abilities. The song is too sleepy in the verses then gets too shouty in the chorus, then the ending is overdramatic. The progression just doesn’t feel as natural or earned as that of “Yo soy aquél”. Also, him pronouncing the H in “hablemos” is still strange to me.
Norway: Dukkemann
Artist: Kirsti Sparboe, returning from 1965
Language: Norwegian
Key: G major
My ranking: 4th
Jeez, what is Kirsti Sparboe wearing this time? Some kind of silver raincoat? No wait, apparently it’s light purple according to the commentator, which is nice because purple is a gorgeous color, but it doesn’t look too flattering in grayscale.
I agree with Vlad, I think this entry is elevated a ton by Kirsti’s infectious enthusiasm. She’s the opposite of Sandie Shaw in a way, because the song is about puppets but you can tell she’s having a blast performing her song, even though she has trouble hitting the high notes. The higher she sings, the thinner her voice sounds, and she has to pause for breath in the highest parts. I feel like the song should’ve been in a lower key or had a narrower vocal range.
Anyway, as for the music, it’s not too amazing, but it’s playful and fun enough. It’s a fast jazz waltz with memorable melodies that tells a story of a puppeteer who lost his power once all his strings were cut.
Monaco: Boum-Badaboum
Artist: Minouche Barelli
Language: French
Key: D♭ major
My ranking: 16th
And now we have the second abomination this year. After having composed “Poupée de cire, poupée de son”, one of the most awesome songs in Eurovision history, Serge Gainsbourg betrayed me my composing this assault on the ears. The instrumental is annoyingly bombastic and has way too much percussion, her vocals are absolutely godawful, and she spends half the song shouting “boum-badaboum” without the slightest regard for hitting notes. OK, I’ll give the song this: the theme of the lyrics is fairly interesting since they seem to be about an existential crisis and protest against nuclear war at the same time. But half the song is a bunch of boum-badabouming and it drives me insane. How the FUCK did this score fifth place? I listened to the studio version out of morbid curiosity, and even in that, she shouts her ass off instead of singing. Her shouting in the studio version might be even worse.
It’s hard to decide whether I hate this song or Switzerland more, but I’ve decided on Switzerland because I’ve hated it longer, and because of a little something called the Anne-Marie David test, or the AMD test for short. That’s a test where I take a francophone entry I don’t like much, and try to imagine if I’d like it if Anne-Marie David sang it. If she sang “Boum-Badaboum”, I bet she could actually make it bearable, especially because she would actually sing the boum-badaboums instead of fucking shouting them. But even if a singer as talented as Anne-Marie sang “Quel cœur vas-tu briser”, the song would still be horrific and I would be pissed that she got handed such a shitty song. This means that this song passes the AMD test and Switzerland’s entry doesn’t.
Erica has the same bottom two as me, except she has the placements swapped, because she hates this song even more than I do. Thankfully, Serge Gainsbourg would redeem himself with his entry for Eurovision 1990.
Oh yeah, the commentator said that Minouche’s dress is seashell green, which seems like a strange color. At least it’s not pink.
Yugoslavia: Vse rože sveta
Artist: Lado Leskover
Language: Slovenian
Key: E minor, E major
My ranking: 11th
Another minor key verses, major key chorus ballad (in 6/8 or 12/8 time), and this time it really doesn’t work. It sounds quite lovely in the verses, which made me wonder why I forgot it existed. But I remembered why in the chorus because that’s when it gets all boring, then it gets even worse when he talks amidst the song. I still find the bombastic ending out of place too. It’s not too bad as a song, but it just has too many things wrong with it.
Italy: Non andare più lontano
Artist: Claudio Villa, returning from 1962
Language: Italian
Key: E major, G major, E major, F major
My ranking: 12th
This is extremely Italian, but unfortunately not really for me. It has all the tropes of stereotypical Italian music: opera vocals, romantic lyrics, and hand gestures. I agree with my past self, the slow sections are more interesting than the fast sections, and I like that the song uses actual slow sections instead of freeform sections. But the song is just too much of a ballad to be my thing.
Ireland: If I Could Choose
Artist: Sean Dunphy
Language: English. I accidentally typed “Irish” at first.
Key: F major, F♯ major
My ranking: 7th
There are some things I really like about the song. For one thing, he has a lovely smooth voice that suits a romantic ballad well, and the lyrics are well-written too. The hook of the lyrics is “I could choose”, but it’s not immediately obvious what choice he would make. He always ends up going with the most romantic choice possible, so he surprises the listener with how deeply he loves his girlfriend. He sings that if he could choose a place to walk with his love, he’d choose the longest road, and if he could choose a time, he’d choose the longest day. It’s a likable enough song that I can understand why it got second place.
Now despite the clever lyrics, the instrumental starts with a freeform section then it becomes your usual 6/8 ballad, so I’m not too fond of this. Then it has a cheesy key change because of course it does, and a bombastic ending because of course it does. I love how over the decades, Ireland eventually went from wholesome goodboy ballads to “Doomsday Blue”.
My full rankings
I didn’t end up changing my rankings at all from last time I ranked the year! Here it is:
As you can see, this wasn’t a great year overall. Less than half of songs were a 5 or higher, and we have two songs with the dreaded 1/10. But there are some things to like about this contest, as I’ll discuss in the general thoughts.
Rest of the show:
For the interval act, we have a children’s choir performing classical pieces by Strauss. I’m not a fan of children’s choirs usually, but these are actually pretty good singers, and I appreciate the interval act for being so different from the competing songs. I just wish it didn’t go on for so long. I thought the interval act was going to end after the first round of applause, but there was even more.
After the interval act, the Austrian commentator said that the jurors have now come to their decisions but it won’t be an easy choice, because almost all songs are at the highest level of quality. But it turns out this was an easy choice for the juries: “Puppet on a String” from the UK won by a landslide. The UK got a lead early on and no other country got a chance to catch up, then they won with over twice as many points as the runner-up.
Unfortunately, the scoreboard design this year is absolutely hideous. It’s hard to read from a distance, it doesn’t fit well into a TV screen at all, and all the visual and text elements are either too big or too small. It’s really bloated too: there are four circles to the right of each score and even on the empty rows, but they don’t do anything until the end when they show the top four. I suppose it’s also worth noting this is the only scoreboard where the country names are written in German. Luckily, the BBC would trim the fat in their scoreboard design next year.
What else is notable about the voting sequence? The Finnish spokesperson gave a little speech in German that ended with a “servus”, which caused the audience to laugh. The Belgian spokesperson said “gute nacht, Wenen” at the end, even though in German the city is called Wien. There were a few voting mishaps near the end, like Erica Vaal saying Luxembourg and then France were in second place even though the audience could see Ireland had the second most points, which made them laugh. And most famously, Erica Vaal almost declared the winner until the scrutineer Clifford Brown told her Ireland still had to vote. The Irish spokesperson famously said “I thought we were going to be left out”. Otherwise it was a pretty boring voting sequence, because of the annoying zoom-ins and the UK’s unstoppable lead.
Even though she was no doubt excited to win, Sandie Shaw still sounds vaguely angry when singing “Puppet on a String” one last time, at least to me. But good for her, and good for the UK for winning this thing. And I can never deny the song is a total earworm. Erica Vaal ended with a speech congratulating all countries that participated in the show in all the same languages she spoke in the opening, then “good night” in every participating country’s language.
General thoughts:
Don’t be misled by the fact that this post took so long. The contest wasn’t a slog to rewatch at all. My brain just refused to let me finish this post until I finished my Homestuck fan album review, then I got it done. That said, I found myself agreeing with almost everything I said in my round 1 review, which puts into question what my future round 2 reviews will look like, or if they really need to exist. I do still want to rank each Eurovision year though, and rewritten reviews are a good way to do it.
As I already said, the song lineup this year wasn’t great, but it wasn’t too bad either: there were two songs that I gave a respectable 8/10. Now the hosting on the other hand, Austria pulled out all the stops to give this show a distinct personality from the rest of the grayscale years. It’s easy to tell it was hosted in what was once a royal palace and various elements of the hosting reference Austrian classical music. The presenter did a great job putting on the show, despite all the voting mishaps. I’m willing to blame the mishaps on the scoreboard operators (and perhaps Clifford Brown being too eager to nitpick), not on her.
There were a few other details in the presentation to like. At the start of each song, we saw the country’s name written in its native language (as with 1958), plus the song title in the original language and translated to English, French, and German. That was another way Austria made the hosting feel international. I also like how we got to see the contestants reacting to their results in the green room… was it actually called a green room yet? Hard to say for sure. In any case, this is a year with memorable hosting and not so memorable song lineup, but I wouldn’t call the songs forgettable either.
See you next time as Cliff Richard tragically loses Eurovision for the first of two times, yet manages to recover enough to sell 250 million records worldwide.
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