Intro Post

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Introduction

Let me preface this post by saying 1970’s music is the fucking best and you don’t get anything like it these days. It was when people put heart and soul into composing popular music and cared about making those songs good and not totally dull and repetitive. As I go through this decade, be prepared for me to pop off about songs you probably think are boring, especially if you grew up during the 70’s and took this amazing style of music for granted.

Eurovision 1970 was hosted in Amsterdam, the second host city in the Netherlands, because they were the winning country that hadn’t hosted in the longest. Unfortunately, the four-way victory last year meant that Portugal, Norway, Sweden, and Finland skipped out due to protest, and Austria and Denmark continued to skip out. This brought the contest to a new low of 12 countries, the fewest since 1959, with no returning artists from prior years. There’s a silver lining to this decrease in participants: to increase the contest’s runtime, every song was preceded by a charming little postcard video, a Eurovision tradition to this day.

With Ireland’s first of seven victories, this contest began a streak from 1970 to 1977 where every winning song was in English or French, which included the four years without the language rule. The 80’s varied the winners’ languages more, but the 90’s had so much bias towards English that the language rule ended entirely. Some countries still voluntarily uphold the language rule, and I get sad whenever I remember Germany doesn’t.

This contest began with a four-minute video showcasing streets and buildings in the Netherlands, then a hilariously short introduction from the presenter. She basically just said “good evening and welcome to Eurovision 1970” in French, English, and Dutch. It was so brief that it felt jarring.

I watched this contest with Ireland’s commentary in English, done by Valerie McGovern. As far as I know, Eurovision has never been commentated in Irish.