Intro Post

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I should mention that four days ago, I got a ticket to semifinal 2 of Eurovision 2025 in Basel! I chose that because it’s the show Germany will be performing in, and because it has most of my other favorites. I haven’t heard most entries in full just yet, so my opinions could shift. I didn’t choose the final because I already have a cheaper ticket to the public viewing.

Introduction

I’m honestly tempted to skip this year, because I already know it has no songs I love and I’ve reviewed all of them before, so why should I listen to them again? Well OK, I’ve reviewed all Eurovision songs up to 2024, but I haven’t ranked 1962 yet, so I guess I should get that out of the way real quick.

Luxembourg hosted Eurovision for the first of four times (1962, 1966, 1973, 1984), in a ridiculously tiny building called the Villa Louvigny which was the headquarters of their broadcaster CLT. In Luxembourg’s defense, the country didn’t really have any better options back then. They didn’t have a proper theater building until the Grand Théâtre de Luxembourg was opened in 1964, which hosted the third and fourth Luxembourgish contests. For whatever reason, the Grand Théâtre wasn’t chosen to host 1966.

This year is most notable for being the first where a country scored zero points—in fact, four songs got no points this year. It’s no coincidence that this happened the same year the voting system got revamped. Now instead of dividing ten points across different songs, each national jury awarded three, two, and one points to their top three entries. The juries consisted of ten people back then, so I’m not sure how this system handled tiebreakers between the jurors. In any case, this was a really boring voting system, so it’s no wonder the EBU changed it the next year.

All the same sixteen countries as last year competed in 1962, which is a nice number because their flags can be arranged in a square. All of the top three this year were Francophone countries: France first, Monaco second, Luxembourg third. The host is a French TV presenter named Mireille Delannoy, although not much is known about her aside from hosting Eurovision. She did the entire show in French except a few parts of the voting in English.

For the first time, the opening act is an orchestral arrangement of last year’s winner, which is “Nous les amoureux”. I’m salty that Eurovision eventually dropped those reprises in favor the previous winner either rehashing their last song unedited, or singing a weird rearrangement into a new genre.