#esc 1997

Dublin 1997 is a strange year in Eurovision history. It falls between eras. It comes after the first challenge to the ballad hegemony misfired and before the full televote-era. For some it's the final year in a golden period before the onset of the Dark Times. It certainly marks the end of Irish dominance. The good results of all the English-speaking countries of Ireland, the UK and Malta are coming to an end.

There's a strange conformity of uncertainty. No country really knows what to do, so they sort of go with what they know as they wait for firmer footing.

Germany felt aggrieved about 1996, but then managed not to send Leon despite almost engineering their national final for him to win. Sweden sent almost the archetypally Swedish band Blond when there were far more interesting songs in Melodifestivalen. France chose a national sweetheart who probably didn't want to be there. Ireland and the UK went as conventional as possible at a time of full-on pomp and joy at home (and still won).

Italy accidentally entered, then their representatives became the bookmaker's favourites. RAI tried everything they could do to ensure that Jalisse didn't win amid chaos and scandal. Many of the countries with the most interesting national finals had been relegated or withdrawn. No Belgium, Macedonia, Israel, Romania or Finland.

The contest was a good one - a classic even, but the sense of floundering, caught in limbo with little in the way of direction hangs over everything.

Yet among this there are gems and glimpses of brighter days ahead. Türkiye have their best result ever with something authentically Turkish, Denmark bring rap in, Poland maintain their excellent selection streak, and Iceland blow everyone's minds showing just what it is possible to do on the Eurovision stage.

Seven of the songs make it into the most recent ESC Radio/songfestival.be top 500, maintaining the good record of the last few years.

The hosts basked in the glory of having their Eurovision back again. The budget was a step back after the riches of Norway, but Ireland was keen to show that their economy was on the rise, the Celtic tiger in full roar via their set dressing, but the wide open stage of 1994 and 1995 was gone to be replaced a smaller circle and a huge arch of lights.

An end of an era then. What would Birmingham and mass televoting actually bring? Would the broadcaster stride firmly in the brave new world with experimentation, left-field choices and stage-climbing chaos, or would they retreat even further back to what they knew?

It was only natural for Eurovision countries to try to select the meta if they wanted to do well. A stubborn, conservative and stagnant consensus had formed. The ballad-schlager axis.

Occasionally a new strand would emerge accidentally (traditional Celtic/Irish music), and there was a rush to exploit it. It did not last long, and once again Balladageddon re-established itself. In the real world, these songs were not selling.

There was a push to encourage national selections to be braver and some were, but nothing managed to challenge Eurovision orthodoxy. It was time for the EBU to take action.

The juries were the problem. Not only did they consistently fail to vote for the new or experimental, they also tended to favour neighbouring countries or countries with similar musical cultures to their own. Block voting had been an issue as far back as 1963 when there were accusations that the Norwegian jury changed their results to favour Denmark. It had never really gone away, and now it was discriminating against the newcomers.

The juries needs a shake-up.

Luckily there was a solution. Telecommunications technology had recently begun being able to handle televoting. Short phones calls to exchanges that could record numbers and could cope with a sudden burst of incoming calls. It had been used in several national finals for some years, even if there were some teething problems like those that afflicted the Finnish national selection final in 1996.

In 1997 the EBU took the plunge. Five countries with the most experience at running televotes were selected to replace their juries with 100% televoted results. These could be gathered and verified during the interval act. There was only a short time for voting, but it was enough. It had the additional benefit in that those televotes cost the callers money, so there was income to be generated, although at first that reward was taken by the telecommunications companies themselves.

Even in 1997, the results were there to be seen. Some counties that scored reasonably highly with juries, did not with the televote:

Slovenia got 60 points and finished 10th, but it didn't get a single point from the televoting countries.

Spain got 96 points and finished 6th, with 17 counties giving them points. Among those that gave them nothing were three of the televoting countries.

Malta, the perennial English-language boosted nation got 66 points, finishing 9th, but no points came from the televote.

Other countries were more favoured by the televote but not at all by the juries.

Iceland got all but 2 of its 18 points from the televote

Denmark got 10 of its 25 points from just three televoting countries

Bosnia & Herzegovina got 13 of its 22 points from four televoting countries in possibly the first case of televoting sympathy for a country recently at war (although I know it's hard not to vote for Alma)

There were still some oddities, and there was some neighbourly voting clearly remaining. The German televote gave Türkiye 12 points which could be the first instance diasporic voting, but Türkiye's song finished with 121 points and finished 3rd overall, so possibly not.

The rumour is that Italy entered Eurovision 1997 by accident. As an EBU member, RAI were supposed to inform the EBU that they didn't want to take part, otherwise they would contractually obliged to participate. Such was the disorder inside the Italian broadcaster they forgot and had to go to Dublin.

Luckily they didn't have to organise a national final or even go to the lengths of choosing an act. They had Festival di Sanremo as a fixture on the annual Italian cultural schedule, and they could simply select the winner.

This one-off accidental Italian entry shows what we've been missing. Sanremo is head and shoulders above all the other national finals in this year by some way. There's a huge variety of music, nearly all sung well. There's the controversial winners too! Sanremo was launching huge musical careers in a way that Eurovision, at the time, was not. If you can take the multi-hour length with the show originally meandering into the wee small hours, this grand old contest is definitely worth your time.

Clocking in at a considerably shorter 30 minutes, is the UK national final, The Great British Song Contest. In the year the UKs government drastically changed and when Britpop pomp was at its pinnacle, the year when Radiohead released OK Computer, the songs weren't anything close to commercial and there were only four of them. One was actually a joke. Yet the overall quality is not that bad and they managed to select the winner too.

Dora continues to be Dora, although overall the quality of the music is declining. It's still good. And the opposite of this, the Maltese selection is finally showing signs of life even though overall it's not great.

Tajana - "Povedi me" (Croatia). I don't often try to highlight the full Jemini experiences, but they are a relatively frequent occurrence. Parts of this aren't bad, but other parts... This was the first song of Dora 1997. What a start.

Lei Moe - "Vejen til paradis" (Denmark). This song isn't bad. It nearly made my also rans for 1997, however what the hell is going on behind her? If this had qualified (it got fourth), we surely would have had an EBU ruling on body paint.

Gorm Bull Sarning - "Si' mig li' Mari'" (Denmark) - I think this is about Marie Antoinette. It's definitely a Danish song about seducing French girls. And then there's Gorm's reaction to costume reveal... It finished 3rd.

Sam Blue - "For the Life You Don't Yet Know" (3m 12s for mobile users).

Helen Uí Dhúnaird - "Uaigneas (Loneliness)"

Magazin - "Opium"

TVP has a formula. For the four years, they've been competing at Eurovision they've picked a young female singing talent who has recently had a break-through in the Polish music industry. They had a range of musical styles including ballads, and traditional Polish music. That hasn't always paid off in the final scoreboard, but the quality of these songs and the singing is undeniable. It's no mistake that those four songs have all made it not only into my Top 26s for every year, but into the Top 10s.

Poland made the strongest debut series of songs of any country in Eurovision ever.

Anna Maria Jopek is not going to break that sequence. She's a graduate for the Warsaw Academy of Music, she's studied jazz in New York, and she's performed at several music festivals in Europe. She has a bright future ahead of her, starting at Eurovision. Poland is not just trying to win at Eurovision, it's launching careers.

Ale Jestem (But I Am) is a song about transience, about the fleeting time all things have to exist. It absolutely relishes the joy of racing through that existence and experiencing everything that comes from just being. It's a song not just with a smile on it's face, but a broad grinning mouth crying with delight as it rushes headfirst through its three minutes of life at break-neck pace. This is the Eurovision version of John Adams's Short Ride in a Fast Machine.

For that reason it's my number one, because every time I hear it I feel exactly the same. It can break any low mood. I utterly love it.

From 1985 to 1997 inclusive, every year that Türkiye were in Eurovision they were drawn to perform in the first half. They performed every year in that period except 1994. That's 12 years in a row in which the random draw placed Türkiye in the first ten songs. In 1996 Şebnem Paker also represented Türkiye and finished 12th having sung first. This year she drew the death slot. Second. And there are now televoters who are highly running order biased.

It feels wrong.

Despite this, Şebnem Paker & Etnic with Dinle managed to score 121 points and finish third. Türkiye's best ever Eurovision result by an absolutely huge margin. That includes getting points from all the televoters and a huge 12 from Germany - although I'm guess that's one of the first ever cases of diaspora voting at Eurovision. It won Şarkı Yarışması 1997 by getting 71% of all the points available. The song is that strong.

It's much more authentically Turkish that her previous song. Like Marianna Zorba singing the Greek entry this year, she's broken out the zills and is backed with traditional instrumentation including tambur, kudüm and a ney flute. It has an insistent, seductive rhythm that drives it along and draws you in. Şebnem sings about a mysterious love she's hunting for, although she doesn't know his name nor his face - in fact she's not met him yet - the girl's gotta have it.

Dinle frequently tops polls of Eurovision fans naming their favourite song from 1997. In the most recent ESC radio top 250, it finished as the 58th best Eurovision song of all time, just behind Dancing Lasha Tumbai. It's not often included in the compilation clips the general public get shown when broadcasters need a Eurovision show, but it remains a treasure beloved by the Eurovision faithful.

It's even more than that - this is the song that demonstrates what good composition rooted in the rhythms, arrangements and styles of native music can do. Ireland did it a few years previously, but this is the one that says, look, it's not just Celticness that works, whatever your cultural identity, you can show it off and Europe will love it.

Oh, Andreas! Perennial Melodifestival contender. Never the winner. In 1997 I think you were really done dirty. Jag saknar dig, jag saknar dig (I Miss You, I Miss You) is so much better than almost anything else in Melodifestivalen 1997 and your televoters only gave it enough votes for 7th place.

It's more restrained and downbeat that its rivals. It's an introspective, quiet yearning for a love who's moved on (literally - they moved house), who Andreas can't forget, even if he has let go. The last ember of a relationship that's about to be extinguished by the early morning drizzle, as he retraces the steps that used to take him to their front door.

This is Andres's second attempt at Melfest. The first was the previous year when he came second. He tried solo on two other occasions, in 2007 and 2012 but he didn't make it into the final.

More significantly, the year after this he was a founding member of Swedish group Alcazar. Not only were they big in Sweden (selling huge number of albums and singles throughout the 2000s), but they tried to win Melodifestivalen on five separate occasions. In 2003 they reached the viewers' choice final, winning that by miles before finishing third. In 2005 they thought about trying for the UK national final, before SVT came in with a better offer. They had exactly the same result as 2003.

After a two year break, they reformed in 2008, in 2009 they finished fifth, in 2010 they missed the final, then after another break they tried for one final time in 2014. They came third again! They wanted to enter in 2018, but Christopher Bjorkman said no. Andreas and Alcazar are the Melfest supergroup. I'm certain they're going to be featuring regularly in forthcoming top 26s for the next few years.