Morten Thomassen from Norway decided to write about some of his memories of Eurovision and the Norwegian Eurovision selection. ESC Covers again will publish it after google translating it from Norwegian to English.

All my three visits to the fine city of Dublin took place in a period of only 3 years and that is because Ireland had a habit, depending on how you look at it, of winning quite often and after a short trip to Oslo the ESC circus set his nose towards Dublin again.

For the third time, the Point Theater was the venue for the competition, so you could say that in many ways it was an already well-trodden path, but this particular year would turn out to be a bit of a turning point nonetheless.

Not only did Iceland field the first openly LGBT artist Paul’s Oscar, this was the first year any country allowed telephone voting, allowing those watching to have a say in the outcome.

Admittedly, there were only 5 countries (Austria, Switzerland, Germany, Sweden and Great Britain) where you could do this, but when you saw that the previously mentioned Iceland had done much better if only the audience had been allowed to decide, the light obviously went on for the EBU and since then, only in exceptional cases has it been only a country’s jury that has decided the points from that country.

One of the really great MGP trotters finally got to participate for Norway, but for Tor Endresen you can perhaps say that his second ESC trip to Dublin was a bit of a bummer, not a single point did the men and women who were voting think that our song was worth and if you’re wondering, Tor’s first ESC trip to Dublin was when he was chorister for Karoline Krüger in 1988.

My memory this time is about the 5 ladies who came in front of Norway on the results list because they got one point each for attendance, so there were 5 points for Saskia, Paulette, Suzanne, Marjolein and Linda in the group Mrs.Einstein who represented the Netherlands with the song “Niemand Heeft Nog Tijd”.

For some reason he won I traveled with a competition where the prize was to have breakfast with these ladies, unfortunately 1997 is long before the era of mobile phones with cameras, so to the extent that there is photographic evidence of this meeting, I do not have it, but what I have is a CD they issued with signatures from all 5 ladies:

The breakfast was otherwise nice and it always tastes better with food early in the morning in my opinion and it doesn’t hurt to have nice company around the breakfast table, right?

Nowadays, the artists always rehearse with the costume they have thought of wearing from the first rehearsal, this perhaps mostly to see that it works on TV and such, back in the 90s they showed off the costume at the first rehearsal so that they the technical people involved in lighting had to know what was coming and then the artists didn’t wear it before the first run-through that the actual show on Friday.

At the press conference during the rehearsal week, the ladies in Mrs.Einstein had boasted a lot about the cool costumes they had from this wonderful designer, and on the first run through they looked like this:

Well, then they obviously had an epiphany that these amazing costumes didn’t quite go down well on TV, but luckily for them it had something else in their briefcase that they could wear so the costume disaster that could have been brewing was thankfully averted.

And I think quite honestly that it was not what they were wearing that was to blame for the meager points-capture, it was probably rather the song that became a bit old-fashioned and unfashionable for those who voted.

Like Morten, I also got the full CD of MRS EINSTEIN which contains several Eurovision covers. The most exciting is a Dutch cover of Russia 1994, their first Eurovision entry.

For me the memory that stood out most was the fact that I had to interview JALISSE from Italy. Nobody knew at that time that it would be the last time we set eyes on Italy at Eurovision until 2011.

1997 also stands out as the year where I had the most one to one interaction with the artists. Tor Endresen from Norway also gave me his full CD And so did Pal Oscar of Iceland. He told me I was the first South African he had met. I in turn asked him why he was not blond. He replied that he actually is blond but ever other Icelandic person is blond so that is why he turned his hair black. Talking of blond, Sweden brought a group called BLOND, and their members were just as nice to talk to.

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