Roy van der Merwe of Eurovision South Africa and the ESC Covers website attended several Eurovision song contests in person at the host cities. He is writing down his memories of those Eurovisions he attended with accreditation.The Norwegian winner of 1995 was not at all my taste – too instrumental but I was able to have Eurovision in my most love country of Europe at that time – Norway. This was so special in so many ways. Getting to Oslo was quite a challenge – shortly before my trip the airport in Dusseldorf was destroyed in a fire and I had to change my flight plans. I decided to fly to Frankfurt and took a train to Oslo, so it took longer than anticipated and so I arrived only on the Monday evening and missed the welcome party.
Interesting is that on the train from Goteborg to Oslo I got my friends Tor-Olav and Maria on the train. They were heading home to Oslo after a holiday.
In 1996 Eurovision came for the first time to the Norwegian capital of Oslo. When the artists arrived on the Sunday before Eurovision it was 25 degrees and full summer. The final day we woke up to a little bit of snow on the ground. And since the final was on May 18, all the artists could experience the National Day of 17th of May. This day is always celebrated with children parading the streets and all the artists, delegates and journalists were invited to cake at the town-hall in Oslo. I was able to attend the party on Norway’s national day, which is the best party I have ever attended. I did not bring a jacket and had to borrow one from Oystein, my friend I was staying with. It was miles too big. The huge bowls of strawberries were such a treat and the interesting cakes – I never had such nice things to eat at Eurovision again.
But the biggest highlight was being able to GET all the entries on individual CD singles. The previous year I got about 60% but not all. Now I had been able to get each entry. What made it easy was the fact that most of the delegations stayed in the OSLO PLAZA next to OSLO SPECTRUM and just being in the hotel lobby, you were bound to run into 4-5 artists all the time.
I think Eurovision 1996 was also the only year that accredited journalists could travel for free on taxi’s and several journalists made good use of this. I did not use it as everything was within walking distance.
Another highlight was meeting the Swedish group ONE MORE TIME who a year or two before had a monster hit in South Africa with HIGHLAND – one of the members of this group is the son of Benny of Abba. They were delighted that I brought them a copy of Highland, the South African release.
In Oslo the pigeonholes were open, and everybody could wonder around them and even helped themselves to stuff in your pigeonhole, so I rather tried to speak direct to the delegations and artists and get the promo singles. My pigeonhole was not located at a good spot, right next door to the water machine.
I had a fantastic time with Regina from Slovenia and her husband. They had not before met someone from South Africa and she was delighted that I like her entry. She signed it for me and in fact 5 more copies for friends of mine in South Africa I took back as gifts.
OGAE Norway had made a special CD for this year called 20 YEARS WITH TURKEY IN THE EUROVISION SONG CONTEST and many fans bought a copy.
Pity the Finnish entry scored so badly, I do like the song Niin kaunis on taivas by Jasmine. On the promo single there is also versions in English, Swedish and French and they even gave us the sheet music to the song. I collected sheet music especially in the 80’s.
Ireland won again and so they piled up another victory with the song THE VOICE.
One of the major things of 1996 was the fact that more countries wanted to take part in EUROVISION than time allowed and so all entries were judged by a panel of people, and several did not make it to OSLO. One casualty was Hungary; their song Fortuna was one of my top favourites. After Eurovision I rushed by train to Budapest to try and buy it before flying home to Johannesburg from Frankfurt. Also, the German entry by Leon PLANET OF BLUE did not qualify, making it the only time Germany has not taken part in Eurovision. As Germany is the biggest financial contributor to Eurovision, a new rule was made to allow the BIG 4/5 countries direct access to Eurovision.
The last big loss was the Danish song – it was not selected for Oslo. To be fair, it was sung in Danish, but when the composer wrote English lyrics and got his group to record it, the song became a huge hit as PAINT MY LOVE by MICHAEL LEARNS TO ROCK.
Musically, the best songs are
Belgium – Liefde is een kaartspel – Lisa del Bo
Sweden – Den vilda – One more time
Norway – Evigkeit – Elisabeth Andreassen
Slovenia – Dan najlepsih sanj – Regina
Of course, there were a few horrors as well
Iceland – Sjubidu – Anna Mjoll
Spain – Ay que deseo – Antonio Carbonell
Poland – Chce znac swoj grzech – Kasia Kowalska
