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.
I thought I would spend the rest of the year dispersing some of the piles of memories I have in connection with MGP and ESC.
For me, music is the communication of emotions and when you also add a competitive element like in MGP/ESC, the mass of emotions you can get expands, and the emotion I’m going to write about today is anger.
Yes, because sometimes things don’t quite go as you would hope and as if that wasn’t enough your favorite song is beaten by a song you simply don’t have much positive to say about.
Actually, I always respect the result in MGP/ESC as what the songs really compete for is to be liked the most by those who can vote, vocal performance, originality of the song and other quality concepts that those who vote can elegantly overlook and then it sometimes goes “wrong ».
The last time I got really mad was when Stella Mwangi went out in the semi-finals in 2011, totally incomprehensible to me then and there and then all that time “Haba Haba” was the song that made the hall boil the most that Tuesday evening in Düsseldorf.
When you later see the performance on TV, you understand a little better that Norway did not quite deserve a place in the final that year, but the annoyance when the last country was called up in the semi-final and we Norwegian fans stood back disappointed is still not so easily forgotten.
But, this anger is nowhere near the anger I felt back in 1980, I was a huge fan of the artist Alex and dug her song wildly and uninhibitedly and in my opinion it was miles ahead of the other 9 songs of which I probably thought over half of them were old fashioned rubbish.
The song “Univers” was super modern and right on time according to my 15 year old brain and the lady looked like a pop star too, the other artists were way too casually dressed in my opinion.
The voting started well with a top score for my favorite, but then it got 1 point from Kari Diesendy and Ivar Dyrhaug respectively and especially the latter’s last place for my favorite disappointed me greatly, he was one of the hottest things on TV at the time and how could he ruin my favorite, I guess I’ve never been able to forgive him for this betrayal, my favorite was only 3 poor points behind the two songs that came first after the first vote.
The matter was definitely not made better by the fact that it was “Samiid Ædnan” who won and it would not have made the matter better if “Bjørnen Sover” had won either then, two hopelessly outdated songs for my musical taste, so on 20 March 1980 I can safe to say that I went to bed very disappointed.
The 15-year-old version of me actually thought our winning song in 1980 was an absolutely terrible song, a lot of joike-groan that only came to spoil us Norwegians in Europe, the more grown-up version of me has realized that “Samiiid Ædnan” is a legendary song and my wet dream as a participant for Norway, Mari Boine is actually so nice that you sometimes grow out of things you initially didn’t like and see the value in them.
Fortunately, when you’re young, most emotions don’t last too long, and I realized well into the spring that our first ethnic contribution to ESC had a very strong impact on the Norwegian people and was perhaps in some ways groundbreaking for Norwegians’ view of and interest in joik as musical expression.
Fortunately for me back in 1980, the international final contained so many good songs that I could live with the fact that the Norwegian song was not among my favorites and I probably didn’t exactly cry over the fact that it didn’t make it big on the results list either.
However, I can’t quite let go of the thought of where Norway would have ended up on the results list if my favorite song that year in MGP had made it to The Hague, I’m pretty sure that we would have ended up at least in the top part of the results list and it was not common for Norwegian contributions at that time.
Each time Morten writes a memory, Roy van der Merwe will as a footnote also add his memory from that year.
Eurovision 1980 was special to me. In that year South Africa got video machines and for Christmas his penfriend in London posted him the 1980 Eurovision he recorded from TV. It was the first time I had seen the whole show and my favourite was LOVE ENOUGH FOR TWO by PRIMA DONNA. I still love the song to this day.
Featured image source – Youtube