Eurovision 1965
Date: 20 March 1965
Venue: RAI Concert Hall, Naples
Winning country: Luxembourg (2nd win)
Winning entry: France Gall, “Poupée de cire, poupée de son”
Nobody liked “Poupée de cire, poupée de son”. Not the people at Naples, who loudly booed whenever the Luxembourgish entry was being rehearsed. Not the singer’s boyfriend, whose first words to France Gall after she came off the stage were “you sang terrible”; not second-place finisher Kathy Kirby, who upon hearing she’d lost to this song ran over to Gall’s dressing room and SLAPPED her. Not even France Gall herself, who figured out too late she was merely Serge Gainsbourg’s musical plaything and never forgave him for the things he put in her mouth (in one case, quite literally).
Yet listen to the Eurovision Song Contest 1965, and it becomes clear that everybody else was wrong and Serge Gainsbourg was right (well, musically, at least). “Poupée de cire, poupée de son” is the best song of Naples 1965, and it’s not even close. And although it isn’t an amazing winner in its own right, it does represent a paradigm shift of sorts — it represents the moment that Eurovision was dragged, kicking, screaming and biting, into the 1960s.
When the 60s arrived at Eurovision, it was at least two years late. Over the last two entries I’ve charted how the changing times confused and were then rejected by ESC audiences; even as the entries got more sophisticated and deepened their thematic content, the format remained broadly the same, the countries and their representative TV stations all opting for the safety of rousing ballads. Nowhere was this tendency clearer than France: when we last discussed the French and their musical tastes, it was back in 1958, when Andre Claveau sent his lover (alongside every audience member) to sleep; not much changed in the sixties, where Radio-Television France handpicked tune after strangled tune to represent their country.
Perhaps it was this conservatism that led them to reject Serge Gainsbourg. For “Poupée de cire, poupée de son” is audibly different from the get-go, and you could even call it dangerous: it begins with ominous chords, intense and compelling noises suggesting some imminent catastrophe, before some loud, brash trumpets barge in, all quite suddenly. They herald the arrival of the singer, whose first words are a loudly bleated “I AM A DOLL OF WAX, A DOLL OF SAWDUST”. (France Gall’s off-pitch singing is probably unintentional, but even so, the impact on the listener is no less alienating or strange.) We are a far cry away from the innocent romanticism of earlier years, from hesitantly feeling around for emotional common ground, from “Tom Pillibi has two chateaus, one of them in Scotland”; here the narrator has turned on herself, questioning the very premise of her selfhood in her own song. It’s all very modern — or should that be postmodern?
But there’s another shift that I think is more important: we know more, much more, about France Gall’s narrator than we do any other previous winner. We never knew anything else about them besides how they were hopelessly in love, or in some cases heavily traumatised by it. But the central character of “Poupée de cire, poupée de son” goes far beyond her own romantic experience: in fact I think it’s fairer to say that she defines herself through her lack of romantic experience. (“I say to myself: ‘What’s the point/ Of randomly singing about love like this/ Without any knowledge of boys?’”) Instead of that, then, we get Gall’s unflinchingly honest confessions as a singer, where she makes no attempt to hide her celebrity status, does not even try to come down to the listener’s level — and this paradoxically makes her all the more striking. Our previous winners all positioned themselves as everymen, as people whose experiences were relatable, attempts which were inevitably hindered by the subsequent inability of the lyrics to actually talk straight. In Gainsbourg’s lyrics, the song’s central character arrives fully formed, and already fully exposed, so we cut straight to the unfolding crisis.
Crisis? Yes, because the arrival of the 60s, instead of making things alright, merely unearthed just how messed up everybody was, and this is true even in the placid world of Eurovision — recall the trauma of Isabelle Aubret or the clingy melancholia of the Ingmanns. France Gall merely turns this subtext into text: though she smiles throughout her performance, the hint of numbness in her voice is unmistakable — “am I better or am I worse than a doll of the salon?”. But everybody else around her is busy losing themselves in the oblivion of her voice, and so they do not notice her spiralling despair: she is “everywhere at once/ Broken into a thousand shards of song”, forced by her art to become a mere puppet whose sole purpose is to be used and entertain. In effect, we are served the dissolution of the singer’s humanity; it’s not so much a song as it is a pocket psychological thriller.
If this portrayal of existential disintegration feels slightly icky, then perhaps it is; we’re still six years off from Histoire de Melody Nelson, but Gainsbourg’s compulsive taboo-breaking is already rearing its head in questionable ways. The now-famous wordplay of “poupée de son”, the implication that this “doll of sawdust” can also be an easily manipulable “doll of sound”, unavoidably leaves a sour taste — here is a man who knows his power, and sadistically lords it over his singer while flaunting it in front of his clueless audience. (This is a rare case in our series where an artist’s subsequent output has affected my feelings about their Eurovision winner; no doubt the score below would be somewhat higher if “Les succettes” did not exist.) Yet we, the listeners, are implicated as well: “those who dance to my songs”, (almost) says the singer, “let themselves be seduced by the slightest temptation”. The juries at Naples ranked this highly, we modern listeners have the benefit of knowledge and hindsight and still rank this highly — what does that say about us?
The outrage, of course, was Gainsbourg’s whole point, the song’s whole contradictory dynamic mirroring the newfound celebrity cultures of the 60s. Even as the old guard continued to profess their repulsion towards the loud, brash and somewhat distasteful stylings of the new yé-yé music, the continuing advances of media and technology still provided them with access to this new kind of celebrity, this unabashedly (perhaps brutally) transparent and sordid version of fame. It was a fame that fed on psychological tension, and which turned humans of real flesh and blood into just another hollow spectacle for consumption. This, then, represents the first time we’ve seen Eurovision be not just confrontational, but even discomfiting — of course the Contest had been mildly discomfiting or gothic before (our last Luxembourgish winner thrived on it) but this song was the first time a winner had made that dark side explicit, and forced audiences to face all those ugly emotions. Like the writer’s way of doing it or not, “Poupée de cire, poupée de son” was the first ESC song that took a magnifying glass to the arrival of the 60s, and examined all that it implied.
“Yes, yes, all that can be gleaned on paper,” I hear you cry, “but what of the performance itself?” I discussed, at the very beginning of this piece, the hostile reception that the 1965 Luxembourgish entry had received, and while I do not think that it merits physical assault on the performer, I also do not think all the retrospective acclaim given this song is quite so justified. It’s undoubtedly one of the more meaningful songs we’ve dealt with, but musically it’s also quite heavy-handed — every single arrangement seems to have been calculated to be as in-your-face as possible. (Special derision goes to the timpani player, who punctuates EVERY SINGLE SYLLABLE with a deeply unnecessary hit on the drums.) And then there is Gall’s singing, which barely passes muster; I run hot and cold on whether her accidental apathy adds anything to the song, but objectively speaking this performance would have gotten laughed out of any talent show.
But against all this, there is also plenty to enjoy: of particular note is the driving, almost furious pace of the music, which matches the frantic energy of the lyrics surprisingly well. We’ve never had a Eurovision winner go this hard before, and whoever decided to increase the speed from what it was on the recorded version massively improved the performance. (Unless I’m forgetting something, this is the shortest winner of the ESC we’ll ever discuss. And yet it STILL engendered a 1600-word piece.) And even though Gainsbourg’s wordplay can seem sinister as well as self-satisfied, there’s no doubt that he does know how to put a song together: I may not love this as much as I did “Dansevise” or even “Net als toen”, but I still found myself bobbing along to the music and finding things to like; as with many top-tier Eurovision songs, this is one that rewards multiple listenings, one where the deeper meaning of the song unfolds itself a little bit more every time you hear it again.
Whether you like that meaning or not is up to you. You may feel that Serge Gainsbourg was a canny and perceptive songwriter; you may feel that he was a massive pervert and manipulator of young girls. Both of these are true for me — but ultimately I think that a little grudging respect is due, both to him and to France Gall. After all, they were the ones who kicked Eurovision out of its complacent funk, and into the modern world — and to the Contest’s credit, it never looked back either.
Except once. But I’ll save that for my next post.
Rating: 7/10
Best song
I laid my cards on the table at the start of this piece — it’s Luxembourg. Goodnight everyone —
Oh wait, I’m supposed to comment on the others… in second place this year was (say it with me now) the United Kingdom. As mentioned before, Kathy Kirby was not exactly pleased that she’d lost out to the Luxembourgish entry, and indeed you can make a case for her winning — Kirby’s performance shows off both her vocal chops and her personality, very powerful and very dramatic, and proves that it wasn’t just the continentals making progress. One spot below them was the spurned France, who also seems to have attempted modernity; sadly they could only come up with a grimacing ballad which repeated the word “jamais” a lot, presumably to mask the questionable nature of its other lyrics (“you have to sow doubt to reap love!”). It would take them another decade to truly get with the times — but again, that’s a story for another time.
A huge part of why I favour “Poupée de cire, poupée de son” is simply because it was more or less the only innovator: “I Belong” aside, a lot of the songs on offer were once again slow ballads or chirpy but anodyne tunes. There are a couple of songs that made quite the impression on me though: Monaco’s “Va dire à l’amour”, for instance, may be a rip-off of last year’s winner (“go and tell Love that I’m seventeen years old”), but it’s a very good rip-off, filled with innocence and the best pronunciation of the word “moi” I’ve ever heard. There’s also debutant Ireland’s “Walking the Streets in the Rain”, which somehow manages to balance melancholia and warmth almost perfectly; there’s also Sweden’s morose “Absent Friend”, which may be operatic and almost unintelligible, but damn if it doesn’t sound like the eeriest, moodiest thing on Earth. (There’s an oft-repeated “fact” that Ingvar Wixell was the first person from a non-Anglophone country to sing in English, when in fact Carmela Corren had done that for Austria two years ago in London; that said Sweden was still the first country to use it for an entire song, thereby kickstarting their still-ongoing love affair with the language at the ESC.) All quite good, but none as kooky — and therefore brilliant — as Luxembourg this year.
| PLACE | ACTUAL RANKING | MY PICKS |
|---|---|---|
| 1st | Luxembourg, “Poupée de cire, poupée de son” | Luxembourg, “Poupée de cire, poupée de son” |
| 2nd | United Kingdom, “I Belong” | Monaco, “Va dire à l’amour“ |
| 3rd | France, “N’avoue jamais“ | Ireland, “Walking the Streets in the Rain“ |
Next time
Ten years on and what had Europe learned? Not much, apparently.
Postscript
(May 2025)
Is this Eurovision’s first answer song? I can’t say for sure, but I do know that this is MUCH better than the song I just reviewed. Let’s hope we see Laura again in the ESC…
Inkpot Shuffles in the Twilight 
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