Eurovision 1967
Date: 8 April 1967
Venue: Hofburg Imperial Palace, Vienna
Winning country: United Kingdom (1st win)
Winning entry: Sandie Shaw, “Puppet on a String”
On the impact of “Puppet on a String” on the history of the Contest, there can be little doubt. To take just one example, it was Sandie Shaw who first inspired in Christer Bjorkman a love for Eurovision, and we all know how that turned out for the past thirty years; countless others have also cited this very performance as their gateway drug to the Contest. Listening to them talk about it, you’d think that this was the most important song in the history of the ESC, and I’m not sure that they don’t have a case.
Yet one thing has stuck out to me in all the accounts I’ve read: when these people talk about this formative experience, it’s always about the singer, and not the song. Bjorkman specifically tells of his joy in recognising “the little kid inside of me who fell in love with Sandie Shaw and with Eurovision one night back in April 1967”; and in his book’s “about the author” section, Chris West says he “watched Sandie Shaw winning in 1967, and has been hooked on Eurovision ever since”. You’ll notice that “Puppet on a String” doesn’t get mentioned in either of these origin stories — it’s always what Shaw herself did to win that captivated him and all those other writers.
For me, this underestimates the role that the song itself played, both in winning the 1967 Contest and also going on to shape Eurovision history. It’s not that Sandie Shaw’s performance wasn’t a factor in the UK win; in fact, you could argue it was the biggest factor. But I think that if we are to understand this song’s legacy at the Contest — which, you will recall, is the stated aim of this entire series — then we are required to look at the whole package, and that means also examining the song that gave birth to that performance in the first place. And it is there that we locate the answer to this song’s everlasting success: “Puppet on a String” won the 1967 Contest, changed the course of the ESC forever, because it was, quite simply, pop music.
But first, the phenomenon of the pop song as it relates to Eurovision. With few exceptions, Contest winners tended not to do quite well in the pop charts; remember that for the 1958 Contest “Nel blu dipinto di blu” managed to become a transatlantic hit while “Dors, mon amour” barely managed to nudge the charts in Belgium; the same happened in 1961, where it was the second-placed “Are You Sure?” that managed to climb the charts in the Anglophone world. Generally speaking, Eurovision and the pop charts existed in separate worlds, and any crossover from the former into the latter was a pure stroke of luck, something that just proved their inverse relationship.
Of course, only one of these actually featured Europe’s favourite song, and it sure as hell wasn’t Eurovision: part of my ongoing frustration with the first decade of the Contest comes down to how the juries were still obsessed with ballads l-o-n-g into the sixties, all while everybody else was buying music that was harder and much more artistically daring than anything on the ESC stage (France Gall excepted, of course). The ballads that won Eurovision were all quite similar: delicate, conservative, melodic but also somewhat pretentious. By contrast, the cheeky honk of “Puppet on a String”’s first notes herald a sea change: there is no doubt that this song is different, different from the last eleven winners we have discussed. This song sounds lighter, frothier, full of youthful vitality. This song is a pop song.
But it’s a very specific type of pop song, one that was NOT constructed with the public in mind. As my favourite music critic Tom Ewing writes, “Puppet on a String” “sounds a few years out of date, and quite cut off from ‘pop’ as it had developed during the British mid-60s”. That’s reflected in the choice of Sandie Shaw as the UK representative: she had attained her greatest commercial success way back in the autumn of 1964, which in 60s terms was about three lifetimes ago; still a youthful 19 by the time the BBC came calling, she had already found herself crowded out by more avant-garde artists. In choosing Shaw, then, the idea of “pop” being favoured was that of the fresh-faced British Invasion, not the spaced-out psychedelia nascent in the pop records of early 1967; if the cabaret stylings of “Puppet on a String” follow any contemporary sonic trend, then it’s that of the British music hall revival, exemplified by songs like “Winchester Cathedral” and “Lady Godiva” — records that hearken even farther back to tradition, and ideas of British naughtiness. Pop as British stereotype.
It is this spirit of looking back that means that “Puppet on a String” is also the Eurovision winner that’s probably aged the poorest: music hall was always (at least, from the POV of this Asian guy) quite sexist in how it treated women, and while this song goes nowhere near those levels, it’s difficult to listen to lines like “in or out, there is never a doubt/ Just who’s pulling the strings” without wincing a bit. Shaw hated the song from the get-go, detesting its “sexist drivel” and its insolent entitlement; it’s telling that her 2007 rerecording pauses just before the most controversial lines, as if to say “can you believe I once sang this shit?”. But I think there’s also a secondary reason why Sandie Shaw was reluctant to sing this one: right when she wanted to move forward in her artistry, she instead found herself making chintzy, regressive tunes just to stay commercially relevant — a move which any self-respecting artist would have normally balked at.
(Meanwhile, writers Bill Martin and Phil Coulter were of the opinion that she ought to be grateful, because she was getting another #1 handed to her on a platter. It’s not the last time we’ll hear about them being absolute dicks.)
Perhaps this is why Shaw sings “Puppet on a String” so straight: despite the frivolity of the music, she throws herself wholeheartedly into the song, her contempt for the song momentarily forgotten. Maybe she hoped to regain some sort of artistic credo by doing that, maybe she was just that consummate a performer. Whatever the reason, her complete conviction redeems the song; nay, turns it into something good: in her ESC performance, she looks like she’s having a ball of a time, a girl experiencing the first giddying blushes of romance — and you completely buy it. There were commentators online who said that they could hear the teeth-grinding behind her vocals, and I just don’t hear it: from that prolonged “I” onwards, she sounds like she believes in the things she sings, imbuing the lyrics with human warmth no matter how tongue-in-cheek the accompaniment was supposed to be. There is a fine line between “cutesy” and “tacky”, and it’s thanks to Shaw’s heroic efforts that this song enjoyably lands in the former camp.
And when I say enjoyable, I really do mean enjoyable, because despite its litany of imperfections “Puppet on a String” is still a pop song, and a GOOD pop song at that (after the Contest, it shot into the top two almost everywhere in Europe and the top ten everywhere else). Regardless of where you stand on the lyrics, they’re short and snappy and even clever in places — “one day I’m feeling down on the ground/ Then I’m up in the air” is particularly ingenious in its double applicability. Its jerky, “oompah” rhythms may have sounded awful to its singer, but they are what make the song both memorable and enjoyable: it sets the blood pumping, and you’re unlikely to forget the up-and-down of the central hook once you’ve heard it. And then there’s the rest of the music, taken straight from the nearest village fete; it’s hard not to listen to it, and imagine yourself in amongst the crowds at an actual carnival, listening to tinny organ music and snacking on cotton candy. I admit I’ve always been a sucker for dreamy, carnivalesque confections, but this one truly has all the fun of the fair.
And when you think about it, is that not Eurovision itself, packed into one single image? A gathering of peoples from far and wide, all crowded into a confined space and having chaotic fun; some of the people there will win, and some of the people will lose, but (as a lyric from that year says) “a splendid time is guaranteed for all”. Perhaps that symbolism is why everyone took to it, perhaps that is why, after years of voting for nothing but ballads and chansons, the juries finally caved in and voted for something unashamedly pop, something (almost) up-to-date — it was a fun song, and a song that felt relatable for once.
Once Eurovision accepted Sandie Shaw as its first pop winner, that was it: the following Contests would see countries drastically embrace kitschy Europop, and that tonal shift would define the ESC’s legacy for decades. (The exception was the French, who stubbornly refused to accept this new normal for another ten years. Plus ça change.) And at the centre of all this, there stood Sandie Shaw and “Puppet on a String”, grudging bedfellows who nonetheless worked so well with each other that they pulled the Contest into a whole new age. There are a lot of people who think that the “modern” era of Eurovision begins in 1968: after all, that was when colour television became a thing, and everyone started getting fancy with presentation. But with respect to all those commentators, I think that modern era begins one year earlier. In fact, I’ll go further — the ESC, at least in the form we know it, fully BEGINS with that 1967 performance of “Puppet on a String”. It is, after all, the song that brought the Contest and the public together. It is the song that turned Eurovision pop.
Rating: 8/10
Best song
Readers will not be surprised to know that second place ALSO went to an Anglophone entry: Ireland’s “If I Could Choose” is a mellow, intimate song, full of domestic bliss and Sean Dunphy’s velvety voice; for once my cynical self cannot find anything to sneer at, so calm and lovely it is. Below them we have France, trying to drag the romantic ballad into the 60s with “Il doit faire beau là-bas”; Noëlle Cordier does sing well and it sounds less sonically cluttered than recent French offerings, but given how many songs still sound like that in the Contest it’s nothing to write home about.
The 1967 Contest is, for me, a vintage year: the experimentation we found last year has ramped up even more, and even the entries that didn’t try new things sounds lovely and fun. Nothing represents the spirit of the times more than my third place for this year: Portugal sent out Eduardo Nascimento (Eurovision’s first Black male artist) to sing “O vento mudou”, a wonderfully mysterious and expertly modulated song that also shows how the increasing diversity of both influences and talent changed the Contest for the better. (His swaying and his imploring “oiçam”s make him easily the most charismatic performer in Vienna.)
Above him we have Sandie Shaw, whose performance I have already gushed enough about. My first place, however, goes to an even bigger song, in fact the biggest Eurovision song of the 60s: for it was Luxembourg this year that gave us one of the prettiest songs ever to grace the Eurovision stage. I cannot exaggerate how many times I replayed “L’amour est bleu” growing up — a tempest of feelings wrapped in swirling strings, this song is romance in its purest form, confected by the writers of “Tom Pillibi” and beautifully brought to life by Vicky Leandros. The way she sings that first “pleure mon coeur” lays waste to my heart every single time I listen to it, and it’s such a shame that it was the (admittedly excellent) instrumental version which took over the world — how can you listen to those vocals, and think a song is better off without them? “L’amour est bleu” is THE perfect ESC tune, and my undisputed favourite entry of the 60s… and probably the entire twentieth century too.
I would now like to collect my promotional fees from Radio Television Luxembourg.
| PLACE | ACTUAL RESULTS | MY PICKS |
|---|---|---|
| 1st | United Kingdom, “Puppet on a String” | Luxembourg, “L’amour est bleu” |
| 2nd | Ireland, “If I Could Choose“ | United Kingdom, “Puppet on a String” |
| 3rd | France, “Il doit faire beau là-bas“ | Portugal, “O vento mudou“ |
Next time
Eurovision explodes into full colour and joy, and sour grapes are justified for once.
Inkpot Shuffles in the Twilight 
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