ESC London 1968 — “La, la, la”

Eurovision 1968

full show (UK entry and winner’s reprise missing)

Date: 6 April 1968
Venue: Royal Albert Hall, London
Winning country: Spain (1^st win)
Winning entry: Massiel, “La, la, la”

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Bill Martin has never gotten over it. When the Eurovision Song Contest celebrated its 60^th anniversary in 2015, the BBC commissioned a documentary to recount the history of the contest, edition by edition, and when they came to London 1968, the writer of “Congratulations” was still upset about losing to Spain by one point, four-and-a-half decades after the fact. “They must have rigged it,” he says, with folded arms and a conspiratorial smile on his face. “How could a song like that have won?”

And look: this is obviously just sour grapes. Martin is not exactly a saint, nor a reliable source: he once sued George Harrison over an impromptu rendition of “Congratulations” the latter made on All Things Must Pass, and has even tried to claim a later Eurovision winner for himself as well (conveniently, right after the original writer had passed on). There is absolutely no evidence that Televisión Española conducted a massive jury-rig, and Martin’s claims — repeated throughout the decades — are nothing but a petulant attempt at disinformation. But a stopped clock is right twice a day, and in his latter statement, he is absolutely correct. “La, la, la”, the song that gave Spain their first and only unqualified Eurovision win, is a terrible song.

Exactly what makes this song bad for me, however, is not easy to explain. I have a laundry list of grievances against “La, la, la”, but simply listing them all out does not adequately convey the discomfort I hear listening to this song, and I’ve been told that it’s the lazy way out for any critic (or any dilettante with a blog trying to imitate one) — so instead, let’s talk about joy. In pop music, joy is a much trickier emotion to utilise than, say, sadness or anger. The balance needs to be just right: too little, and your song comes off as pedestrian and unmemorable; too much, and you risk sounding like an insufferable, saccharine creep. But you also need to show that this happiness means something to you, that it’s not something that you’re content to keep to yourself, but rather that you want to tell the whole world. All in all, a hefty task, but when done well the results can be shattering: all my favourite songs are those which envelop the listener with their ecstasy, convince them to take part in it as well; they may be peppy, bubblegum confections, but you feel like you could live on that bubblegum forever.

The problem with “La, la, la” is that it isn’t that kind of song. More specifically, it veers so wildly between two different kinds of joy that it feels more like a manic episode in search of an outlet. The frantic gallop of the opening bars (literally, that opening always brings to my mind images of horse-racing) is abruptly succeeded by an ominous descent into gloom, while Massiel intones “I sing to the morning that witnesses my youth” as if she’s a high priestess offering a sacrifice. A couple of sentences after that, the sinister ballad turns into a hopeful ballad, as the singer starts waxing lyrical about how “everything in life is like a song”, whereupon we careen into the galloping chorus; then lather, rinse, repeat.

A sequence filled with twists and turns, yet it is a sequence that lasts barely more than one minute. And therein lies my biggest complaint with this song: at no point in this cycle is the listener ever allowed to feel. Each section barely has time to make its impact before the next one comes hurtling through, an emotional rollercoastering that ends up going nowhere. The song jerks you around by your heartstrings so that it can shake some kind of feeling out of you; there is so little time allotted to the triumphant build-up before the chorus — evocative of a sunrise, it’s one of the more genuinely affecting parts of the song — that none of the resultant joy feels honest or even earned.

This cavalier attitude to emotion epitomises the 1968 Contest: I talked last time about the populist effect pop music had on Eurovision, and indeed there was a marked effort in the 1968 crop to explore the relationship between pop and emotion, or at least to sound more appealing to the casual viewer. Nor was the potential for expression limited to the sonic realm: the BBC had introduced colour television last autumn, which meant that things like colour or costume could also help convey tone and mood too. The problem was, a lot of them didn’t really know how to go about it: the broadcasters of 1968 were completely lost as to what all these expressive possibilities meant, in the same way that 17^th-century people had no idea what to do with pineapples. Yes you got some good ones (if a bit eccentric — Yugoslavia sent out two minstrels to do a Slavic version of a Vivaldi concerto), but for every UK or Norway or Germany there was an Ireland or Portugal or Spain. Such countries presented songs that either looked like a Technicolor version of boring early-60s Eurovision fare, or didn’t so much emote as splatter it everywhere, frantically trying to portray ALL the emotions in the hopes that something would fit.

But “La, la, la” is in a wretched class of its own, because while many of these songs were tonally incompetent, they could still rely on well-constructed lyrics to provide a bit of substance. Yet the Spanish entry provides no such comfort: we are given some unspecific shit about how the singer sings “to the earth that saw me grow”, “to the day that I felt love” — what does all this even MEAN? — we are then told that “walking through life, I learned this song”, and you’d think that with all this happiness bubbling up inside, said resulting song would be a loquacious one that has a million words to say about the wonders of life and what it means to her. This, however, is a song that refuses to clarify what it means to feel this joy, that decides that a million “la”s is sufficient to convey everything, so what comes out instead is one of the most mind-numbing choruses ever to grace the Eurovision stage.

Now, we’re a long way away from the abstract lyrical imagery of early Eurovision, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It makes songs more relatable and easier to understand — except, that is, when the alternative is THIS brain-dead travesty. You cannot give us all this anticipatory build-up unless you follow it up with some form of catharsis; if, instead of writing this paragraph, I had opted to simply write “ha, ha-ha-ha, hahaha, HAHAHA” to convey my distaste, none of you would take me seriously ever again. And yet it goes on, and goes on relentlessly: by one count, there are 123 “la”s in the choruses, and they take up like two-thirds of the whole song. At one point, Massiel clutches her head with a pained look on her face, looking like she’s been struck with a headache after singing all those meaningless words, and I think there’s no image that better represents “La, la, la” than that. This is not a Eurovision song. This is a symphony of rictus grins.

Taken alone, none of the elements I’ve just listed would be a deal-breaker. (After all, forty-odd years down the line Cyprus would send a song that had even more “la”s than this one, yet that at least had a good dance routine that appealed to my shallow sensibilities.) But the combination of all these things — shallow lyrics, incoherent moods, the unearned joy — all add up to a nightmarish picture of lazy songwriting, one that ended up stealing the crown away from other, more deserving songs. Hardly fitting, I think, for such a watershed moment in the Contest’s history.

Rating: 2/10

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Best song

As mentioned above, the UK missed out on a consecutive win by a single point, and it’s kind of a shame because Cliff Richard’s “Congratulations” is actually very pleasant, carbon copy of “Puppet on a String” though it is: you only need listen to it once to see how much this could easily have been a well-deserved victory lap. A few points behind Cliff we had France, with Isabelle Aubret returning for HER victory lap; I mentioned last year that I liked “La source” much better than her winning effort, and that’s an opinion that still holds, with her subdued yet pained performance gently guiding the listener through the song’s tragic, ugly, innocence-shattering tale. It’s an impeccable act of storytelling.

Perhaps it was just the advent of colour, but I found myself liking a lot of the 1968 crop — some of them might be flops, but at least you can see the flop sweat. A fan favourite in recent years has been Germany, whose “Ein Hoch der Liebe” is truly remarkable; her type of cutesy isn’t my thing, but I can see why everybody likes it, and more importantly it has all the elements of Spain but does them much better. But now for my top three: France was my third place for the year, and I’ve praised that enough in the previous paragraph; my second place, however, goes to Norway’s sweaty and self-referential entry — Odd Børre might not have the most rousing song, but his willingness to go so rogue simply has to be rewarded, and surely most of us can also relate to the “Stress” he has about the daily grind. But by the skin of his teeth, it’s Cliff Richard singing for the United Kingdom who takes it. Love him or hate him, Cliff is a natural performer, and his performance carries the whole song — not for one moment did I stop believing that he was genuinely in love (his happy little dance at the end is something I still adore after all these years), and I think that suits the triumphant and euphoric spirit of “Congratulations” just fine.

PLACE	ACTUAL RESULTS	MY PICKS
1st	Spain, “La, la, la”	United Kingdom, “Congratulations”
2nd	United Kingdom, “Congratulations”	Norway, “Stress“
3rd	France, “La source“	France, “La source”

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Next time

Welcome to ’69 — what the hell is going on?