Eurovision 1970
Date: 21 March 1970
Venue: RAI Congrescentrum, Amsterdam
Winning country: Ireland (1st win)
Winning entry: Dana, “All Kinds of Everything”
When I was about five or six, my parents bought this double compilation of folk songs called “Let’s Folk”. (Knowing how many people from Hong Kong forget the “l” in words, the title seems an absolutely hilarious choice these days.) The night my mother bought it home, we sat in the living room for hours, listening to countless bands from yesteryear whilst trying to decipher the lyrics. I asked my mother many deep questions that night, things like “is Puff the Magic Dragon real?” or “why are Mr. Simon and Mr. Garfunkel so interested in a fair from Scarborough?”
My mother responded to most of these queries by telling me to pick another song from the tracklist — and this is where this piece diverges from the one I wrote for “Those Were the Days”, for the track I enjoyed most that night was track fourteen on disc two, a song called “All Kinds of Everything” that painted picture after romantic picture in my young, impressionable brain. I imprinted the lyrics into my head, and spent many an hour imagining the “seagulls and aeroplanes”, the “city sights” and “neon lights” shining in the pitch-black night. It was one of my best memories as a young boy — just staring into space, and conjuring up all those simple images.
I listened to that song long into the night, and for many nights after that — for years, I would drift off at night while listening to it in my bed. And what all of this means is that I have Dana Rosemary Brown to thank for my first Eurovision experience, long before I knew Eurovision was even a thing. It also means that for my review of the 1970 ESC winner, all pretence at reason and logical analysis must go out the window — for there is no way I can even try to be objective for “All Kinds of Everything”, one of the songs that literally defined my childhood.
What I find interesting about the 1970 Contest is just how many different outcomes we could have gotten. Sure, there were fewer countries participating after last year’s scoring fiasco, but the ones that remained had upped their game massively. The Spanish delegate was one Julio Iglesias, then still years from being the prototype Iberian lover; we also had the Netherlands doing their version of the Fifth Dimension, and who should we find representing the UK but the artist of “Those Were the Days” herself, Mary Hopkin. Everything in Eurovision is relative, of course, but these artists (and many others!) brought a series of excellent tunes to the RAI Congrescentrum — tuneful, lyrically intriguing, better than even what the pop revival of the late 60s had engendered — and it was perfectly possible (and, in Hopkin’s case, even predicted) that one of those songs could have won.
But none of them did. Instead, the crown went to one of the simplest songs we’ve seen from Eurovision thus far. There is nothing within Dana’s song that even hints at complexity: not the music, which presents no orchestral flourishes and follows a very predictable verse-chorus-bridge-chorus again structure; and not the lyrics, which seems to almost entirely consist of proper nouns and the word “and” (“snowdrops AND daffodils, butterflies AND bees!”). This song simply does not do groundbreaking: it’s a young girl singing vaguely about romance and lifting her voice half a key in the final chorus, which had been done at least once every year since Sandie Shaw. (Sure, this young girl sat down to do it instead of standing up, but I will remind you that Jørgen Ingmann also sat down to play His Guitar.) Even if it wasn’t quite a return to the somnambulant ballads of the Contest’s first decade, it does seem like an overly safe choice — a win based on simplicity, on stability, on linguistic recognition. You could even argue that Ireland’s somewhat annoying habit of winning the ESC with adequate but unremarkable ballads starts with “All Kinds of Everything”.
All of these criticisms are very valid: there is no denying that this song is simple almost to the point of inanity, and twee to the point of being saccharine. And I get why people don’t like it: when that happens in Eurovision, time and again it’s a cynical move, an unconvincing attempt to broaden appeal by aiming towards the lowest common denominator. But Dana’s interpretation feels different to me: what separates “All Kinds of Everything” from the pandering of later entries is its unaffected sincerity. Throughout her performance the eighteen-year-old, her feet dangling off her too-large seat, projects an air of innocence, imbuing every sentence with a wide-eyed wonder: witness the way she skips lightly over “city sights, neon lights, grey skies or blue”. Even if it’s all an act, it’s still a very believable one.
But the song’s greatest strength lies, paradoxically, in how little it says. Yes, the lyrics are nothing but objects and the occasional abstract concept, but in its refusal to go into detail, “All Kinds of Everything” also leads us to empathise with the singer. For Dana, the mere mention of these items is enough to kickstart a Proustian process, only instead of madeleines and lime blossom tea it’s expanded to “all kinds of everything” — clunky wording, yes, but just the sort of thing that an awestruck young person, deep in the throes of first love, might resort to saying. (Except for Romantic poets, people are generally not eloquent when expressing their love. Come to think of it, I refuse to believe that even John Keats could come up with romantic expressions at a pinch.) For me, that one phrase contains a million thoughts and feelings, too ineffable to be put into words, too joyful to be encapsulated in a three-minute tune. So instead of trying to explain everything, Dana bids us join her, to imagine the things that make her sing. She tells us to visualise the seagulls and aeroplanes, to feel on our skin both the “winds that go howling” and the “breezes that sigh”; to make ourselves at home, in amongst the city sights and neon lights.
And when those elements come together, they come together beautifully. I’ve listened to this song for almost twenty years now, but time has not diminished the vivid series of tableaux conjured up by “All Kinds of Everything”. It really is astonishing how a few simple cues are enough to draw out the most complex pictures: when she talks about “sunshine and holidays, postcards to write”, I immediately think of a small coastal town, one with narrow winding streets that lead down into a harbour dotted with little fishing vessels, and a town square lined with pastel houses. when she talks about “dances, romances, things of the night”, I can almost hear the footsteps and shuffles of that solitary couple as they dance on the rain-glistened asphalt just outside the cinema. I’ve never been to Ireland myself — maybe Michael (hello Michael!) can put me up if I visit someday — but I imagine that there must be somewhere in the country that looks just like that, and it feels impossibly romantic.
You’ll notice that what I’ve just said has not much to do with the actual lyrics of “All Kinds of Everything”. Nowhere in the song does Dana ever go into that kind of detail; her own words are all the broadest strokes imaginable. But there is something about the tone with which she sings those lyrics that makes me default to the most romantic scenarios possible. Her little swoop into that final chorus — “oh, DANces, roMANces, things of the night!” — is one of the most magical moments of the ESC we’ve heard so far, an aural command for the skies to darken and the lovestruck couple to materialise. Lying in bed and listening to that song when I was 14, I would imagine taking flight on that line, soaring above the hills and dales and watching the hazy clouds form on the horizon. It’s all so ethereal and very, very powerful.
This ability to inspire the listener — to wring out complexity from the simplest of words — is why, despite many valid accusations of tweeness and oversimplicity, I have still found myself endeared to Dana all these years. Maybe I’m giving “All Kinds of Everything” way more credit than I should; maybe this is just a song with lazy songwriting and a singer way out of her depth. But then I remember the central mission of the ESC: to unite people of different beliefs in song, to allow those people and those beliefs to flourish despite having little else in common. That such a modest song can evoke so many different visions speaks, I think, to its simple, guileless charm.
Naturally, everybody rushed to follow its lead: as we progress through the years, we’ll see more and more second- or even third-rate imitators, knockoffs which tried to emulate the innocent virtues of this year’s winner while burdening their lyrics with heavy-handed, sometimes insultingly vacuous messaging. In that sense I can see why people might not be kind to this song: it’s so easy, particularly with the hindsight bestowed by history, to see in its winsome demeanour naivete and even mawkishness. But to compare Dana’s song with those later songs would be to miss her lightness and her sincerity; none of those songs ever managed to convey wonder and romance with her level of conviction. Even after all these years, I still think that Dana and “All Kinds of Everything” stand alone as pioneers — and seasons will never change the way that I love them.
Rating: 8/10
Best song
It’s not early-era Eurovision if the UK doesn’t get second place, and this year was no exception: as mentioned earlier, Mary Hopkin came very close to beating a fellow Anglophone with her entry, “Knock, Knock, Who’s There?” Freshly liberated from Paul McCartney’s controlling ways, Hopkin nevertheless sings the kind of sweet, yearning lament that she’d become known for in the past couple of years — and to be fair to her, she absolutely aces it. In third place, on the other hand, was someone from the other end of the spectrum: Katja Ebstein came out sonorously declaiming how “Wunder gibt es immer wieder”, and although this song moves a little too slowly for my liking it’s still a magnificent showcase for Ebstein, who seems to have made a thing out of getting third places for Germany… but more on that next year.
As I’ve already alluded to above, this was a very, very good Contest: I can’t remember ever enjoying one this much, and it speaks to the quality of this year that I even found something to like about the French entry. My third place this year is Yugoslavia: Eva Sršen’s “Pridi, dala ti bom cvet” starts to repeat itself after a while, but Sršen has such a tender and charming voice that it’s hopeless to ignore her loving calls; not to mention how the song sounds like the coming of spring itself, with love and life blossoming all around you — an underrated classic. Above the Yugoslav entry is Dana, whose simple yet evocative paeans provided a high bar to clear…
… but one person DID clear it. It’s a historical injustice that by 1970 Mary Hopkin was already on her last legs as a commercial artist; one look at her performance for the United Kingdom shows that her mastery of emotion and poise was still at a level few could match. Add to that a song which perfectly encapsulates the longings of young love, and you have a stone-cold classic which absolutely should have won that year — the quiet triumph with which she delivers that final “take off your coat and come INSIDE” knocks me off my feet every time. (A few commentators online have, not unreasonably, sensed chauvinism and clinginess in between the lyrics; yet I think its sentiments are absolutely applicable to both genders, and it’s definitely nothing on the levels of “Puppet on a String”, so I feel no qualms in wholeheartedly supporting this one. Plus, come on, it’s Mary Hopkin.)
| PLACE | ACTUAL RESULTS | MY PICKS |
|---|---|---|
| 1st | Ireland, “All Kinds of Everything” | United Kingdom, “Knock, Knock, Who’s There?” |
| 2nd | United Kingdom, “Knock, Knock, Who’s There?” | Ireland, “All Kinds of Everything” |
| 3rd | Germany, “Wunder gibt es immer wieder“ | Yugoslavia, “Pridi, dala ti bom cvet“ |
(Perhaps it says something about me that my top three are all waifish girls, but it’s a coincidence. I think.)
Next time
This series will be going on hiatus for the winter while I begin a new project in a couple of weeks — rest assured, however, that when we return in February, I will reveal how I lied to you in this blogpost. With good reason, though!
Inkpot Shuffles in the Twilight 
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