ESC Edinburgh 1972 — “Après toi”

Eurovision 1972

full show

Date: 25 March 1972
Venue: Usher Hall, Edinburgh
Winning country: Luxembourg (3^rd win)
Winning entry: Vicky Leandros, “Après toi”

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Vicky Leandros, at least in my books, can do no wrong when it comes to Eurovision. Five years before her win at the ESC, she had graced the stage at Vienna with the immortal “L’amour est bleu”, a song so powerful that it had swept the world while leaving the singer in its wake. Her first appearance for Luxembourg is perhaps my favourite ESC song from the 20^th century — certainly few others have come to having the same effect on my heart (and, more realistically, replay value). And so it seems inevitable that she would win the Contest upon her return; and even if the song’s not as amazing as her first appearance at Eurovision, it’s still very much a strong and worthy sequel.

So much had changed, though, in the five years between “L’amour est bleu” and “Après toi”. Compare and contrast Luxembourg 1967 with Luxembourg 1972, and the differences in the singer onstage are vast: long, flowing hair instead of a short bob, freer use of the hands, the addition of the distinctly Hellenic stage name “Leandros” onto the vague, universal mononym “Vicky”. The artist who strode onto the stage in colourful Edinburgh was a very different person from the one who’d picked her way nervously through the orchestra in black-and-white Vienna: more experienced, more charismatic.

But it wasn’t just Vicky Leandros that had changed. Not only were there more countries and more languages in the Contest, but the whole zeitgeist had shifted since “L’amour est bleu”. There was a lot more emphasis on peace and love, with no less than four folk acts onstage in Edinburgh, all singing about the pleasures of appreciating the world around you, or even more explicitly the benefits of living together in peace. One of them had even covered, not four months ago, one of the most famous odes to the act of singing in perfect harmony (as well as Coca-Cola).

But what was striking about all this was that though the person and the circumstances had changed, the song that won hadn’t. Amidst all those youth-oriented, hippie-adjacent songs, “Après toi” turned out to be a very traditional, grown-up ballad akin to those of the mid-60s. It certainly sounds like that from the get-go: a loud orchestral build-up, then Leandros’ quietly describing a breakup in broad strokes. She does all this in halting tones, as if she is physically pained by the mere thought of uttering more than half a sentence at once. “From now on…”, she says, pausing to look appropriately sorrowful — “… you will forget me”. (Granted, all this is slightly undercut by Leandros’ plummy voice, which always makes her sound like a way-too-sincere teenager at a high school talent show. But for a drippy ballad like this, it does the trick.)

Such ponderous pauses aren’t a million miles from, say, those of “Merci, Chérie”; it is on these pauses, pregnant with an unspoken meaning to be inferred by the audience, that the chanson lives and dies. But there are other touches from yesteryear throughout the song and the performance: from the full-bodied accompaniment of the orchestra, to the focus on Leandros as a solo performer herself — here, the camerawork seems to say, is a woman in a long black dress singing a song well, instead of a girl going through a terrible heartbreak. Isn’t she a good performer? And indeed she is — as evidenced when the dam finally breaks, and all those emotions come flooding out: “after you, I couldn’t live anymore/ I couldn’t live, except by remembering you!” The turbulence in Vicky Leandros is much more obvious here than it was in 1967: she closes her eyes, she raises a quivering hand. Her voice breaks, just a tiny bit. Again, it’s the kind of dramatic proclamation that would have been much more at home in Eurovision ten years ago.

This last sentence might sound a bit odd — isn’t drama de rigueur in any Eurovision song? But though it’s true that drama had never left the ESC, it had somewhat fallen out of fashion with the juries around the turn of the 70s; a look at the top threes of the period between 1967-72 show a shift away from the breathless and sometimes tortured declarations of love, in favour of a more positive, generalised outlook. No longer were diatribes of barely-suppressed rage (like those of Luxembourg’s first winner) in vogue; now ESC lyricists looked to the world around them for inspiration, or the daily miracles that made life worth living. The specific language they used became simpler, more easily accessible — or at least a little less pretentious. (Of course, this also led to things like “La, la, la” or “Boom Bang-a-Bang”, but most of them managed to keep that charm without descending into asininity.)

Still, it would be disingenuous to say that the lessons of the previous half-decade had been completely discarded with the retro turn in “Après toi”. Running through Leandros’ song is a startling frankness: “With you, I learned to laugh/ And my laughter only comes through you”, “After you, I could perhaps give my tenderness/ But never again my love”. It is a frankness that we haven’t seen for quite a while: of all the ESC winners that put love front and centre, all but two or three seemed curiously reluctant to articulate exactly what it meant to them, instead choosing to make generic comments about the world around them and then pull the pathetic fallacy. “Après toi” is brave enough to confront the fallout of heartbreak head-on, and in pretty intricate detail too: “after you, I’ll only have wet eyes, empty hands, a joyless heart”. Could this be the very same lyricist who’d penned those preachy, grandstanding lyrics on selfishness just last year?

Well, it could; Yves Dessca’s lines here, much-improved from “Un banc, un arbre, une rue” they might be, still give only a glimpse of depth rather than fully exploring all those emotions; the second verse, with its grand total of TWO sentences, strikes one as being particularly unfulfilling — when you have a song this interested in luxuriating in every detail, every emotion, surely you need more material than six paltry lines. Which brings us to the song’s other problem: being at its heart not much more than a technical showcase, “Après toi” is a song that is infinitely more interested in wallowing in its own misery than it is in exorcising it. Much of this is down to Vicky Leandros’ own performance style: stopping to introspect twice every line and wring any available emotion from the four words she’s just uttered, she progresses through the song at a glacial pace; it seems like a nice, pensive touch at first listen, but transmogrifies into a patience tester by song’s end.

But then, this fumbled mix of lyrical precision with musical miscalculation serves as an excellent sign of the Eurovision times once more. It is important to note that although there WERE hippies or hippie-adjacent people wandering around the Usher Hall stage, the ESC hadn’t suddenly gone all peace-and-love. The vast majority of the acts there were still sterile solo ballads, and the Luxembourgish win merely reflected the hold they continued to have, even in that day and age. But there still lies a difference between “Après toi” and its forebears: it is neither a cackhanded sobfest that dances in frustrating circles round its subject, nor a blazing pioneer of music for the 1970s. It is a delicate tightrope-walk of elements across the ages, sung by a capable performer — and a song that showed how the ESC was, finally, taking steps to catch up with the world.

Rating: 7/10

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Best song

It was the biggest stars of the night (by far) who helped the UK lapped up yet another second place. Perhaps the song is a little distant from the actual folk rock that’d made their name in the first place, but the New Seekers’ “Beg, Steal or Borrow” still fits in with the times like a jigsaw piece; a joyous, raucous romp that bursts with vitality and pretty harmonies, it really should have been bigger around the world. To balance, we have another third-placer from Germany: “Nur die Liebe läßt uns leben” is a swingy tune that perhaps takes itself a little too seriously, but its conversational style and bongo drumbeat is undeniable.

This year was quite a mixed bag: yes there were many good songs, but there were also many tepid ones. I’ll quickly shout out Austria’s pastoral “Falter im Wind”, which has gained a pretty reputation in the years since and is a lovely little ditty (and much better than the ditzy Irish ballad that the fandom enjoys cooing over for some reason). But now to my top picks: the Netherlands’ “Als het om de liefde gaat” is my third this year — though it might have a slightly repetitive chorus, Sandra and Andres are such breezy, irreverent personalities that they manage to make it seem utterly charming. Above them, my second place goes to Luxembourg; as detailed upstairs I have reservations about “Après toi” but the mere stage presence of Vicky Leandros is enough to sweep most of them away. But I have to admit that this was an unfair fight from the start for me: when you’re coming up against “Beg, Steal or Borrow”, everything else simply pales in comparison. So for the third time in five years, I’ll have to give it to the United Kingdom — their entry is a pure ray of sunshine and ecstasy, one of those rare songs which carry you up to Heaven as you listen. Sometimes I feel that 1967 and 1972 should have swapped winners…

(Is the United Kingdom my new Luxembourg? We’ll see.)

PLACE	ACTUAL RESULTS	MY PICKS
1st	Luxembourg, “Après toi”	United Kingdom, “Beg, Steal or Borrow”
2nd	United Kingdom, “Beg, Steal or Borrow”	Luxembourg, “Après toi”
3rd	Germany, “Nur die Liebe läßt uns leben“	Netherlands, “Als het om de liefde gaat“

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Next time

Seventeen years into the Contest, Europe discovers the true power of television.