ESC Stockholm 1975 — “Ding-a-Dong”

Eurovision 1975

full show

Date: 22 March 1975
Venue: Sankt Eriks-Mässan, Stockholm
Winning country: Netherlands (4^th win)
Winning entry: Teach-In, “Ding-A-Dong”*

*I originally considered using the title as spelt out onscreen — “Ding Dinge Dong” — but A. it’s not how the song is known these days, B. it sets up trouble for my 1978/1983 piece, and 3. it looks stupid.

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Imagine, if you will, that you are a European television viewer in March 1975. Outside it is the same old story of chaos — South Vietnam choking out its death rattle, communists running rampant in Ethiopia — but on this chilly Saturday night you are watching the 20^th Eurovision Song Contest, and you are curious about who will win this year.

This year it’s being held in Sweden, courtesy of that charming group who won last year with some song or another about a battle (was it “Austerlitz”, or “Stalingrad”?). It was nice at the time, but this is the first time you’ve thought about them since last year, and anyway their brand of loud, raucous rock is not really your thing. But at the same time, it does make you wonder: just what are you going to get this year? After the Swedish win, everything seems possible: Elton John, progressive rock, maybe even Kraftwerk. Or will it be business as usual, with a return to those stirring belters of old?

The first act appears, a Dutch band with the rather quaint name of “Teach-In”. As they approach the stage, you see footage of the artists painting a picture that represents their country — more or less (how, you may wonder, does a black man in harlequin makeup represent the Netherlands?). The conductor takes his position, picks up his baton; someone beats a countdown — then abruptly stops. A brief silence, and then suddenly everything comes to life: a heraldic drumbeat, a rush of guitar, noisy and urgent; it feels more like the lead music for a breaking news report than a pop tune for a song contest. And it is at that moment that you realise it: fifty weeks on from ABBA, nobody still knows anything at all.

“Ding-a-Dong” is a song of pure chaos. That chaos stems from the title down: at the beginning of Teach-In’s performance, the words “Ding dinge dong” flash across the screen — we’re barely three seconds in, and already this song is suffering from an identity crisis atop its musical turbulence. Indeed, “identity crisis” feels like an apt description of “Ding-a-Dong”, which shifts, morphs and transmogrifies in an attempt to figure out what it is and who it’s trying to appeal to: not only is there indecision about the title, there’s also confusion about its genre (is it pop? Rock? Somewhere in between?) as well as the musical tone they’re trying to set — anyone would be hard-pressed to find another song that flits in between major and minor keys with such reckless abandon. Is this a happy song or not?

Which brings us to the lyrics. To describe them as gobbledygook would be an insult to gobbledygook; such is their incoherence that one wonders if lyricists Will Luikinga or Eddy Ouwens had ever heard of the concept of English or of grammatical cohesion. Consider: “Ding-a-dong, listen to it, maybe it’s a big hit/ Even when your lover is gone, gone, gone!” Or perhaps: “and the world looks sunny, everyone is funny/ When you sing a song that goes ding, dinge, dong!” I would suggest that there is a serious mismatch between these words and the twitchy melody, but that would assume that there is a central idea to the former in the first place. Compared to this song, many of the lyrics of modern Eurovision sound like Byronic masterpieces.

And yet. Just like Eurovision songs these days, the poor quality of the lyrics aren’t really at the front of my mind when I listen to “Ding-a-Dong” — not when the song is such a joyful romp. The opening burst of music might sound tense, emergent, almost cacophonous; yet all the elements you hear within it work beautifully together: the guitars, the xylophone, even the tubular bells (especially the tubular bells), everything combines to create an entrance to the song that’s simply too grand to resist. It powers along at a ferocious pace, even as Getty Kaspers’ vocals come in and the song settles down to a slightly lower energy; such is its speed that we arrive at the second verse barely 40 seconds in. There’s simply so much to take in, so much to pick out from the soundscapes, that one doesn’t really feel like nitpicking until the song is over.

Listen to the chaos a little longer, though, and parallels with last year’s success story begin to emerge. Gaudy costumes, check; fast peppy melody with heavy guitar work, check; English lyrics that make your song understandable (in a very loose sense) to people from different countries, double check. They put their own spin on it, of course, but “Ding-a-Dong”’s playbook doesn’t seem too far removed from ABBA’s last year, a continuation of the shift away from the ballads of the 60s. And yet there are ALSO signs that Teach-In aren’t really ready to leave the past behind: as Chris West neatly observed, the way that the band utilises the word “uptight” — as a synonym for “fine”, rather than “stuffy” — immediately dates them at least a decade back; meanwhile, a sense of 60s whimsy pervades their performance, what with the long unkempt hair and the emphasis on imagery (“when the sun is up in the sky”, whatever that means). The whole vibe is more “I See a Star” than “Waterloo”, which means they can’t even decide which 1974 success story they want to emulate — the one looking forward, or the one looking back?

In a weird way, the continuing indecision of “Ding-a-Dong” feels emblematic of the post-ABBA Eurovision landscape. Everything is relative, of course, but the 1975 Contest (avast, ye fans of Matty Healy) seemed to bring a greater level of experimentation than we’d seen in Eurovision for a while. The United Kingdom tried symphonic rock, Germany tried soul. Italy went all out and sent a funk duo. Of course there WERE the usual chansons and ballads and quirky hits, and the schlager notoriously prevalent at the ESC is beginning to rear its head here — but the above are also hints that various countries had taken note of last year, and were trying to broaden their horizons a little, bring Europe even closer to the pop markets. Just how to do this, however, was the question: if the previous Contest had shown anything, it was that BOTH modern pop and traditional ballads were equally likely to garner appeal from the juries as well as the public.

It is in this context that we find the Dutch entry, attempting to straddle the gap between two different conceptions of the ESC, one modern, one traditional. This is why I think that “Ding-a-Dong” is such a chaotic song — so often we think of chaos as a situation of despair, of complete nothingness. Yet true chaos, I think, does not come from absence, but rather overabundance: one has so many options that the task of choosing the best one and/or the right one becomes positively Herculean. Behind all that busyness and indecision in “Ding-a-Dong” lies Teach-In’s struggle to bridge this divide, to reconcile all these options into one. Old vs. new, feeling vs. coherence. “Everything is uptight” vs. “try to smile when you say goodbye”. Pop that makes an outside impact, vs. music that charms the stuffy juries at Eurovision. And so on.

I think it’s a minor miracle, honestly, that all these elements sound right at home with each other in “Ding-a-Dong”. Despite its deceptively simple structure and relatively short runtime, the song is one of Eurovision’s more complex offerings; it is a testament to the writers’ craft that it manages most of its shifts with unflagging speed and effortless efficiency, while still managing to capture a dash of melancholia within all the breeziness. This is a song that keeps you constantly surprised: just when you think you’ve got a hold on the direction it’s headed, it shifts gears and slips from your comprehension once more. All of this may have been borne out of chaos, but what Teach-In bring us is a pleasant sort of chaos, a mostly-successful attempt by an ESC entry to use songcraft to reason their way out of a thousand different impulses, of a thousand different musical possibilities.

Of course, it wouldn’t last. Eurovision loathes uncertainty (well, Eurovision back then loathed uncertainty), and just as the diverse tastes of 1969 were quickly unified into one single block, so too did the uncertainties of 1975 swiftly get ironed out. By next year the Contest would soon settle into another consensus once more, by which I mean that it reverted to its ballad- and schlager-loving, declamatory ways. But before all that, we got this song: trying hard to be all things to all men, and succeeding well enough despite the chaos. One can only imagine what might have been if the musicians (and TV stations) of Europe had been just a little more content to dwell in it.

Rating: 7/10

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Best song

Having decided that he’d had enough Eurovision for a lifetime, Cliff Richard sent his sometimes-backing band the Shadows out to represent the United Kingdom instead and grab their usual second place. The Shadows were themselves seasoned hitmakers, and so it is no surprise that “Let Me Be the One” is a dazzling, banging tune; even if they messed up the beginning, it’s still massively endearing. Just below them in third was Italy, who as mentioned upstairs served Europe a slice of funk — of course “Era” doesn’t hold a candle to Stevie Wonder or Earth, Wind & Fire (too deliberate, for one), but it’s still a massive left-field turn for the ESC, and all things considered Wess and Dori Ghezzi pull it off rather well.

Even if the acts this year failed to live up to the exciting potential of ABBA, they were all still somewhat interesting in their own way: as evidenced by the also-rans that year, there were still efforts being made, and even those who stuck with old-school schlager, like host country Sweden, still had some rather excellent tunes to go with it. By some strange quirk of fate my third place and second place are also the actual third place (Italy) and second place (the UK), thereby for once saving my readers from reading a long justifying spiel. But there was one song whose enigmatic nature captivated me even more: at first glance Switzerland’s entry looks like a normal story, but as “Mikado” goes on you can’t help but feel unnerved, unsettled by the hints of darkness behind the innocence, and the obvious relish with which they are revealed. There are few Eurovision songs that can convincingly sound sinister — but Simone Drexel managed it, and so she has my vote.

PLACE	ACTUAL RESULTS	MY PICKS
1st	Netherlands, “Ding-a-Dong”	Switzerland, “Mikado”
2nd	United Kingdom, “Let Me Be the One“	United Kingdom, “Let Me Be the One”
3rd	Italy, “Era“	Italy, “Era”

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Next Time

Why is Eurovision so whimsical?