Eurovision 1977
Date: 7 May 1977
Venue: Wembley Conference Centre, London
Winning country: France (5th win)
Winning entry: Marie Myriam, “L’Oiseau et l’Enfant”
Most of France’s entries are shit. This is simply an intractable fact: of all the countries that have participated in Eurovision, none have irritated me more than the country of Charles de Gaulle, of Amelie, of unabashed attitudes to sex. Time after time I have been disgusted by their pretentious offerings to Eurovision, their snobbish songs that are full of sound of fury and signify nothing; time after time I have sighed in frustration as they stubbornly offered up chanson after artsy chanson, long after that form of lyrical ballad had slipped out of fashion. True, other countries deliver worse songs. But none of them have been as consistently bad as the French.
And yet it is also a fact that they DO know how to write good songs. Looking back at my detailed ranking list for each year, I was surprised to note how many times France had entered my top five: even “Un premier amour”, which I had very mixed feelings about, had been my personal fourth place for 1962. When the French make an effort at Eurovision, instead of just trying to coast to victory, the results can be breathtaking: I loved their ghostly 1963 entry, and Isabelle Aubret’s haunting story in 1968, and Serge Lama’s melodramatic ode to nature in 1971… I could go on. But the unquestionable highlight for me was in 1976, when they finally wizened up and sent a pop song — a perfect pop song, at that — by Catherine Ferry, whose “Un, deux, trois” was a joyful, wide-eyed romp full of wonder and youth. I never thought that France would have it in them to send something like this, and I was absolutely bowled over. I think it might be the best thing France has ever sent to the ESC.
The year after that, however, they relapsed and sent yet another chanson — yet another artsy, pretentious song with nigh-indecipherable lyrics and way-too-loud vocals. The difference, of course, was that this chanson was just as impeccable, just as perfect, as their last pop entry.
But first, I’d like to pin down just what it is about the chanson that makes it so annoying. I’ve made no secret of my dislike towards this particular form of music in the past couple of years, but that is perhaps a bit too unkind: even in the dark pre-Serge Gainsbourg days, when chansons ruled the roost, there were still some pretty good tunes every now and then — witness Luxembourg’s first winner in 1961, or the aforementioned French entry from two years later. Yet against all the other Francophone songs from the first decade of Eurovision, I can’t help thinking that they were more exceptions than examples: the melodies are catchy, the lyrics memorable. Most chansons in Eurovision, on the other hand, were indolent, incomprehensible affairs, songs that wandered aimlessly while spouting pseudo-deep bullshit for lyrics.
“L’Oiseau et l’Enfant” is also a chanson, and its lyrics are also pseudo-deep bullshit — if there is something profound being expressed in lines like “White, the innocent, the blood of the poet/ Who in singing invents love”, then the meaning escapes me. Yet there is still an indescribable beauty in Joe Gracy’s lyrics, not in the things that are being said, but in the way they are said: Marie Myriam’s voice flows through the verses, smoothly leading us from one to another, connecting beauty to whiteness, whiteness to daylight, daylight to love. It can all seem pretty forced, and so often when you get moments like these in Eurovision, the songwriters always insist on drawing your attention to it (“see how clever we are?”) — but here it becomes a stream of consciousness that swings from one image to the next. When you DO finally pick up on it, it feels ingenious and natural, a melodic pleasure rather than a gimmick.
It’s not just in terms of lyrics that the chanson finds itself subverted here: the melody, too, feels imbued with a purpose not seen in the past 21 years of the Contest. My biggest issue with the chansons France insists on sending (almost) every year is not that they’re overly elaborate — look who’s talking — but that they are never memorable. Back in the Contest’s early days, chansons like Lys Assia’s initial winner were lauded as complex, “high culture” offerings, but over time this transmuted into tunes such as this one, which languidly drift all over the place without any attempt at focus or appeal to the audience; hardly ideal for a song contest where the goal is to have people deem yours the best.
“L’Oiseau et l’Enfant”, on the other hand, has one very simple melodic motif, and it’s amazing how well it goes with the lyrics: rising and falling steadily like human breath, recurring again and again, just like a normal thought process might have its ebbs and flows and cycles. Take for instance this line: “Like the blue bird flying over the earth/ See how the world, the world is beautiful” — I love how it cycles back to the first word of the verse, love how it pauses as if to think of the right adjective to describe the world; and the music adds to that feeling of normality, makes it just another part of the singer’s undulating thoughts. And so when we end up talking about love, it feels like a logical culmination of the process: of COURSE, you cry, all things would lead to love at Eurovision. How foolish I was not to have guessed this.
And it is to Marie Myriam’s eternal credit that she sells that earnest philosophising with such grace and simplicity. This is not a given: so often in Eurovision, an earnest French singer is a bad thing, for it means they believe that their chanson is doing the world a service, that they are uplifting the culture and whatnot. Of course, the same could also be said for the Italians and their canzone, but they never felt as snooty about it; the French always seemed perpetually anxious about their status as cultural protectors of Europe, always trying to reconstruct a world that, to quote a bit of Wes Anderson, “ceased to exist long before they ever entered it”. “L’Oiseau et l’Enfant”, from its lofty title on down, teeters dangerously on that territory as well, but instead it’s tempered by the genuine warmth we get from Myriam, who absolutely sells the song’s simple rapture. I don’t think there are many people who might be able to sing so loudly the words “Me, I’m only a girl of the shadows/ Who sees the evening star shine” and still convince people of her starry-eyed wonder, but she does it.
And all of this — the earnest singer, the naturalistic lyrics, the breath-like nature of the music — all this combines into a song that feels livelier and younger than almost all of the French entries before it. Gone is the quiet languor of previous chansons, replaced by something that throws itself wholeheartedly into the vivacity of Eurovision and the crowd; gone is the illusion that they can still play by their own rules and behave like it’s 1958, replaced by a determination to create their own triumphs once more. You see that ethos in the way Myriam belts the chorus: so many songs have tried to convey their sense of wonder at the world, but so often they feel like mere facsimiles of actual human emotion. On the other hand, with Marie Myriam the realisation that “L’amour, c’est toi; l’amour, c’est moi” comes with audible exultation; she seems genuinely excited by the revelation that love can be you and love can be me.
Emboldened by this realisation, she pushes forward, picking up where the chorus ended — what else can you and I be? — and the thought process continues. She sighs about being “only a girl of the shadows”, and implores someone to “come light up my sun so dark”. She lambasts powerful men, with their warmongering ways; she glorifies a country of love that has no borders, and in particular the children at its heart —
— and it is at this second mention of childishness that the orchestra suddenly disappears. So too, for that matter, does everything else: we smash cut into an empty blue void, a place sans people, sans detail, sans almost everything. In that moment, we can only focus on Marie Myriam’s disembodied voice, quavering in its solitude as if reciting an incantation (and judging by the lyrics, that’s not an unreasonable guess). Instinctively we feel like we are trembling on the edge of something momentous; I’ve known this song for more than a decade now, and that moment still brings me goosebumps every single time. We have looped right back to the beginning, and it looks like the cycle will begin again: “like a child with eyes of light/ Who sees the birds passing in the distance…”
Yet in its final line, the soliloquy turns into something more: Myriam, bathed in the glow of the spotlight, her arms outstretched, swerves away from the predicted ending and instead declares: “we will find this world of love!” It is here that France breaks decisively away from its pre-established patterns, that they finally, actively decide to stop being the lifeless, culturally spent force they have been at Eurovision these past two decades. And so when Marie Myriam hurtles into the chorus, spreads her arms wide, and utters that final roar — “l’enfant… c’est… MOI!” — it is an unmistakable roar of triumph. The battle has been won, the chanson is reinvented, and the French, at long last, have resurrected their fortunes at the ESC; and all it took, it seems, was for them to rediscover their joie de vivre inside them once more.
Rating: 10/10
Best song
Say it with me now, “the United Kingdom got second place once more”. This year the BBC sent singer-songwriter Lynsey de Paul and her songwriting partner Mike Moran to do the bouncy burlesque tune “Rock Bottom”. There are some who claim that this song is even better than the French entry, to which I need only add that these people are absolutely out of their minds. This? This piece of flippant, aimless, discordant garbage BETTER than “L’oiseau et l’enfant”? No wonder the UK keeps on losing, people keep on expecting THIS from them… anywho, in third was another Anglophone country, Ireland’s “It’s Nice to Be in Love Again”, a rather middling and awkward soft rock song that featured two men and two women ambling around onstage and trying to look like they loved each other. The melody’s nice, but not much else is.
France and “L’oiseau et l’enfant” tower so highly over the rest of the competition that the seventeen songs before it can seem like an afterthought. But in my opinion this was a very interesting year: there were satires on the music industry, early uses of synths, and even Beatle tributes. My second place this year is from Belgium, the entry directly before the French: one of the two non-Anglophone entrants singing in English, Dream Express’ cheery tune of “A Million in One, Two, Three” masks some really savage, angry sentiments about the proliferation of political bribery; I don’t think Eurovision had ever gotten this political before, and it’s a left turn so unexpected that it immediately earned my deepest respect. Similarly intense is my third place, the Luxembourgish entry “Frère Jacques”: a very horny song about a very horny girl, this song takes the titular folk song and gives it a VERY grown-up twist (“wake up… and come sleep with me!”) — again, it’s so out there, and Anne-Marie B. sings it with fierce sexuality, that you can’t help but admire it. But at the end of the day, I feel nothing comes close to Marie Myriam’s excellent song and performance — it’s one of the great songs of Eurovision, and fully deserved to win its year.
| PLACE | ACTUAL RESULTS | MY PICKS |
|---|---|---|
| 1st | France, “L’Oiseau et l’Enfant” | France, “L’Oiseau et l’Enfant” |
| 2nd | United Kingdom, “Rock Bottom” | Belgium, “A Million in One, Two, Three“ |
| 3rd | Ireland, “It’s Nice to Be in Love Again“ | Luxembourg, “Frère Jacques“ |
Next time
Does Israel deserve to be in Eurovision?
Inkpot Shuffles in the Twilight 
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