Eurovision 1980
Date: 19 April 1980
Venue: Nederlands Congresgebouw, The Hague
Winning country: Ireland (2nd win)
Winning entry: Johnny Logan, “What’s Another Year?”
You know it’s there, the moment it starts. You see it in the soft lighting, hear it in the halting, tentative way it begins, and above all feel it in the smooth, smooth drone of the saxophone. Yes indeed, the eighties have arrived at Eurovision.
For Eurovision, the eighties were definitely something of a mixed bag. On the one hand: Israel, Sweden and Germany all hit their stride during this period, pushing out banger after unbeatable banger; Cyprus would also join the fray in 1981, giving the Greek language a shot in the arm and out-Luxembourging Luxembourg when it came to being a proxy for their neighbour. But on the other hand you had so many other countries losing interest in the game: the UK began to suffer from constant “will-this-do”-itis, putting out bland boppers again and again, and France famously withdrew from the 1982 Contest after branding it “a monument to drivel”. (They should know. They produced a lot of it.)
In this respect, I think Johnny Logan serves as the perfect representative of 80s Eurovision. We’ll be seeing Logan a lot as we work through this decade and a bit of the next — he wrote quite a few entries in addition to the ones he sang himself — and although he did manage to write some good songs, there are also quite a few which raise little more than a half-hearted shrug from me. And it is among this latter group that we find “What’s Another Year?”.
The thing about “What’s Another Year?” is that it’s very pleasant and non-confrontational: everything in this performance looks like it’s designed to relax your brain. In that sense it runs against the grain of 1980s music, a period renowned for the relentless innovation within popular music: while Johnny Logan was off netting Ireland this win, we had post-punk mutating into new wave, smooth jazz into yacht rock, funk into hip-hop, and so on. But “What’s Another Year?” doesn’t really seem to be part of that movement; despite the saxophone, it would be stretching credulity to call it an example of yacht rock. Instead, it moves along sedately, content to be normal orchestral pop; there is the occasional flourish from a flute or a trumpet, but those just add to the general cosy vibe of the song. The performance, too, feels a lot like a throwback: watching Johnny Logan onstage, one is reminded of a lounge singer from the 50s or early 60s — you could swap him out for Udo Jürgens, and he’d still feel right at home.
And this predictability forms a huge part of eighties Eurovision: it wasn’t all sleepy soft rock, but it’s not hard to spot the same few genres making yet another appearance; if it’s not soft rock then it’s schlager, if it’s not schlager then it’s a power ballad, and if it’s not a power ballad then you are watching something else and I don’t believe you. Of course there was the occasional experiment: the Belgian entry this year, for instance, was a quirky Kraftwerk pastiche that discarded the orchestra completely and relied entirely on synths. But the preference — both from the musicians, as well as the juries that chose the winners — was mostly for safe, knowable songs like “What’s Another Year?”, as had been the case since the first Contest.
Such musical predictability may have won the hearts of the juries — but what of the audiences at home? Eurovision had hit its peak during the 1970s (with hosts often breathlessly exulting how they were broadcasting to half a billion people around the world) and even produced a couple of global (super)stars, but move into the next decade and this popularity seems to evaporate. Take the British market as an example: in the seventies, it was de rigueur for a Eurovision winner (and many other-placed entries!) to reach high positions on the charts. This might have been expected for Anglophone entries like “Waterloo” or “Ding-a-Dong”, but even “A-Ba-Ni-Bi” had managed to get into the top 20 back in 1978. But after a strong start in the early 1980s came total collapse: NO Eurovision winner has ascended to #1 on the Official Singles Chart since 1982 (although a few have come close), and some even completely failed to chart. A sampling of charts from other European countries reveals a similar trend; there might be the occasional chart-topper in a country or two, but they mostly run out as you go deeper into the decade.
It wasn’t like the quality of the singers had dropped off a cliff: yes there are some bad songs that’ll be coming up in the next ten entries, but there are some good ones as well, and anyone who calls the 1988 winner “a bad singer” needs to get their ears checked. But watching 80s performances at Eurovision, one can’t help but feel that the chaos from earlier Contests is missing: there is neither the carefree joie de vivre of Sandie Shaw, nor the unaffected sincerity of Milk & Honey. Instead what one so often gets is a relentlessly polished package, something that’s been artfully written, impressively choreographed and stirringly performed — but which feels a little too refined, a little too calculated for massive appeal. Yes, the Johnny Logan we see may have an impressive voice and a winning demeanour, but like all lounge singers, he looks a little dead behind the eyes, and the song doesn’t really have much appeal with that performance (and even less without it). It feels like just another English song in a sea of thousands written for the Contest.
And that brings me to my final eighties Eurovision trend: the rising dominance of the English language. Again, this may sound absurd on the surface: after all, of the ten winners of the 1980s only three of them were in English, all of them from countries that were Anglophone to begin with anyway. But this hides the increasing influence of English in the Contest — I’ll get into this phenomenon more when we reach our next Francophone winner, but the 1980s saw the language gradually supplanting French as the ESC’s language of currency. Even with the mystifying persistence of the native-language rule, you could sense artists, some of whom probably had an eye on their post-Eurovision careers, trying to show off their English skills as well: slipping in words and phrases here and there, or even performing the reprise in the language; no linguistic trick was considered too low to broaden the song’s reach, both during the Contest and afterwards.
This even extends to the artists who already had English as their mother tongue in the first place. What strikes me about the lyrics of “What’s Another Year?” is how plain they are: nowhere in this song would you feel the need to open a dictionary. Here, for example, is a randomly selected verse: “I’ve been praying such a long time/ It’s the only way to hide the fear/ What’s another year?” There are no deep words within these two-and-a-half short sentences, no complex sentences that torture the listener’s head; anyone with a rudimentary grasp of English would have understood it immediately. Of course, it’s never a must that Eurovision entries be the auditory equivalent of Ulysses, and anyway the words fit well with the music — but still one wonders if there would have been a way to explore something deeper than just “oh well, guess I’ll huddle up and cry” (and writer Shay Healy, a man who composed songs for Billy Connolly in his spare time, was certainly capable of doing more than that).
Put them all together, and you have “What’s Another Year?”, a sterling example of the good and the bad that the Contest would find itself facing in the eighties. It’s a very vanilla entry, for sure, but at the start of the decade it did its job, and one might even find a certain pleasure in its laconic safety. In time all the cheap ploys employed by songs like this one would all prove to become a massive headache for the EBU (and for RTÉ’s spending budget) — but all of that was for the next decade. In the meantime, we continue to sit in that darkened concert hall, and wait for the saxophone to finish its smooth, melodic droning. Or is it coming from the man onstage?
Rating: 6/10
Best song
In the early 1980s, the UK’s dominance of second place was briefly threatened by the ascendance of Germany, who figured out how to write Europe-pleasing tune after Europe-pleasing tune. The decade started off with Katja Ebstein making her return to Eurovision after an almost decade-long hiatus; I certainly like “Theater” much more than her last two entries — her voice is as strong as ever, and the mimes behind her are delightful, but I wouldn’t go so far as to claim this as the masterpiece that so many people seem to think it is. The UK then had to settle for a miserly third, although at least “Love Enough for Two” has singers who are believably in love and harmonise very well, though I can’t help but think that the costumes are extremely tacky and low-effort.
This year’s Contest is a very intriguing one to listen to: it starts off bad, then gets good for a stretch of a few songs before fading again, then rinse and repeat. This might explain why my top three this year came consecutively, one after another. In third place I put Portugal, whose blatant Elton John ripoff (aka José Cid) may have been beamed straight in from 1974, but damn if he doesn’t know how to give us a good time with his “Um grande, grande amor”. The song after that saw the return of Maggie Macneal, now split from her big-Mouthed partner and appearing solo to sing “Amsterdam” for the Netherlands, a dazzling paean to the Dutch capital that captures so much of its fabled quirkiness and wonder; every time I hear her voice against that barrel organ, I imagine myself falling in love with that city I’ve never been to again. And I was all set to make Maggie Macneal my first ever repeat winner…
… but I had not counted on France coming from nowhere to knock me out with “Hé, hé M’sieurs dames”. To describe this as “out of left field” would be underselling its power: this is France, a country not known for upbeat rockers, suddenly sending a youth anthem that’s sprightly and rambunctious and a joy to listen to; every single singer in Profil is unique and I wish they’d gone on to be hitmakers around the world. I cannot listen to this song without feeling a sense of euphoria and even hope, and to this day “Hé, hé M’sieurs dames” is still one of the few songs from the ESC I make a point of listening to on a regular basis. Criminally underrated, and a true gem to behold, this is and will remain France’s best entry for me. (Unless Sébastien Tellier returns to Eurovision…)
| PLACE | ACTUAL RESULTS | MY PICKS |
|---|---|---|
| 1st | Ireland, “What’s Another Year?” | France, “Hé, hé M’sieurs dames” |
| 2nd | Germany, “Theater“ | Netherlands, “Amsterdam“ |
| 3rd | United Kingdom, “Love Enough for Two“ | Portugal, “Um grande, grande amor“ |
Next time
Ghostly voices scream out “WILL YOU COME AND PLAY?”
Inkpot Shuffles in the Twilight 
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