Over the next month or two ESC NORGE will look at several memorable songs that AUSTRIA sent to the Eurovision song contest. ESC Covers have again google translated it from Norwegian to English.
This is a blog post and represents only the writer Morten Thomassen’s own views.
Before the year ends, I think it might be a good idea to look at some memorable songs from Austrian ESC history, and this time I’m focusing on 1966.
They say all good things come in threes, and that’s exactly what I’m pretty sure the first person to win for Austria, Udo Jürgens, can agree with.
After trying his hand in 1964 with the song “Warum Nur, Warum?” which gave him 6th place and in 1965 with the song “Sag Ihr’ Ich Lass Sie Grussen” which ended in 4th place, he finally found what it took to win.
Away with the German title and instead add the charming French words “Merci, Cherie” and voila, it was a pretty clear victory, well ahead of the Nordic countries Sweden and Norway, both of which achieved their best placements that year.
When you look at who gave Udo points, the majority of them were fully or partially French-speaking countries, a full 22 of the 31 points he received came from them and he had managed to win just with the votes from them in fact.
I would categorize his winning song as a fairly standard pop ballad from that period and all three of his contributions as an artist are on the same page, so it was just up to him to find the right way to present the song to clinch the victory and his ESC career did not actually end in 1966, just 2 years later the good Udo was back as composer for the song “Tausend Fenster”.
His real name was Jürgen Udo Bockelmann, so he actually changed his first names to find his artist name, but according to Wikipedia, he started his artist career as Udo Bolan and he had time to change artist names throughout the time his artist career lasted from 1950 until his death in late 2014.
In other words, he got to experience Austria’s second victory and would have certainly had a role during the ESC final in 2015 had it not been for the fact that he passed away, a remarkable artist who probably holds the record for the artist in the world who has been on the hit lists for the longest time, in Germany he has been on these lists for a total of 8 different decades.
Featured image – Youtube