Roy van der Merwe of Eurovision South Africa and the ESC Covers website attended several Eurovision song contests in person at the host cities. He is writing down his memories of those Eurovisions he attended with accreditation.

Eurovision in Copenhagen was another Nordic country and so I was delighted. Due to the accommodation problems I had in Stockholm, from this time onwards, I started to share a hotel with my friend Morten from Norway and I have to specially thank him for being such a wonderful friend over the years – we have been at Eurovision together since 1995. Our hotel was close to Tivoli, one of my favourite attractions in Europe and we even had a party there one evening and all rides were free to people with accreditation. Where Birmingham was my worst Eurovision, Copenhagen did not rank high with Morten. Morten loves attending Eurovision in new countries and Denmark is a neighbour and a place he had been several times. He also did not get the same press accreditation as me. The venue was the biggest and quite far from our hotel. Morten actually walked most mornings to the venue but I took the delegation bus which started quite close to our hotel.

The buffet breakfast in our hotel was great and I enjoyed it.

I had a slight delay with my accreditation as the Danish woman who had to sign the form was quite busy and so I had to wait until she could come to the accreditation office, signed the form and had my accreditation badge printed. I missed the first 3 press conferences as I was unable to enter the press center without my accreditation.

Concerning the promo singles, most countries continued to bring special singles but I was extremely disappointed with Denmark having a single without a cover.

By now I have been involved in several covers of Eurovision songs in South Africa. Since more and more fans now were coming to Eurovision with accreditation and due to the cost, delegations brought less copies. I thought it was time to produce a special CD from South Africa to swap for promo singles that were difficult to get. One of the record companies produced a special CD that looked like the shape of Africa (in the colours of the South African flag) and many people wanted this. I, however, had just 10 copies as it was quite expensive to produce and so swapped it for promo CD’s that were hard to get.

In Copenhagen I met Manfred Holz who came with Fabrizio Faniello, the singer from Malta,  and in the years to come I had run into them several times.

I was very disappointed with the winner, the song from Estonia was in the bottom 5 of my rankings, but I was extremely happy to finally be going to my first Baltic country. It was, however, interesting to me that one of the members of the Estonian entry was born in an exotic country, Aruba.

Coming back from Eurovision, I moved house and, in the move, I lost my 2001 accreditation badge (I have all the others but this one is missing and although I have search many years for it, still without success).

My favourites from 2001 are

Sweden – Listen to your heartbeat – Friends

France – Je n’ais que mon ame – Natasha St-Pier

Turkey – Sevgiliye son – Sedat Yuce

Malta – Another summer night – Fabrizio Faniello

Greece – Die for you – Antique

And those I do not like are

Lithuania – You got style – Skamp

Estonia – Everybody – Tanel Padar & Dave Benton

Portugal – So sei ser feliz assim – M T M