Morten Thomassen from Norway decided to write about some of his memories of Eurovision and the Norwegian Eurovision selection. ESC Covers again will publish it after google translating it from Norwegian to English.
This time it’s the last places I’m going to remember, and it’s quite appropriate since I’m a proud citizen of the country with the most ESC last places, a total of 11 of them.
It’s taking far too long to go through all of these so I’ll concentrate on the last place song I like the most and then we’ll go back to that goddamn year 1983.
From Norway, we sent Jahn Teigen with his soon-to-be wife Anita Skorgan and three cute girls with the song “Do-Re-Mi” and despite the fact that the conductor was called Johannes Skorgan instead of Sigurd Jansen, which was his real name, we managed 9th place and at that time, top-ten positions were not commonplace for Norwegian ESC contributions, in fact it was 10 years ago that we did not get a position that contained 2 numbers in it.
In other words, there were two other countries that fought for the last place this year and the unlucky ones were Turkey and Spain and according to the rules of the time they both finished in shared 19th place, according to today’s rules Turkey would have finished in 19th place and Spain in 20th place all the time they sang the last of these two countries.
That the song “Opera” from Turkey took last place was probably not a big surprise for most people, for most people this with opera tones in a pop competition was a bit too much of a good thing, however for Cetin Alp who sang the song it was total crisis, he received crushing criticism years after he got his country’s first zero points.
No, let’s rather talk about the song I liked best this evening, a musical taste not entirely shared by the rest of Europe, I’m talking about Remedios Amaya and the song “Quien Maneja Mi Barca”.
In the middle of the pile of more or less ordinary pop songs, this song stood out like a pole, completely unique and different from what you might call a standard pop song of which there are at least fifteen out of a dozen.
The lady was also completely alone on stage and she didn’t skimp on dramatic facts in the song about who drove her boat, fortunately my Spanish skills are meager so such a title was and is rather incomprehensible to me, but what does it do when I dig the song and I actually have a habit of liking songs that end up pretty far down the results list in the end.
Actually, the lady’s name is Maria Dolores Amaya Vega and she started her career back in 1978 and released new music in 2016 at the latest, the internet is to be believed and for those wondering, her style of music is called flamenco, fierce stuff.
Now 1983 is the most important Eurovision year for me, as it was my first trip to Europe and attending the Eurovision song contest in Munich was so special. I can write a book over it, but this also spoil Eurovision for me to attend it physically in the venue as the guy in front of me spoil it totally for me by his remarks each time his country’s song got not full points from another country.
Unlike Morten, I hate the Spanish song and it is in the bottom 5 of my all time hate songs from Eurovision. But as a collector, I still have the vinyl single. On the other hand, I do like OPERA from Turkey. It is also the only time ITALY managed to produce my top song of a year with PER LUCIA.
Featured image – IMDb