My No. 1? A Deeply Opinionated Review of All of the Eurovision Winning Songs - part 4

[vampadvocate]

cont'd from part 3 - I'd say look at part 1 to see the criteria for the tiers but it's all kinda moot as they're all S from here onwards but you will need it for the explaination of the inclusion of running order positions, margins of victory by points, percentage of vote and overall ranking in how wide it was compared to the other winners from 1975 onwards (introduction of the familar douze points scoring system) so out of 46 and of the overall no. of points it scored, it's percentage of the overall possible vote and how that ranked in terms of how close it was compared to all of the other winners from 1957 onwards (the point scores aren't available for the first contest) so out of 65.

As prestated all the winners here  (and onwards if it goes to a part 5) are in the S tier illustrating the quality of the songs (at least in my eyes)  I acknowledge some recently bias and I will accept and address the ways in which others might disagree with pretty much any or all of them and that rating of them and one in particular - anyone familar with ESC is going to know which one that is. This is means that I'm going to be talking a bit less about all of them except in the context of them winning and what that meant for the contest. Well such was the theory and the intention anyway - the reality ended up being a bit more complicated.

2015 - Sweden - Heroes -  performed 10th out of 27 songs - margin 62pts,20%,16th - overall 365pts,78%,7th - Rise Like A Phoenix doesn't appear in the Best of list because of reasons to do with the origins of that playlist but this marks the point where all of them rest of the winners will. If you saw the previous post then you'll be relieved the rest of the winners from here on in aren't going to get their own posts railing against their most extreme haters (mainly because they weren't quite so utterly ridiculous in their statements, as a post punk/new wave kid in the UK like me heard in a song that went to No.1 for Fun Boy Three and Bananarama 'it ain't what you say, it's the way that you say it' and that's what ticks me off. It's basic art crit 101 you can say whatever you like but you have to back up your argument with reasoning that isn't exageration) but then again Heroes is probably one of my favourite winners of all time which is why it is on the Best of list, literally could not bear to leave it off. As I said there I get this was a bit contraversal that this was a strong year filled with some pretty great songs with an especially strong top ten (mostly - the tenth placer is reckoned in some cases to be a victory of a well supported country with a good message and representation rather than a particularly good song that was particularly well performed or staged and, although I applaud the message, I agree). However...part of this comes from after three years of mostly agreement between juries and televoters on what the 'best' song was this marked a serious rift between them - with this being the one time that the juries got their way. Heroes still has the ignamy of being the lowest ranking winner (3rd) with the televoters - although it's still in the top 50 televotes of all time comfortably enough that it won't be booted out of it anytime soon. Obviously it was still enough to not only win but do so by quite some margin and with a healthy amount of points. You do have to wonder if this the reason why the votes would be split rather than merged the next year was over this because not only was a different song top with the televoters but it was with quite a staggering margin which wouldn't be eclipsed until this year by a country that was literally invaded. The jury vote for Heroes was equally staggering too - just inside the top ten jury votes of all time including all the pre-televote ones. If it did lead to the splitting of the votes which in turn lead to the days of songs topping both being largely over - it begs the question if that happened because of the splitting of the votes or was this a split that was happening anyway as the contest became more professional and the priorities of both sets of voters became more diverse as the contest entries did. Another factor leading to the vote splitting may well have been that, having seen the clip of the reprise of Heroes as a winner and seeing the end of the voting in that, the last few countries' votes were stopped from being announced as Sweden were so ahead in the voting that it became pointless to do so (although some would say that the Italian hosts ought to have done the same after the Ukranian televotes came in in 2022 - although I guess there was a race for second) which didn't exactly make for either gripping tele or scream representation to the countries announcing their votes who must have been a bit cross their announcers had been prepped to do the announcement only to be met with 'don't bother, it's game over man, Sweden have won no matter what you announce'.

Due to those large scores from both songs, both the televote and jury winners actually got votes from every single country though which is more than could be said for the runner up in both votes. It just feels wrong to do throw shade in a Best of list so I'm going to do it here to the Russian entry. I fell in love with Heroes as a song from the first moment I heard it which was in a preview for the show before the semis started and I didn't watch the contest because I couldn't hear to see it lose or think anything would top it. I'll discuss how the later statement might have been challenged and things might have changed as regards my relationship with Eurovision and how I might have cut off my nose to spite my face there in the 'Best' of list but I did save myself the stress of worrying if Russia might have won instead. I don't hate A Million Voices exactly on it's own merits but I do think it is the most overated song in the top ten if not the entire contest and I did before finding out that it's singer is either a simp, a wimp or a two faced hypocrite (she is a mum and I wouldn't put it past Putin to threaten her kids if she didn't 'behave' but somehow that does feel like I'm making excuses for her and going out on a limb in a way I really can't be bothered to) for singing about the million voices in the title go and then supporting Putin in invading another nation seven years later. She was also paling around with Conchita to show how LGBT+ she was which makes me wonder how sincere she was there if she was willing to support one of the biggest enemies to that community later when it wasn't going to help her career, as one suspects not very. However even when I actually believed she might have been sincere the fact still remains that Russia was horribly hypocritical in sending a song like that and whilst I'm not going to say the booing was justified it was understandable, as it was for the even more hypocritcal schlock that the Russians had sent two years before and the fact that they tried to deflect criticism three years on the trot (with 2014 possibly being stealth 'the Crimea wants to be part of Russia really' propanganda) by sending doe eyed pretty girls that looked like butter wouldn't melt in their mouths. However even that aside I still think that compared to the rest of top ten, and some songs like Slovenia's and Montenegro's outside of it, that it's formularic pablem and, even before its singer's non adherance to its message was revealed, I found its over emotional delivery a bit performative and mildly nauseating.

Ok maybe I do need to talk about Heroes a bit more now to end on a up note - it didn't just win because of the staging IMO - and if it did then it's because it fits the song, there's a whole backstory about the singer Mans Zermerlow's personal connection to the song that I'll go into when discussing it in the 'Best' of but that influences the staging because basically stick boy is him as a kid. However I don't think you need to know that to feel his connection with what he's singing. Yes is it sounds like Avechi but I've only ever heard one person say it actually rips off one of his songs (and despite putting it last in their video ranking on those grounds I suspect there may well of been other reasons they didn't like it) and honestly if the song's good enough then I don't care. There have been pointless arguments about where a sound or a tune comes from and unless you can prove it conclusively then it's pretty moot. One of my favourite songs outside the ESC got accused of ripping off a rift which those sueing them turned out to be have been possibly taken it from somewhere else and that was possibly nicked from an even earlier song. There are only so many notes in the world and as the translation of the immortal words sung in Norweigan by another absolute legend at the 1966 concert in Luxembourg says there's nothing new under the sun. I really love this sort of music and Heroes's anthemic quality and the 'Best' of list will testify that it's not just when Sweden does this Avechi stuff. This is still one of my favourite winners of all time and I think it gets some undue hate because of the contarian instincts in some people lead them to reject all Swedish entries. I suppose some of which is kinda understandable as I too suffer from degrees of hype allergy so I do think one You Tuber's rejection of 'you will like this' is understandable. I just think you do not have to apply it to every single Swedish (or Italian or anyone other mostly rated country's) entry and that rejecting popular opinion out of hand every single time is just as much of an interlectual straitjacket and can be just as pretentious and dogmatic as habitually following the crowd. Being a free thinker is about not being influenced by what anyone else does and I think always being in opposition to them is still letting them guide it, just in reverse. Whereas if you are truly independently chosing to follow them or not then you are just as effectively thinking for yourself if not more so. There's also understandable blacklash of acts seemingly putting the cart before the horse when flashy staging seems to win out over a good song. I just don't think this is happening here and if it is, it's not the worst example of it. Every winner suffers from a degree of 'wah the song I thought was the best didn't win' toy chucking from rival fans and in some cases a certain automatic underdog championing mentality and a certain not like the other pundits ism. So some pundits suffer from 'I do kinda love you man but I think you are at least on occasion guilty of that' with one here that I think that about suffering especially in their championing of some very dodgy San Marino entries. I also have a knee jerk reaction to Swedish soulessness - I just think this song doesn't suffer from it. So sorry not sorry to those who object (especially Lethargic Sloth in being very unrepentantly non apologetic for thinking he's full of the proverbial) but it's a S for me and an extremely high one at that.

2016 - Ukraine - 1944 - performed 21st out of 26 songs - margin 23pts,5%,36th - overall 534pts,54.3%,47th - In the first year of split votes then you got a winning song that was the top of neither of them. The televote winner was 5th with the juries (which was actually one rank better than the previous televote winner) and the jury winner was in the top ten but not the top three televoter scores, so unlike Heroes it lost out coming second. It's funny I remember getting my wires severely crossed and somehow getting the message that Australia would have won had it not been for the juries - which is wrong and also the reverse what if for Australia's fate for THIS year and all previous and successing ones (Austalia pretty much consistanly do better with the juries than the televoters and to make matters worse the song that made me go 'oh thank eff that tripe didn't win for Oz'  I think was actually the 2018 entry -I remember it being fairly generic, poppy and sung by a woman which best fits that song amongst the Aussie entries at that point along with the fact I've never liked it - and that song was actually bottom with the televoters in the final and so a triple combo of wire cross). I mention this because that second placer was the Australian song this year. There are mainly two sorts of people who object to 1944 winning - well in this case possibly three but unsurprisingly the fans of the jury winner tend to be less vocal online that those of the televote winner and one of that group that I follow seems to be less annoyed with the fans of the Ukranian winner than those who voted for yet another song more than Sound of Silence and stopped it doing a Heroes. The fans of the televote winner and the other group tend to overlap a lot more because the televoter winner was Russia and the other group thinks that the ESC should be devoid of politics and are extremely angry with it for that. Personally I think they are kinda fooling themselves if they think they can exist in a bubble where politics doesn't exist and, as the You Tuber reviewer Tessalating Hexagons states, 'don't kill my family isn't a political statement'. The Russians tried to get the song banned from the competition but I think the line about content in songs that is political is drawn in the right place  by them.  Apart from it's title there is nothing in 1944 that ties it to any specific event and the previous year the ESC allowed Armenia to compete with a song called 'Face the Shadow' about the Turkish denial of the genocide against Armenians in 1915 that was far more politically explicit and the ESC requested only that they change the title from Don't Deny, the words of which still appeared in the main hookline of the song. I'll talk about the Georgian song that wasn't allowed to compete in 'Best' of list but that was far more provocative than both especially in the context of when and more importantly where the song would have competed. 1944 talked of a specific event in the past - Jamala may well have intended parallels to be drawn between what happened in 1944 in the Crimea and what was happening in the Crimea the time the song competed (and those parallels would add special poignacy to when she reperformed the song at the start of the German national selection for the 2022 contest at their request probably because of it which make her look like Cassandra - which her dress in 2016 makes her look a bit like too - in retrospect with some justification, we should have stood up to Putin and helped Ukraine more when he came for the Crimea instead of condemning her as a spoilsport when she was a factor in a lady who'd performed in Crimea not competing in 2019, but that's by the by) but she never mentions it in the song. As much as the writer of the televote winning song Phillip Kirkorov might complain that it's treatment with the juries was political too, and some of its fans agree, I think that there can be blindness that just because you believe it to the best that everyone else will agree with you but sometimes they won't. The You Tuber Tessalating Hexagons didn't think either of those songs were actually all that and that out of the realistic winning options that 1944 was the best one. He was, and still is, probably not alone. I'll discuss the pros and cons of all of these songs in the 'Best' of list but it's completely possible that the juries collectively just thought they were four better songs.  I think that 1944 just won because it stood out for being so different to everything else in the competition (we got the same game of following the winner you that you get a lot, with quite a few entries that were sending Swedish style pop including at least two who did it more successfully than they did and at least another one that should done better than their host entry which I am NOT fond of and thinking only did so well because it was Sweden and the bloke singing the song was cute and very young and a lot of very young women voted for him on that basis, there were also a lot of ballads probably as a hangover from anno mirablis year for them of 2014 but not one of them were quite like 1944). It won because the juries and televoters just thought collectively it was best and whilst the televoters liked Sound of Silence and the juries liked You're the Only One neither liked them quite enough to award them the win the other set of voters would have done. Also Kirkorov's (whose suspected string pulling and dominating behaviour of the very likeable if not especially talented 2021 Moldovan singer of his song that year didn't win him a lot of friends and may have lost a few amongst the fan community he already had) whining smacks of the whole 'help I've been cancelled' rubbish generally spouted by opinionated douches. I would say if you don't want people to call you out then don't punch down by word or deed but I guess it's not your fault if your country is lead by a litter tray (his name sounds very like want you'd crudely call one if you were five). However you shouldn't grumble too much if there are consequences, if there even were and the juries as a whole didn't just simply prefer four other songs (Russia were 5th with them so it's not as if they barely got any points - Ukraine would actually do significantly worse with the juries the next three times they competed) or that you didn't get a huge televote score for all the neighbouring countries voting for your singers who are hugely famous there. Biases exist in both votes and that's why both votes exist to balance them out and I guess you could argue this shows that the system works.  It's not rocket science - Spaceba.

2017 - Portugal - Amar Pelos Dois (translated title I think is Love for Us Both)- performed 11th out of 26 songs - margin 143pts,23%,12th - overall 758pts,77%,9th - from one extreme to the other as this was a rare example of the stars alligning since the votes were split and the televoters and juries not just agreeing on what the best song that year was but doing it incredibly euthiastically - it's in the top tens of all time for both types of vote and like with Heroes I'm going to stress this that for the juries this is including the pre-televote jury votes going back to 1957 (or in the impressive part back to 71 where you got that point generous system that lasted until 74). What makes it's victory even more impressive is both sets of voters also agreed on the runner up and gave it more points than the next three winners and that it would take a country being invaded and a staggering televote to top it in terms of points even amongst a winning song (even that couldn't actually surpass the actual winner in terms of points). I think as with the previous winner then I think what made it a winner is it stood out from the crowd. The blogger Monkseal who did humourous observations of the contest lasting until 2019 on his Word Press account described the copy the winner format for this year as something I'm parphrasing slightly as there were a few entries consisting of shrieking women trying to copy Jamala's style but without her skill, passion or conviction. Amar Pelos Dois was not that (and nor was the runner up) and then there was the twin Cinderella story. Like Ukraine, Portugal had sat out the previous contest to the one it won in and part of that is that is it was working on launching a national final to select it's entry and this the first of the songs to qualify for the ESC from it. I think a new NF and then the 'ruddy heck Portugal have actually sent something interesting for once that isn't a joke entry despite competing since the mid 60s' did catch people's imagination. As did the back story that singer Salvador Sobral was awaiting vitally important life saving heart surgery at the time he competed. He did so against the advice of his doctors which meant his sister Luisa, who wrote the song, did all the rehersals of the song in Kyiv to save his energy and minimise the stress on him. This showed in his appearance where with his skinniness and large brown eyes, almost too big for his face, he looks a bit like baby deer. Sobral not being well enough to stand around or practice with dancers, virtual trees of light spouting behind him or little LED stick men or really move much around the stage period probably helped (alongside probably his own distain for those sort of things - he would state in his acceptance speech that music wasn't fireworks but feeling and criticise 'disposable, fast food music' ) to contribute to staging that was as classy and understated as the song and helped it feel like something from an earlier era that was far more about music than staging and/or drama and messaging, and especially after the contraversy over 1944's political content, that must have felt like a breath of fresh air. This is the song I was talking about when referring to a throwback in my section on the first Italian winner and like that 64 winner it manages to be somehow an epitome of old school quality (including being orchestral enough to hark back to the days of the actual live ESC orchestra) but with a polish and character that doesn't look out of place in the contest it competed in and I think that is probably what appealed so much to both juries and televoters alike especially since further down the scoreboards there were a lot of disagreements between them. Tessalating Hexagons who didn't like the song questioned his viewers to try and define what differentiates a classic song from a dated one but that's a question I'll try and have a crack at when I talk about it in the 'Best' of list.

2018 - Israel - Toy - performed 22nd out of 26 songs - margin 93pts,21%,15th, overall - 529pts,52.5%,50th - ooookay where to start with this one? Fasten your seat belts people it's gonna be a bumpy write. Anyone who was annoyed by Sobral's dissing of other contestants or other types of music he didn't approve of was going to have the satisfaction of seeing karma give him an almighty slap this year. Not only was his own country going to be stone dead last in the final (they didn't really deserve it but it's hard to know who did to be honest - Ukraine were bottom of the juries and that wasn't really fair either and it was never gonna happen to Sweden or Norway) but he made pretty clear that he didn't like Toy despite being a favourite to win which it then did. I think that trophy handover must have been as they say in bad US sitcoms 'Awkward!!'. He was in good company though -Toy became the most downvoted video of not just any ESC winner but of any ESC song, I think that due to hacking skills at being able to look at the number of downvotes despite them being concealed that Toy still holds that dubious distinction, at least for grand final competing songs, it's also at least down there with semi-final competing hated songs too.

Israel has always attracted hate for reasons that partly justified, partly not and partly complicated between the two and there are plenty of people in the arab world who can access and then downvote a You Tube video but couldn't vote for something else to win. The runner up also had, shall we say, .... a strong and passionate fan base that may well have contributed to the negative response too. However I think the real clue to why is that it's not just the video downvote that shows it wasn't an universally loved (or the closest thing that you are going to realistically get in this online age where strong opinions and the extremely vocal and no holds barred disaproval of people not getting the result they wanted are a dime a dozen) winner. Several commentators online, including some quite prominent ones, absolutely haaaate this song. I don't, and how, but I can totally see why others do and I think what puts some off is what made me fall in love with it.

This was the last the winners I happened to see at the end of the contest when it got announced - I remember seeing the singer Netta in the very Japanese influenced outfit she was wearing and thinking she looked like Bjork on the cover of her third album Homogenus and 'I hope she wins because she looks entertainingly bonkers'. Then they announced she had and the song was very bit as insane as I'd hoped. However before all of the other fans of the song who think that's a bit dismissive then I'd point out that the reason it won and why for me it's a gift that keeps on giving is there's not just a method to the madness but a serious point behind it. You get that a bit from the hook 'I'm not your toy, not your toy, you stupid boy, stupid boy' but even if reports of it being influenced by the Me Too movement weren't actually correct, it is very clearly about feminism and the inspiration of it to resist chavaunistic bullying. With what's been happening in the US recently it's still very relevant and sadly may become more so. It's actually clever how it manages to do so while incorporating a lot of interesting elements both musically and lyrically quoting Pokemon and playground bullying metaphors - 'I think you forgot how to play, my teddy bear's running away.... leave me alone, I'm taking my Pikachu home' and I quite like refering to sexist bullies as literally the immature little boys that deep down they often are. A lot of chauvanistic men have used similarly infantilising language to patronise women that they disaprove of after all so if they don't like it being turned on them - well karma is a bitch my dudebro!  There's a great ethnic sounding  style rift musically after the chrouses that usually in the clip of the song at that contest has all the Israeli fans partying to while they wave their flags. Some of it's more reasonable critics will also acknowledge that it's sung and performed extremely well and whilst the staging is dialed up to eleven and incredibly in your face that the energy is commendable - everyone on that stage is giving it some and then some more. Some people who don't like the song still respect what it's trying to do.

That said I get why the chicken noices (a lovely guy I follow who hates it calls it 'The Chicken Song' because of that. He's Romanian by descent so doesn't get that in the UK there was a satirical puppet show that realised a song with that name with deliberately ludricious lyrics like 'hold a chicken in the air, stick a deckchair up your nose' - which because I'm very sad I actually memorised - parodying novelty songs in the 80s charts, ironcially most noticeably by the group Black Lace who competed early in their careers at the contest in 79 with a song called Mary Ann which my mother absolutely hated along with its accompanying video)- and the full on nature of everything (I think that its haters would not be unjustified in using the word garish or indeed going as far gimmicy) is not for everyone though. I think the hate is applified by Toy winning a very strong and diverse year so I find it really understandable that some people were incredibly annoyed and in some cases very bitter that such a song beat ones that they saw as being of much higher quality, enjoyed more or simply didn't hurt their ears and eyes to watch and/or listen to. Toy also won a semi final that was infamous for being a bloodbath where probably every serious fan of the contest saw at least one beloved song fail to qualify and many knew that this would be the case going into it.  You saw the quality and breath of the songs that were competing in that final by just how many different ones got 12s from the juries and most of them were like 'yup ...deserved' except Sweden IMO...but I don't even find that a travesty - it's a very slick package but it's just very souless. Although I can't imagine though many of Toy's haters would have wanted Dance You Off to win either.

However there is a reason Toy won and although it was to that date the lowest ranking song with the juries (the next winner would be equally ranked to it and the next two one position lower still) it was still good enough to win especially combined with topping the televote. It's not hard to comprehend why this is so divisive that I think Marmite missed a trick not getting Netta to advertise for them, at least in Israel, but I absolutely love it and it's one of my favourite winners in I think one of the best contests of all time.  It's contentious I guess but is it even possible to NOT have a view on this utterly out of the box song and performance that isn't?

2019 - (The) Netherlands - Arcade -  performed 12th out of 26 songs - margin 26pts,6%,35th - overall 498pts,51.9%,51st - Perhaps the sole thing that this song has in common with the previous year's winner is that people saw it coming, both songs were favourites to win in the run up to the contest which was not true for either 2017 or 2021 (I think in the 'Best' of list I'll talk about the symmetry of that). Ironically it had been the barnstorming and universal success with both sets of voters from Portugal two years earlier than had come out of the blue for the pundits, uberfans and bookies - another song had been such an odds on favourite that bookies had stopped taking bets on it and in the end it wasn't even in the top 5 finishing 6th. It's also weird considering this that Arcade was the lowest ranking song in terms of where it placed with each set of voters of all time, as like 1944 ,it was top in neither set of votes and, like Toy, it had the lowest ranking with the juries of any winner up until that point. Unlike with 1944, which was a bit of a surprise winner, what caused the shock in 2019 was what would go on to top each vote in turn. Both would be so contraversal and unexpected that neither song would be in the top 5 despite that, as the other set of voters would be indifferent or hostile to them enough for the top 5 to be songs that were compromises between what both sets of voters wanted with Sweden in 5th not really being that big a hit with televoters but enough of one to squeek into it. A mess up with the voting (I'll explain about this when talking about the actual jury winner in the 'Best' of list) meant that the organisers at the concert thought that originally Sweden had won the jury vote which meant their singer had his vote announced last by the new system that announced the televote scores in inverted jury ranking order (rather than the inverse televote size order - I'll explain why that probably got changed when I talk about Toy in the 'Best' of list but the hosts sort of prematurely announced Netta as the winner and while at the same time falsely teasing that she wouldn't be and it kinda became obvious) and so millions of people viewing got to see their singer's ill concealed crushing disapointment on his face as he found out he hadn't got enough points to win (I don't actually mind the song that much but I'm not mad keen on it either and I think that the jury winner the previous year did the same thing a lot better but I'll elaborate on that in the 'Best' of list when discussing what Sweden did next).

In a way it's kinda of ironic that the previous year the Portegeuse had refused to set up the, by then, usual LED screens with their reasoning being they wanted to be all about the music ...man (whereas the real reason was suspected to be that the recent ecconomic crisis had left them a bit potless and they were trying to do things as much on the cheap as they reasonably could) and they'd ended up with a winner that included chinese waving cats, a light up device saying 'hey' and dancers dressed as lycra clad chickens in purple  (there were other countries with quite interesting, and some might say the OTT props there too) and a song the previous winner did a very poor job of concealing his dislike of. In constrast to Tel Aviv where the LED screens were definately back  and were incorporated into the winning performance very effectively (incorporating a cool storm effect) while the singer emoted at his piano in front of them but it seemed to a be winner than actually confirmed what Sobral said about music being about feeling rather than fireworks. The LED screenscape echoed the obvious emotion of the song and singer and co-writer Duncan Lawrence's personal feelings that were so laced within it. (The same was true of the runner up also singing and writing an equally heartbreaking story personal to him too, who finished one place lower than Lawrence in both votes and then overall). Lawrence was also a very different kettle of fish than the flamboyant Nessa who handed the trophy to him - a quiet, unassuming, almost socially awkward guy who prefered to let his music do the talking and in his winners acceptance speech stated 'it's about music first' but did end up outing himself as bisexual during the contest (at the conference after he was announced as a finalist)- so is a representative of LGBT+ community. In a way I think this is a good thing to show that different types of people live under the rainbow umbrella and they're not all the camp cliche (not that there's anything wrong with that either).

I have to admit that Arcade wasn't the instant hit with me that the winner before it was but then again I didn't first hear it under the best of circumstances as it was at the next contest when he performed it in the interval (or part of it - as watching back I can see it was just part of the song before he launched into his new single Stars which has also grown on me quite a bit since seeing for the first time). It was also a filmed rehersal from a few days before where the poor guy probably caught the very virius that had ensured he'd been the longest reigning ESC winner ever, as it cancelled the contest the year (as well as giving both him and Netta to perform new material of theirs on the replacement program Europe Shine A Light that the EBU filmed and aired instead), but it also ensured he was sitting at home and possibly not feeling too great as his successors recieved their trophy in the Rotterdam arena. For me I guess they shaded him and it took time to appreciate him because of it but also they would help signal boost the song as they became a factor in why Arcade would start to (sigh...how to say this without seeing to make a bad pun on that very same actual virius again) become a bit of a sleeper hit online eventually even in America. The other being the Will Ferrel comedy film about Eurovision that actually featured an act that was obviously based on Lawrence (or at least his performance and staging) in the film as one of the other contestants. Some people loved Arcade from the start (well duh it won and a lot of people that voted for it to win would have seen it for the first time on the night it did) but I'm one of those who it had to grow on which is weird because it's most often compared to the band Imagine Dragons that I quite like and I also loved songs in the next two contests that have some things in common with Arcade and were compared to it which perhaps explained in part why they didn't win since although the trend of copying the winner died down a bit because neither Amar Pelos Dois or Toy were very immitable (one being so essentially Portegeuse and the other so totally its own thing) in true style of the modern contest then the televoters especially would go for something totally different to Arcade at the next contest (as they probably would have done had the contest in 2020 taken place especially since that contest, predictably in the wake of Arcade's success, was full of ballads).

2021 - Italy - Zitti E Bouni (translated title Shut Up and Behave or literally Be Good)- performed 24th out of 26 songs - margin 25pts,5%,40th - overall 524pts,57.5%,39th - So like 1944 this is a fairly low ranking winner in terms of both it's margin and overall percentage of points out of the possible ones recieved. However rather unlike 1944 it was a comfortable televote winner with more points from the televote than any song (including the televote winner) got the previous year and it actually has the 9th highest televote by percentage of all time (with the lead singer Damiano's geuninely shocked Pikachu face, made especially funny by all the black sort of gothy make up on it and his subsequent realisation moments later that he's been filmed leading to him trying in vain to as nochantly as possible reclaim his cool badge - too late my dude! you've just become a meme forever!, testifying to the fact he was not expecting it to be that big) . The narrowness of the victory is because the runner up came very close to replicating Arcade by winning in the same positions in the separate votes except inverted (she was second with the juries and third with televoters although actually got more points from the televote than the juries). Both songs actually achieved a feat that not even very winner does of getting points from the televote of every single eligible country (some years you don't get any doing that, this year there were three).

There was a lot of polarisation between the two votes as had been happening and effecting winners certainly since 2015 (and in 2011 too, with the Italy losing out in both years because of the other set of voters) but although the Italians weren't the worst victims of it then it was a bit of game changer as they that discrepancy meant they had the lowest jury ranking of any winners ever, coming in 4th, with them challenging the recieved wisdom that you had to be in the top 3 with both votes to stand a chance. Admittedly they very nearly were, being only behind the third placers with the jury by a mere two points. That year though all of the top five scorers with the jury are by percentage in the 50th highest jury scorers since their return in 2009 (and quite comfortably so) and weirdly this song actually got a higher jury score ranked by percentage than Toy did. (The two winners actually very closely parallel each other by the amount of points they got in each vote in their years but this song's percentages were higher as there were four less countries competing in 2021 than 2018).

I was blissfully unaware of the top 3 in both votes rule coming into watching the televote live saying I think out loud to the family I was watching with (I was certainly thinking it) that they could still win and was overjoyed to be right....then on went online to experience the backlash (although one of the big wheels who hated it did warm to it slightly because of the live performance - that was Matt of ESC United I mentioned earlier - and the realisation that one cannot always have your own way or the other one did try to justify why the provably bs storm in a teacup might actually be true to cover the fact he was not only wrong but being wrong had caused to him to make a very unwise prediction about it being Italy's worse result in years. I'm afraid I do still enjoy the schadenfreuden of laughing at that one and him confidently predicting that another song he didn't like wouldn't qualify when the group involved had every other time they'd been written off proves he hasn't really learnt from that mistake) along with the mostly expressed joy. Since the contest the success of the band caused by it have lead even more people discovering and falling in love with it.

Aside from the usual 'wah my fav didn't win' you get every year the fairly rare salt was to be expected and understood if rock wasn't your bag. This was a strong year with a lot of really great songs many with the strong and vocal fanbases so whoever won was going to be contraversal and watching my third contest live in the 21st century I can understand that as I was having a great time (mostly) and enjoyed many of the artists in the final this time around. However I was completely blown away by these guys when they took to the stage and I knew that they were my winners whatever happened so I voted for them and I rooted for them.   [I might transfer this bit to 'Best of ' list] - I guess I'm lucky that in all the contests I've watched live this century (I can't remember if I bothered watching 1986 or not) I've got my way in most of them and I've never been annoyed by a winner yet. I know that if I persist (which I probably will) then this can't last and I will at some stage join everyone else in moaning about a song I hate winning. It also amuses me that out of all the references that Will Ferrel put into this ESC film that the one that proved to the point to the future (apart from the appearance of Salvador Sobral busking - which I'll elaborate more of about in the Best of list) was putting in a sort of Lordi expy band (it also ironic that they were Belarusian in the film considering how much trouble that country would get into from 2019 onwards) who were the last rock band to win.

Over one year on despite listening to it almost very day for a year (and at one stage deliberately limiting myself to one reaction to it a day so I wouldn't go off it) I still love it to bits and think it's one of the best winners ever and you can see a lot of people reacting to it for the first time are just going wow!. Like Arcade one You Tuber made a video laying out his reasons why this song deserved to win (his luck of getting his way would run out a bit when he made similar videos this year about his two joint favourites and neither of them won - although they did both come in the top 10 and one was in the top 5 just missing out on the top 3).

There are other parallels with Arcade and with Toy too. It really annoyed me when I read comments from at least one idiot who claimed Maneskin only won because of the clever staging, because as with Arcade, and the French runner up, the staging is not actually that complex. It's mainly just some clever camerawork especially with part following Damiano onto the stage, the silouettes of the band behind them on the screen and then the pyro at the end (I guess sometimes Sobral is wrong and music is occasionally about fireworks too, at least partially) however most of it is just capturing the lightning in the bottle which is just the band performing. One of the things that makes certain songs win is how well they are all performed and there's an interesting reason for that with Toy, Arcade and Zitti E Bouni and it also links Heroes into the mix too. There's a song in the 'Best' of list that was performed by a duo who were mildly infamous in the UK as they competed on the British X-Factor and for the weeks the judges made their opinion that these two were outstaying their welcome well and truly known then the public would vote them back in anyway and the cycle would continue and they got perilously close to actually winning or at least that's how I remember it at the time. I also remember a few years later hearing about them completing in Eurovision and thinking 'well that country doesn't want to win again'. The irony was they actually did pretty well and even got a Marcel Brencon award from the press at the contest for being the best act - showing perhaps that it wasn't a good year. They came back the next year and at one stage said they'd keep coming back until they won (they were still quite fun but did significantly worse in their second year which put the kibosh on that although the next year after them the country in question would be last in the final and after they woudn't qualify for it again for it for the next four years - at least once unfairly so - but even so those lads luck and the ESC's audience's patience with them would have run out completely eventually). Looking back you can see that being on a tv show like the X Factor and having to engage the public enough to vote you back the next week is something that is going to develop your stage craft which will stand you in good stead on the ESC stage if you get the right song, even if in their case they weren't the best singers in the world.

It's perhaps telling that it pointed to the obvious case that someone with that background who actually could sing well was going to win the contest at some stage and that would happen in 2015 with former Sveige Idol contestant Mans Zermerlow. Three years after that former Israel's Next Star contestant Netta netted the glass mike. Then came Duncan Lawrence was on the X Factor or a similar contest in the Netherlands. Sure shortly after the 2021 contest all the footage of  Maneskin's stint on the X-Factor Italia started to emerge on social media resulting in them having a huge international hit with their cover of the Norweigan band Madcon's version of the Four Seasons song Beggin' (ironically the writer of which is of Italian descent from the state well known for a lot of Americans with that cultural  background - actors as well as musicians). The band's stagecraft had further been honed by famously busking on the main shopping street in their native Rome but also by entering a battle of the bands contest run by a radio station there.  I think this was the one that resulted in their name as they now needed one and their founding member bassist Victoria who is half Danish just said words in that language until she said one that sounded cool and they kept it believing it to be lucky as they started winning stuff with it. Also as mentioned in the turn of the century Danish winner's entry, if you want to know how to pronounce it which many struggle with, then another contestant that year covered a series of previous ESC songs in his two Jurodadi videos (perhaps it's out of the remit for this series except he probably would have won at the previous year's contest had their been one) and there in the original version of Fly on the Wings of Love in Danish is the word for moonlight - Maneskin. I'm sorry I'm geeky enough that random correlation amuses me.

If Covid would stop Duncan Lawrence handing over the trophy to them then Maneskin's success would stop them handing over theirs to their successors as they'd have jet off to appear in America to premote their new single the same night of the contest - time differences mean that you can follow Saturday night around the world if you go in the right direction - (and Damiano would sprain an ankle shooting the video for it shortly before appearing at the next year's concert to perform it there, resulting in him being quite visibly in pain whilst one the hosts talks to him afterward) but they would release the video of a song in support of Ukraine, have talked about having friends from the country and earlier that Damiano was taught to pole dance for one of their X-Factor performances by a lady from there and so would probably be happy with their victory.

2022 - Ukraine - Stefania - performed 12th out of 25 songs - the Barclay book of the margins of winners only goes up to 2021 so this doesn't have a ranking but it's 165pts  (I can't calculate what % that is but the max possible points were 936) - overall 631pts,67.4%,19th - oh boy! how to talk about his one? Ok lets start from the off - yes sympathy was certainly a factor in it winning and it certainly wouldn't have done so by quite so extreme a margin with such an utterly insanely high televote (you know things are weird when a Cypriot televote does NOT give it's douze points to a Greek entry in the final - it was a good one too) in normal circumstances. However for all those getting snitty about it then....remember what I said about the previous year where that the winner and the runner up had uniquely scored points from the televote from every single country but they were two of THREE countries that had done so? Well the third country to do it was ...you guessed it ....Ukraine. I'll get into the weeds of that talking about that song in the 'Best' of list but it had some commonality with this one in being a mix of the traditional - including being entirely in Ukranian with a traditional Ukranian woodwind instrument (actually even played by the same guy in both cases, who also sings in this song)  and the modern - in this case rap, in that one EDM. Indeed those similarites were why I loved this song on first listen when another You Tuber was playing snipets of the competitors in the Ukranian National Final and it is still one of my favourite songs at the contest competing this year. This convinces me that even without the war that Stefania would still have done very well in the contest and been fondly regarded by its uberfans (there was quite a bit of outrage in some quarters that the country's previous entry hadn't done better and it's comparatively low ranking by the juries in 9th was the main culprit - it was second in the televote by quite a large margin with a point score in the ballpark of the previous year's televote winner) even without the situation being what it was.

Ukraine has always been a popular and successful country within the contest which one reason why people cared so much about what they are facing. They are the only one that has never failed to qualify for a final (when not even the mighty Sweden can claim that) and they've never been a borderline qualifer either and all cases, bar one in 2012, in the top five of the countries in their semi. Within the final most of their entries have reached the left side of the scoreboard with a large percentage of them in the top ten and even the top five. They know what they are doing in what performers and songs to send (they once in 2010 ruthlessly changed a song that wasn't being well recieved within the fan community for one which was much stronger), how to stage them (this is country who brought us the infamous hamster wheel that appeared in both the Fire Saga film and in the self parody take of how to win in the interval of the Stockholm contest) and how to premote them. Whatever you think of Stefania (it is very distinctive and so won't be for everyone, a friend of mine watching absolutely hated it although his teenage son didn't agree with him)- the performance and staging of it is top notch even with the equally infamous malfunctioning kinetic sun in Turin affecting things.

Stefania's critics have made much hay out of the fact that the song wasn't even the original victor in the country's national final and another song did that was disqualified because it's singer had entered the Crimea through Russia after 2014 which was a big no no for understandable reasons. However Stefania had been the choice of the Ukranian public with the other song winning because of the jury and the clip of Stefania being performed there clearly shows jury members Jamala and another previous Ukranian contestant getting down to the song and it was given the nod to go after the original song's disqualification because it was still second.  I also don't think the Ukranian delagation milked the situation or they didn't do it to win. There would be a video for the song that was filmed in parts of the country near its capital that were bombed by the Russians and text in the video stated that was the case. It an emotive narrative about three female soldiers carrying three different children - one was a mother taking her child to her parents so they could seek shelter abroad while she carried on fighting, one taking a child to a shelter to be reunited with their parents and another taking a dead child to be buried. However it was deliberately released AFTER the contest - no doubt hoping to help raise funds and publicity for the cause with the publicity created from the contest but to avoid being seen as overtly influencing its outcome. The invasion (I'm not going to soft pedal calling a spade a shovel here) started shortly after the previously selected song got disqualifed and there was a worry that the band Kalush Orchestra wouldn't been able to compete as understandably every able bodied adult Ukranian male young enough to fight was required to but the fact that Presdient Zelensky gave the band members an exception to that is proof that as a former entertainer himself (he was a professional comedian before entering politics) understood the importance of what West (look up who he is in the previous parts) calls 'soft power'. This is the significance of countries to boost themselves economically and in terms of visablity by making their culture and values more popular in the world. If the hard power of physically fighting their invaders was important to the Ukranians than so was showing the world what they were fighting to preserve on an international stage. I also think that whilst some, including a friend of mine, have poo pooed the importance to the Russians (or more accurately their government) of being barred from the contest (which the money and effort which went into their entries would show is wrong), the fact that they didn't just bomb Maripol just after the Ukranian win but directly sent a message that this was the help that the band Kalush Orchestra's founding member, the rapper Oleg, was requesting from the Eurovision stage shows the Russian authorities both heard the message and it bothered them. The Russians understand soft power too and have too used the contest to deploy it (there's an interesting video on You Tube entitled 'Why Russia needs Eurovision' which was made in 2019/20 that goes into much more detail about this) so as with the military, to an extent, the Ukranians beat the Russians at their own game.

There are some that will argue, sometimes quite angrily, that politics have no place in the contest and whilst I can understand why they feel that way, I think it is being in denial about the reality of the situation. It is worth pointing out that it wasn't the Ukranians who got the Russians banned but the protests of other countries including the baltic and nordic nations (I think Sweden was one of them and when Sweden says it's us or them then you take notice). It's one thing for countries like Israel, Poland and Azerbaijan to have a less than spotless human rights record (or even in the latter case to be fighting a war with another competing country and actually intimidate your own people who voted for them) but for one country to actually invade another one is something else and it was serious enough for international sanctions elsewhere and for Russian sportspeople to be barred from competing in international events. That is something that even a not exactly young person like me hasn't seen happen to a country since the days of a racially segregated South Africa and it's NOT something that you can just ignore however much you might want to. It was also not the juries that awarded Kalush Orchestra the win (like Italy the year before they were fourth with them but by a much larger margin and the votes came mainly from baltic and eastern european country juries who had not just borders but culture in common with them) but the televoters. Whilst there are people that cynically questioned how many voting for the song were doing so because they liked it and what else they've done to try and help Ukraine beyond that gesture, the fact is that they did so because of nothing that could have been orchestrated by anyone else but a great mass of individual people right across Europe and beyond. It's an unusual situation with an unusual result and it has resulted in an equally unusual situation with a winning nation being unable to host.  However I would challenge the doomsayers and sceptics who think that the contest will now forever have countries winning for the 'wrong' reasons.

There are three things that are noticeable apart from the music off stage so to speak. Kalush Orchestra's victory mark the second time that there have been back to back victories by bands at the contest since the mid 80s (that being the Swedish trio of brothers the Herreys and the Norweigan lady duo Bobbysocks although 94-5 and 2000-1 were bands or duos that were preceeded or succeded by duos) and the first back to back wins by songs entirely in native languages since the lifting of the ban against countries not singing in them (although the Porteguese song of 2017 was preceeded by a song partly in a native language). It's also the first song to win that includes rapping so even if it didn't win for entirely musical reasons it still increases the diversity of the songs that have won the contest which in turn ultimately encourages more diversity within it and the reputation of the contest abroad (many Americans for example have responded postively to the song and black Americans especially have related to it). Also a channel featuring a diverse group of people from various nationalities, including Americans, who didn't watch the contest and were largely unfamilar with the songs in it (some had heard Stefania already) reacting to the top ten had them concluding that the song deserved to win on artistic merit alone even if there were political factors that caused it to. To be colloquial the televoters have both IMO and those of many others made much worse choices for far less altruistic or 'woke' reasons and a lot of those are going to date a LOT more badly than this one. Indeed you only have to look at how many people look at Running Scared and/or Believe and question the wisdom of them winning to see that my word is true.

Ok this marks the point where you will have to look at part 1 to get an idea of my tiers as we are slipping out of the S tier here - please though read on for nuance.

2023 - Sweden - Tattoo - performed 9th out of 26 songs - margin was fairly comfortable - and as percentage of votes idk - As Mick Jagger wrote and sang you can't always get what you want and I knew that having had two winners that I voted for there was going to coming a time when one was going to prevail that I didn't or wouldn't even have considered doing so and did not want and I was going to have to just suck it up. What perhaps I didn't bargain for was being in the majority that wanted something else, with probably the biggest split between juries and televoters since the last time Sweden won (it's touch and go and if it's actually bigger as idk what Heroes actually got in terms of pure jury score and it's closest rival actually got a higher by percentage televote score than the song that the televoters wanted to win instead of Heroes) and especially this threw light on the discrepany since another Swede EBU head Martin Oestradal decided after twin scandals of a jury rigging ring of countries having to have their jury votes taken away from them and a song with a zero point televote qualifying to the final through jury votes alone to make the semi finals determined by televote. Both Tattoo and it's rival were never in serious doubt of failing to make it though in spite of being in easily the toughest the two semis (I'll go into talking more about that more in the 'Best' of list and the pitfalls of that approach). Like in 2015 this meant those televoters who wanted a different winner weren't happy bunnies and unlike 2015 this included me but in a sense it helped that the writing was on the wall and I had time to sort of adjust to it as I can't claim this was a shock.

Before you dismiss me as a bitter hater I would urge you to hear me out. First off if you read my assessment of Euphoria you would know that it's not entirely because of that and also that I have absolutely nothing against Loreen. In a sense she does deserve to be the first woman and the only other artist apart from Johnny Logan to win twice - she's a good enough singer and an absolutely top notch performer with charisma coming out of her posterior and she's also seems a geuninely good person (which shouldn't matter but it does to me although in one case on the 'Best' of list I've put on one song performed by someone who behaved like a tool) a bit like a zen earth mother - geuninely supportive of other people, the best sort of new ager type but it is a song contest not a singing or performing one although these factors are influencial and it's not wrong that they are (they are actually factors that the jurors are supposed to consider) I can't help feeling that like Euphoria and perhaps even more so that Tattoo is not a great song and is horribly overated. At least Euphoria was doing something groundbreaking in bringing a competitive style in a different genre and it was the song that got everyone dancing that year, this year it isn't. As my better half has pointed out I can't moan too much about it being a steal if this came 2nd in the televote and by a pretty comfortable margin but I know how the fans of the televote fav in 2015 feel now and it is a bit done over. It does feel a bit generally like the juries kinda went 'ok what's are the most vanilla things we can signal boost this year? Let's do that' and with one exception which I'll talk about in The 'Best' of list decided to mess over anything interesting in favour of the blandest things on the menu and it all leaves a bit of sour taste in my mouth. I think it got an excessive amount of love from the juries because it's Loreen, representing Sweden (when the country is so prominent in the music industry and so many of the jurors are involved in it), because as per usual with Sweden the staging is fantastic and it's a slick performance of a safe radio friendly song rather than something doing anything new or exciting and I think unlike Euphoria then people are going to look back in years gone by and agree that the televoters were right and the juries crowned the wrong victor and I worry that the vibrant diversity we had in the final this year is going to be set back because of it. Although I do think that 2016 had a lot of good songs competing in it I'm not sure that it's a good thing if we get another year of wall to wall pop songs and ballads although I guess we've got no Russia and an innovative song did win that year after all.

That said it could have been worse if Tattoo isn't amazing or a rock of ages classic winner than it's not terrible lowest common denominator trash either (and no there are not twenty 'infinately better' songs especially since there have been some serious misfires and sloppy efforts efforts this year plus some songs that were just so not my cuppa that I found them actively annoying, plus one piece of drek that qualified for the competition in the worst circumstances possible and then proceeded to be successful because of the very same LCD factors and that nation's dispora, although there might be around twenty that I prefered - see Best of list) and it's not something that I consider to be style over substance and bounce off so hard I find it irritating to the point of being borderline painful like Slo Mo.  It's perfectly listenable, catchy and enjoyable and as I said before I can't fault the staging or Loreen's performance, if she isn't the best singer than she's certainly amongst the best and in a year where one of the few issues has been with sound mixing and vocals not been great then Loreen certainly emerges above many on that account including her biggest contender. I'd have absolutely no issue with Tattoo coming second and I'd probably like a lot more if anyone else didn't (over)rate it so much especially the juries to the extent that IMO they nerfed a much better song in a way that does all feel like a bit of a fix. I know that I've said you shouldn't do down a song because of that and I'm a bit of hypocrite because I love Heroes which arguably did the same thing only more so and it shouldn't matter but it's my opinion at the end of the day and is doesn't have to be rational or follow objective reasoning or be fair. So for me like with Euphoria and My Number One - the overhype and overating of it drag it down. So like Euphoria it's a good song that's overated and like Satelite it's an enjoyable song  that kinda robbed a much better one that will date a lot better. So it gets an A - I would rate it a low one but to be honest I don't actually think it's worse than Euphoria. Contraversal opinion I know but there you have it.