It’s a interesting lead-in to another phenomenon: how one year’s winner influences future entries. Two years later, the BBC’s first ever win was, guess what, “Puppet on a String”, and I well remember the writers explaining at the time how they’d studied the structures and component features of previous winners to come up with a winning formula.
So it was that after years of few or no points for wistful ballads about lonely herring-gutters, Norway won by jumping on the Boom-Banga-La-La bandwagon. You can still see some reflections of the previous year’s perceived trend, but it doesn’t really work now it’s all so multifarious and unpredictable (God alone knows where last year’s winner came from).
(PS: Gainsbourg - it wasn’t long after that that came, if I may use the word, Je T’Aime Moi Non Plus with Jane Birkin - whom he at least married: though that would hardly have been a Eurovision contender!)
Hi, I’m Gyrate and I’m a huge Eurovision fan. Admittedly I enjoy it because the friends and relations and I (online or at home) spend the evening exchanging snarky comments about the acts, the presenters, the various country reps and the whole long kitschy evening, but still: it’s great fun.
Which reminds me: I see Verka Serduchka will be performing as part of the interval show this year. BEST EUROVISION ACT EVER.
Likewise, Katrina Leskanich (of Katrina and the Waves) is American, but still represented the UK (and won) in 1997. There’s a lot of this going on. Nobody seems too bothered by it really.
Wogan was great but by the end of his run Wogan wasn’t even bothering to conceal his contempt for the event nor his increasing state of inebriation throughout the evenings. Norton is a much better host (although part of me would love to see Harry Hill host it one year, just for the commentary).
Gainsbourg was a disgusting little turd who exploited women for his own perverted pleasure. He wallowed in how he could manipulate young girls through their innocence and naivety including his own 13 year-old daughter with the song “Lemon Incest”. Warning the video is creepy and pervy.
He groomed France Gall from when she was 15-16 years old so she trusted him and his songs.
So far as I am aware, he did not “groom” Gall in (what we could call these days) the normal sense/use of the word. He certainly exploited her naiveté and innocence in the cause of his own “art”. He may have made her a laughing stock and probably did her harm, career-wise, but that’s a different matter. As I noted above, Serge was a genius but a bit of a bastard.
It is October, 2016 and only two events predicted by Nostradamus have yet to happen for the End of the World as We Know It to take place. One is the election of Donald J. Trump and the other Brexit. Clovenhoof, Satan condemned to a life in Birmingham, West Midlands, is dispatched to the US to stop the former and the Archangel Michael (ditto) is tasked with the latter. He decides that an entry in Eurovision with a song pleading the UK to remain is the best way so he gathers an… eclectic group of artists to write and perform it in the control room of the LHC (long story). For me, the funniest bit was several chickens who escape their cages (they couldn’t find any doves) make it into the collider ring and are instantly accelerated on a sub-light but still very fast trip around the ring. They return a few minutes later defeathered and roasted by air friction.
Oh my eyes! Over the past few days of watching Eurovision videos, I have seen some both amazing and disturbing things. I think that I am ready for this year’s competition.
He didn’t “groom” France Gall. This word would be understood by the reader has meaning something entirely different from what happened.
He wrote for her a song that had a double meaning that was obvious for most of the public, but that she was too naive to understand. The song was a massive success, and she sang it everywhere, only realizing what it meant long after, and she was outraged and felt betrayed.
Note also that nobody else explained it to her. In particular not her parents who were in charge of her career.
Gainsbourg enjoyed greatly provocation, but although I could be mistaken, despite the large number of lovers he had, I don’t think, although I could be mistaken, that he has ever been accused, or even suspected, of being involved with underage girls.
ETA : after checking, this didn’t happen when Gall was 15-16, either, but when she was 19.
I mostly agree with you here, but it’s undeniable that Lemon Incest, sung with his own daughter, is at best in very poor taste and at worst frankly disturbing - cheap pun in French notwithstanding.
Plus, he lifted the melody from one Chopin’s Études :dubious:.
