Song 75: Go!

I wouldn't say I hate Eurovision. It's not that. I know it gives a lot of people a great deal of pleasure and I understand why.

But somewhere in the mid to late 90s, I lost touch with it and have never really found it again. It got bloated, it got unfair, and it got kind of not silly, not bad enough.

And I myself, of course, became joyless and musically snobbish around the same time. Funny that.

A couple of times in the intervening two decades, rather than look down my nose on it, I've committed to the evening like we did when we were children, and kind of enjoyed it again (albeit with different drinks than as children). Not massively, not with thrill and abandonment, but a bit.

When we were kids, of course, it was everything. It was looked forward to for weeks, it was a long evening in front of TV with the siblings and the cats and the notepads to keep score and the joy and the jokes and it was, what? 2 1/2 hours, maybe 3. Within bounds. Not 4, that's for sure.

Of course, it wasn't just one evening - well not always. The first "Song for Europe" I remember was in 1988, and it was won by 'Go!' by F***** Scott Fitzgerald (not sure that works on any level). A tear-jerking power ballad of the era by a man of the era.

With the preliminary round, the preamble and the actual contest, the song drilled its way into my head and my heart. Those were, of course, the good old days, when a moderate British power ballad didn't totter miserably to 11 points and 28th place, but strode its way to 135 points, only to be denied victory by 1 damn point - by Switzerland, by 'Ne partez pas sans moi' by a little someone you might have heard of called Celine Dion.

Hi Scott, what did you do? I lost by one point to Celine Dion and history changed forever, how about you?

Anyway, the thing is, I probably heard the song about 5 times in total, if that, all in, with the 'Song for Europe', the celebratory reprise, and the big show. It didn't crack the charts or anything. But we (well mainly me) used to sing its chorus in the back of the car for years to come - it had this Don't Worry Babyish persistence and rise and fall - "Go before you break my heart again you know that's what you've come here for, go before you say I love you like you did the day before you walked away from me" ... on and on it went. Probably, in my head, it's been a song that's been in everybody else's head for decades too.

So, I didn't listen to the song after that, just sang it, to be annoying, and then, had in my head. It never left. Never. It played in my head all the time for three decades. Pure background.

Then, suddenly, at the end of last year, I thought, with a flash of genius - The world has moved on. I could listen to that song, it needn't be trapped in some unreachable past. I can release it from my head and be free. It exists, it doesn't have to haunt me any more.

So I did. And had it been transformed by time into a thing of greater or lesser beauty? No, it was exactly as I remembered it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F09DJR9iiHY

It was this.

I'm not sure anything else has lived in my memory so complete and so whole for quite so long - most other songs/films/goals/stories have had some kind of real-world top-up along the way, or faded away, or perhaps reared up once in a decade or so. But somehow, for 30 years, I'd kept Scott's big hair, big lungs, big chorus pristine ever-present and untainted.

I'm sure Eurovision is, in real terms, much better now, I'm sure it was much better in the 70s too, but this is all it is for me.