Nul Points

by Tim Moore

  It’s a little awkward to sit there, knowing where the story’s leading. ‘After five or six countries gave us no points, I felt a little embarrassed, a little afraid.’ But even as he says this, Jahn is allowing his lips to crack into a smile. ‘Then someone in the green room shouts, “I hope Norway get zero points!”, and there is a big laugh, and after this magic moment everyone is cheering for me!’

  So hearty were the Jahn-based celebrations when this unlikely dream came true that the Israeli winners had to wait for over half an hour after the TV broadcast had finished before receiving their medals. ‘Somehow, scoring my zero was like scoring a goal in the last minute. The situation had looked terrible, then suddenly it was saved.’ Noughty, but nice.

  ‘A lot of us went out into town, and we ended up in a club with a grand piano. I was playing Mil Etter Mil when Serge Gainsbourg came in, and joined in with me.’ I’d spotted the world’s Frenchest man in the Palais des Congrès audience – as composer of the excellent Poupée de Cire, Poupée de Son, he’d been a Eurovision winner back in 1965. The moment Serge offered his patronage, Jahn must have known that despite the NRK boss’s pale-faced exit from the green room, coming rock bottom could turn out better than coming second last; perhaps even second. Or indeed first: A-Ba-Ni-Bi was by some distance the best song performed that night in Paris, but as I learn from my online Eurofriends, twenty-six years on, the band that performed it have long since dropped off the pop radar.

  Waking up to find his hotel room bestrewn with comatose strangers (‘I left them there to pay the minibar bill – I knew NRK wouldn’t want to give me any money for it now’), Jahn set off for the airport not yet aware that this was the start of the most extraordinary day of his life. Outside Norway he was being derided as a buffoon or lambasted as a subversive (‘some foreign journalists thought my whole performance was a protest against Eurovision,’ he recalls), but at Oslo they were already rolling out the red carpet. ‘A real red carpet at the airport! And when I go outside there is a group of Hell’s Angels, who have come to escort me to my hotel. For the first two or three days it was nearly like the Beatles. Imagine my parents, to see the son of a hairdresser almost as famous as the king. I had so much love, I could feel the vibrations from people aged five to ninety. So Mil Etter Mil was now a really big hit in Norway.’ Number one, indeed: having already clawed its way above Mull of Kintyre and three Bee Gees’ singles in the top ten, in Eurovision week it leapfrogged the second of the two Bonnie Tylers.

  Mil Etter Mil headed the charts for two months and stayed top ten for three more. ‘And of course I called the next single I Won’t Give Up, and that was in the charts for the rest of the year.’ Jahn is savouring these heartwarming recollections, and so am I. On the plane to Oslo I’d suffered a destabilising crisis of confidence in my quest: what kind of sport was this, dragging underdogs back to their vomit, then making them eat it? How upliftingly splendid to sit here now, half a day and a strip-search later, hearing Eurovision’s most notorious failure describe his majestic ascent from the nul-points flames.

  ‘People were so happy for me – they said, “Here is our friend, he’s our man, he’s one of us”,’ says Jahn, who’s clearly analysed in some detail the extraordinary national response to his humiliation. ‘I am like this everyman who has been chosen to represent his country, maybe in running, and then at the final he falls over. Young people, old people, they were sad for me. That man,’ and here Jahn exchanges waves with a lingering member of his coterie, who’s been monitoring us with slightly sinister diligence from the other side of the café, ‘he was eight, and he cried. And his grandparents. They say, Jahn was just trying his best.’

  This time, the sense of injustice was too deep to be effectively dispersed over Norway’s smug neighbour. Jahn admits as much during the entertaining rant that now ensues. ‘Everyone here was so proud of me when I came home, because the original song was fantastic, and because I was their friend. They were so angry at Eurovision. In fact, at everyone in Europe! People said: “Why do they smash us down like this? Fuck you, Europe! Stupid fucking idiots!”’

  This seems the best moment, or at least the most exciting one, to bring up Eurovision’s founding principle of continental fraternity, and in particular the extent to which the contest has apparently failed to foster it. ‘Well, I voted No when Norwegians were asked to join the EU. Maybe not everyone can manage on their own, but we can.’ Indeed: North Sea oil has foisted improbable wealth on Norway’s four and half million ‘blue-eyed Arabs’, and inevitably reduced the security-blanket appeal of EU membership: of all the countries who have held referenda on joining the EU, Norway remains the only one to have voted No. Twice, indeed.

  Yet in the 1994 poll, the Nei camp triumphed by only a tiny margin, and I wonder aloud if the lingering anti-European vitriol stirred up by Jahn’s nul points could have tipped the balance: after all, far more Norwegians went out and bought Mil Etter Mil in two-fingered, anti-European pique than the 64,000 whose votes would have swung it for the Ja campaigners. Jahn has clearly come to this conclusion already. ‘For sure! People still tell me they hate Europe because of what happened to me in Paris.’ I’m impressed, even oddly empowered. A daft celebration of musical badness it may still be to some, but fifty years on Eurovision still has the power to change the course of geo-political history.

  Up in his Oslo hotel room on 23 April 1978, Jahn wasn’t looking that far ahead. ‘I am by the window with people waving up at me down in the street, thinking: This is amazing – but what do I do next?’ His eventual answer was the Toilet Tour, so named, says Jahn with a crooked smile, ‘because Mil Etter Mil had gone down the toilet’. To endow the tour with a commercial rationale Jahn rushed out an album, entitled in the same spirit ‘This Year’s Loser’. ‘It was almost a musical about that week – we sang words like “Sack that Jacques!”, all to do with Paris. But in Norwegian.’

  I’ve been aware that Jahn’s surprisingly full-on nationalism sits uncomfortably beside a recorded output that to date had been vocalised almost entirely in English. From the Enemies to Popol Ace – via the Red Squares and even The Lions of Judea – he’d always sung in pop’s lingua franca (though practice didn’t necessarily make perfect: appraising Popol Ace’s legacy, one prog-rock reviewer derided ‘Jahn Teigen’s hilarious English pronunciation’). Indeed, aside from collaborations with his fellow Prima Vera loon Herodes Falsk, Mil Etter Mil was only the second single he’d recorded in Norwegian – the first being You Are a Pig (or Du Er Eit Svin, as it was more familiarly known to phlegm-faced Oslo teenagers).

  Was Jahn’s sudden studio conversion to the mother tongue related to events in Paris? Perhaps a tacit acceptance that he would never now sell records outside his homeland? ‘No,’ he says, simply. ‘I just wanted people here to understand every word. That seemed more important now.’

  Launching himself into a maelstrom of mixed metaphors, Jahn rode the crest of the nul-points backlash for longer than he’d imagined possible. In a commendable display of sod-you defiance, in 1980 he entered the Melodi Grand Prix again, having sat out 1979 to allow his girlfriend and fellow Eurovision obsessive Anita Skorgan to enter, win and finish eleventh in Jerusalem. Dressed as a big-game hunter he finished last, but in 1982, his schmaltzy duet with Anita, Adieu, won over the nation and romped home.

  Reselecting Jahn for Eurovision ‘82 after a second Norwegian nul-points showing the year before was, on the face of it, an act of reckless, fate-tempting bravado: just as they had done when keeping Mil Etter Mil in the charts for half a year, Jahn’s countrymen were once more thumbing their cold noses at Europe. In fact, behind the scenes, Norwegian hands had been wrung until they bled.

  It was difficult not to respect the Viking defiance that had inspired the Norwegians to send along a song they liked, without caring whether anyone else did. Let the rest sing A Song For Europe; their entries were always just A Song From Norway. But now we’d broken their spirit: in their desperation to avoid a much-prophesied hat trick
of ignominy, NRK had secretly contracted an Anglo-French professor of linguistics for advice. His suggestion, which presumably didn’t include the words ‘Jesus! Not that tit in the braces again!’, was to purge the lyrics of those abrupt consonants that dependably startled so many non-Scandinavians.

  ‘He cut a lot of things,’ recalls Jahn, ‘and when I sang on-stage in Harrogate at the final I forgot some more, so the song was just two minutes, I think the shortest Eurosong ever.’ Nonetheless, Adieu picked up forty more points in Harrogate than Mil Etter Mil had managed in Paris, and after recording a back-to-back MGP triumph with the ruthlessly Eurovision Do-Re-Mi, Jahn went better in 1983 – thirteen points better, good enough for ninth place and Norway’s best finish for a decade. That was his final MGP victory, but far from his final appearance in the national qualifier. He now has fourteen under his belt: available, as Frida butts in to inform me, on a compilation CD entitled ‘Jahn Prix’.

  Never satisfied, ever restless, Jahn found his energy being channelled into whole new arenas. He had played Riff-Riff in The Rocky Horror Show in Oslo the year before, and now wrote the score for a musical, The Phantom’s Wedding, which opened in November 1978 and played to full houses for months. He began working with his Prima Vera colleagues on a film script that would tell, in predictably Pythonesque terms, the story of the Viking monarch who encountered Christianity in Britain and returned to convert his heathen subjects. The Saga of King Olaf the Holy was eventually released in 1983, with Jahn naturally in the title role. ‘We had Terry Jones here to help launch it,’ he recalls, excitedly. ‘In the first week it was the number-two movie after Octopussy in Norwegian cinemas.’ Not in the second week, however: reviewers slated it with unusual vitriol, one damning the film as ‘historically inaccurate, scandalous, daft and appalling’.

  After such an enduring run of multi-artistic success, King Olaf’s crushing failure appears to have been a professional tipping point. Summarising his national standing at this time, Jahn says, ‘I was the most known artist in the country, as a solo, a duo [he would marry Anita Skorgan in 1984], a trio [Prima Vera].’ He smiles strangely. ‘And then in 1983 … it all stopped.’ His glasses slip down again, and he rams them forcefully back up his nose. ‘Now I must go outside to smoke.’

  Huddled under the patio heater, my steamed breath mingling with his Marlboro exhalations, I contemplate Jahn’s extraordinary domestic achievements. One Norwegian Eurovision chat-roomer had hailed Jahn as ‘our first real pop star’, but I’d already learnt that there was a lot more to him than that. Musician, actor, comedian … having entertained his countrymen in all these guises for almost forty years, Jahn Teigen must surely be an institution. I gather as much when a passing young man who can’t have been born when his parents first heard Mil Etter Mil marches straight up as Jahn lingeringly stubs out his cigarette. Having established my nationality, our new friend addresses me in an epic tone tremulous with emotion.

  ‘You know this man? This is Jahn Teigen.’

  Jahn smiles that special celebrity smile, gratitude and acknowledgement tempered with discomfort (the low-level, self-deprecatory type rather than Hollywood-strength that’s-great-now-please-piss-off hauteur). ‘This is my hero since I was a little boy. This is a great man.’ I thought people only spoke like that when they were drunk. But he isn’t. There are handshakes, and the hint of a welling tear; we stand to go back inside and our young associate departs across the windy granite piazza.

  ‘It’s strange to imagine the love I get from people.’ Jahn half-sighs. ‘Me, a little pimpled boy from Tønsberg.’ The repeated failure of his bids for international glory might still incite the odd pang of regret, but in Norway at least, that ravaged face was now a cherished feature of the cultural landscape. Here it was never a question of rueing what might have been, but cosily luxuriating in what had been, and still was.

  Comforted by this reiteration of his enduring popularity, Jahn seems suddenly reluctant to return to his account of the period when he did his best to destroy it. ‘After 1983 … well, I took away many years,’ he says, in a nonchalant murmur that seems to acknowledge the statement’s inadequacy. We’re into the dark heart of Jahn’s career, and he isn’t handing me a torch. Every time I raise a question relevant to the decade that follows, he calmly delivers a verbal whitewash of platitudes or fast-forwards to his mid-nineties renaissance.

  My subsequent investigations fail to broach the wall of silence erected around the Teigen Slough of Despond. So stubbornly immune to salacious rumour-mongering are Jahn’s countrymen – and so admirably keen to protect their prodigal son – that exhaustive Googling uncovers nothing more than euphemistic chat-room asides about ‘economic difficulties, bad reviews, and problems with his new marriage’, or Jahn ‘looking more to express himself as a private person than as an artist’. The circumstances that led to our fresh-faced popster booking his extended break to Planet Odd, and the events that weathered him therein, emerge only months later, largely in interviews unearthed and translated by a kindly minded Norwegian associate (Lasse, son of Sissel, I salute you).

  After his wedding-of-the-year marriage to a pregnant Anita, Jahn disbanded Prima Vera, returning to his home town Tønsberg to open and manage a naturopathic pharmacy. Six months afterwards, Anita gave birth to Sara – ‘people offered 100,000 kroner to take pictures of our daughter,’ he told one paper – but there was soon trouble (‘because of another man’) and in 1987 the couple divorced.

  The year after, in a move hardly designed to turn his life around, he acquired the pub-brewery, Norway’s first. I’m of course particularly keen to find out more about this intriguing venture: in an online set of Eurovision Top Trumps I’d come across, Jahn’s micro-brewery earnt him an impressive ‘Special Powers’ score of 87 per cent (one less than his unkindly harsh Ugly Rating). But all that emerges is an obscure suggestion that a rock star with his own pub, and the on-premises equipment to keep it supplied, is going to find himself with many new friends, mostly of the wrong sort.

  Whilst pointing his gnarled finger at love trouble, bankruptcy and pubs, Jahn has, quite typically, pinned most of the blame for a ‘life that went to hell’ on a carpenter. ‘I was rebuilding my home after Anita moved out,’ he told an interviewer, ‘and then there was the restaurant I had in Tønsberg, The Three Little Pigs, and as well as the micro-brewery, I had three more houses and was building a fourth. And I think I had six cars.’ Jahn’s life had never been simple, but I’m astonished to learn of the remarkable lengths to which he went in his determination to over-complicate it. ‘All that meant a lot of problems, and I met a woman from Tvedestrand, and that didn’t work either.’ Later, he talks of his sadness after she broke off their engagement; at twenty-four, she was half Jahn’s age. ‘Every day was a new nightmare. And then this carpenter came and almost destroyed my life.’

  Seeking settlement for 5,000 Norwegian kroner (a little under £500) he was owed by Jahn, the tradesman initiated legal proceedings. Word of these led to a stampede of creditors: ‘The snowball started rolling, lawsuit upon lawsuit,’ he recalled. Only now did Norway’s solitary gossip magazine (at best a reluctant dirt-disher – perhaps more of an Um … Hello! or a Well, If You’re Sure It’s OK) begin to suggest discreetly that the funny old world of the country’s first pop star might be getting a little too funny. Jahn himself has mentioned some of the speculation in interviews: ‘I heard rumours that I was a religious obsessive, that I was sick in the head, that I was selling drugs.’

  He went off for long months, hiding with old friends in Israel, and then London, returning only when the case belatedly came to court. ‘The trial was really painful. It almost killed me. Then Dag-Erik Pedersen called.’ This name rings a faint bell in my brain’s yawning sports department, and a quick online check confirms its owner as a noted cycling pro, winner of three Giro d’Italia stages in the mid eighties. In any other life story, you’d wheel out the phrase ‘unlikely saviour’.

  ‘Dag-Erik had heard I was down, an
d he says: “The tickets are ready. Come to Italy, you will be better here. The plane leaves 16.30.” It was sad, but I felt I had to leave the country. I was only going away for a week, but then it became three months, then three years …’

  Yet it would be inaccurate to date Jahn’s recovery from the moment he stepped off the plane in Rome. As well as occupying his time in Italy with the recording and release of a universally panned album, 1991’s ‘Exile in Paradise’, he also held a press conference outside the Colosseum during which he declared himself the reincarnation of Julius Caesar. Only in 1992, when he decamped to London for a further extended stay, did Jahn Teigen feel himself coming out of the woods.

  So much I assume from the fact that this is the point Jahn chooses to resume our narrative, albeit with the arresting claim that while there he was asked to perform the lead role in The Phantom of the Opera. ‘The composer personally wanted me for the part,’ he tells me with teasing nonchalance. The composer being Andrew Lloyd-Webber? ‘Of course. But there was a problem with one or two notes, so I decided not to go to the next audition. It was not part of my journey. I was going somewhere, but it wasn’t there.’

  I wonder later if his eight-year lost weekend was a delayed reaction to that night in Paris. Perhaps the strain of keeping a brave face finally got too much; the critical opprobrium heaped upon his King Olaf film ruptured the thick scar tissue sealing his nul-points wound, and out burst half a decade of pent-up self-loathing and inadequacy.

  Certain Teigen musings on that night in April 1978 lend weight to this. ‘If someone else had done that song, they would not have got zero,’ he mumbles at one point. ‘It was just because of me. The juries thought: this silly man is ruining our festival.’ And he hints that even while surfing the great wave of national indignation unleashed by the 1978 result, there were times when he felt its mighty undertow pulling him down. ‘The country really engaged with this injustice, they really took it personally for a long time. A guy from Belgium, or anywhere, he goes home after Eurovision, maybe he gets some points or none, but the next day it is all over, all forgotten. But not for me.’ A persistent Jahn theme is moving forward, the onwards journey in life. Maybe he just had enough of his countrymen always looking back. Had enough of the gnawing fear that his enduring popularity might be based on pity.