by Tim Moore
A Cypriot girl in a toga; a trio of pastel-eyed Swedish housewives; three hefty, booming, Yugoslav women who look like the one from The Golden Girls we all thought was a man – a relentless procession of songs and performances that by most sensible artistic criteria, and all snidely aesthetic ones, deserve no more than Nuku Pommiin. But because their performers do not sneer, or smirk, or slap themselves about the face, they will go home with a respectable haul of points.
Not so the Danes, whose bravely synthesised offering is musically reminiscent of Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, and whose Kojo-trumping outfits of banana and fuchsia lurex suggest wardrobe manoeuvres undertaken in similar conditions. Five points and second last in the bag: Eurovision has never responded well to contemporary trends in pop culture. There was a continent-wide intake of breath when a 1967 regulation decreed that half of all voting delegates should be under thirty; Sandie Shaw triumphed in what became known as ‘the year of the young juries’.
The ORF announcer placed his finger firmly on the Eurovision pulse when he welcomed the glittery highway-women of Portugal on-stage with an apprehensive shiver: ‘Ah – die punk ladies.’ Having sensibly tempered their apparently shocking appearance with the comforting banality of Bem/Bim Bom, they didn’t do too badly. The only other song to score under ten didn’t do so on account of its avant-garde alienation, or any recklessness on the part of its karate-suited Dutch performer. It was just shit. Have a good look at that monument to drivel, and you’ll spot Bill van Dijke strung up from its lightning conductor.
And then, last up, here’s eighteen-year-old Nicole, showing Finn Kalvik that to carry off the guitar/stool combo it helps if you’re young and female. Romping to victory by a record sixty-one points, Ein Bisschen Frieden – as A Little Peace the last Eurovision winner to top the UK charts – ensured a final scoreboard bookended with pacifist anthems. It succeeded where Nuku Pommiin so spectacularly failed by obscuring its message in layers of anodyne schmaltz: A little sunshine, a little gladness, to wash away all the tears of sadness … none of your nuclear poo here. Nicole sang ‘peace’ fourteen times, ‘love’ three times and ‘bird’ twice, and she sang them all without slapping herself even once. With her big, white Kumbaya-ready acoustic, that pale face framed by great curtains of hair and a Pam Ayres dress, she was every jury member’s perfect Euro-daughter, just as sneering, self-harming Kojo was their nightmare Euro-son.
When Nicole came out to reprise her triumph, she did so with verses sung in English, French, Italian and Dutch: thus ruthlessly promoted, Ein Bisschen Frieden went on to sell over a million worldwide. Predictably, the song’s composer was a hard-bitten Eurovision pro whose 1979 German entry paid zesty tribute to feted pacifist Genghis Khan. On that occasion, Ralph Siegel backpedalled on the birds and sunshine in favour of such soothing lyrical sentiments as: They carried fear and horror in every country, let’s fetch vodka and he fathered seven children in one night. (In a little-publicised case some years later, Ralph was accused of borrowing large parts of Ein Bisschen Freiden from a minor 1973 Julio Iglesias hit, Alle Liebe dieser Erde. The settlement was never announced, but it’s interesting to see that a website devoted to cover versions brackets the two songs together.)
The Harrogate pre-vote show gave 300 million of us a good reason to put the kettle on. Ronnie’s variations on Scarborough Fair and The Grand Old Duke of York play behind a tour of the region’s stately homes; when Jahn briefly appears, being carried up the steps of Castle Howard in a sedan chair, his leer and the musical accompaniment’s porn-muzak quality suggest scenes of vile decadence await him within.
‘Here are the results of the Portuguese jury …’ Another of those precise but oddly stilted disembodied voices booms out, unleashing a painful screech of feedback. How fond I’m becoming of the spy’s English that once was every jury foreman’s stock in trade: clipped and precise, yet fatally flawed by a tiny slip in enunciation – in this case, a tell-tale over-deliberation of the central syllable in ‘Harrogate’.
In the second round of voting the perennial nul-pointers bag big votes off Luxembourg, prompting a tickled shriek of ‘Norway – six points!’ from our hostess and a lazy, ironic cheer from the audience. The awful, awful Dutch keep Kojo company at the wrong end of the scoreboard for eight rounds, before the treacherous Swedes – widowmakers once more – award Jij En Ik three points.
Once again a solitary Nordic male has been bent over and spanked with the big wooden spoon. Following Norway’s brace of nul-pointers in 1978 and 1981, when Finland copped the big nix it seemed Scandinavia would be riding the Eurovision duck for ever more. What did they all do so wrong? Well, as thirtyish Scandinavian males they certainly weren’t about to pick up many sympathy points. Come on, the jurors are thinking, it’s not as if that red-suited head-slapper is off back to a Portuguese barrel-repair sweatshop or the Zagreb hoof-glue rendering plant. Bollock it up at the Eurovision and a Scandinavian can go back home and fashion any number of lucrative new careers for himself: leather footstools don’t just design themselves.
With Kojo now down and out on his own, an exceptional moment: perhaps because Nicole’s runaway triumph means there’s little drama at the top, perhaps in recognition of the host nation’s distasteful fascination with the wrong end of the scoreboard, we are given a rare live shot of a nul point in the making.
In almost every other final I have watched or shall, the stricken are left to suffer in darkness and silence. But suddenly, here’s the chap in red lounging flamboyantly in a green-room armchair, legs splayed over the arms, honing his Billy Idol lip curl. Their slouched deportment suggests that his surrounding Blues Brothers are long since past caring, but for their leader it goes beyond that: here is a man who never cared to begin with. Kojo clocks the camera, extrudes a lazy, lopsided smirk into its lens and raises his arms in mock triumph. As he does I know that I’ve seen this before, that taunting salute, that fuck-you-all sneer: with apologies to Jahn, here is Eurovision’s one true punk moment. And that’s enough to have me hauling the Fender from under the bed and banging out those bar chords.
‘Some say architecture is frozen music,’ drones the voiceover on the wonders-of-Finland film being played out on a ceiling-mounted screen in the arrivals hall. Well, if it’s going to happen anywhere, I ponder dully, feeling like Jim Pembroke after three encores and a triathlon, it would be Helsinki. Late January; the fag end of Scandinavia’s darkest, coldest month, in its darkest, coldest capital. Cold enough, even inside, to randomise my thoughts, to cause me to wonder what kind of architecture a frozen Eurovision might suggest, and to come up with the Pompidou Centre. And dark enough, even though it’s pushing noon, to cast a forbidding shadow across the vast advertisement hoarding whose message causes trepidation to swell up in my guts as I wander towards the carousel.
‘Facts about Finland,’ it’s headed innocuously. The second of the two lines of copy that follow – ‘2004: Finnet, first choice for mobile network in Finland’ – is unremarkable but for its interaction with the first – ‘1962: best ever result in the Eurovision Song Contest, 7th’.
Five minutes in this country, and I’m already forced to confront Finland’s unhealthy fixation with its appalling Eurovision history. As I had a day or so before, blundering across this study of comparative climatology on an Anglo-Finnish blog:
+5°C: Italian cars won’t start; Finns are cruising in cabriolets.
-10°C: Brits start their central heating; Finns start wearing long sleeves.
-300°C: hell freezes over, Finland wins ESC.
Reading that advert again, and again, my misgivings multiply. Seventh? That just doesn’t sound right. By the time the more conspicuous of my two luggage items is parting the rubber-strip curtains, I’ve confirmed my doubts, courtesy of the Eurovision handbook delved from the first. April 7 1973, Nouveau Theatre, Luxembourg, Marion Rung, Finland, Tom Tom Tom (chorus: ‘Tom tom tom tom tom tom, I hear the music, tom tom tom tom tom tom’). Yes, having finished last eight times, Finlan
d could hardly claim to look back over a gilded Eurovision heritage. But Tom Tom Tom, with 93 points, came sixth. After forty-nine years of pain and disappointment, hope has curdled into a Finnish fatalism so bitter, they’ve airbrushed out the highlights. And here I am, picking up my Fender case, about to celebrate through public serenade the very lowest light of all.
Una Paloma Blanca trills simperingly from the taxi radio as we slap and slosh up the bus lanes, the pines and birches above bowed with fat new snow. There’s a dour, ice-and-granite Soviet ambience to the streets; every passing face is hidden in a hood and angled down at the pavement. How could this place have produced the reckless free spirit who had smacked himself about in front of 300 million people, and whose eccentric chutzpah was still apparent in two-line emails sent twenty-three years later?
‘Your idea sounds crazy but nice,’ his first Dubai-dispatched reply had begun, ‘and I’m always ready when it comes to having A LAUGH. I’m back in HELSINKI next week so LETS HAVE LUNCH.’ The moment that landed in my inbox was the moment the post-Kalvik recovery process began in gleeful earnest.
We’d arranged to meet at Strindberg, which swiftly announces itself to me as an alarmingly upmarket restaurant clearly unaccustomed to serving foreigners in stupid and possibly offensive Cossack hats, and carrying slush-spattered guitar cases. I’m early, and though I’ve no idea what facial evolutions Kojo might have undergone since 1982, inspecting the incoming clientele – smooth executives shaking the weather off their overcoats and the odd lady-who-lunches doing the same to her hair – I figure he shouldn’t be too hard to spot.
I sit down on a banquette near the maître d’s lectern; a barman scuttles up. ‘Beer?’ he says, taking both nationality and alcoholic preference for granted. Moments later he returns with a frothing half-litre that’s rather more than I’d wanted at this time of day. ‘Not important to ask if you prefer a small one!’ he chortles matily, winking at the Fender case. Here we go. At least there’d been no one at customs to feel me up for party-buttons.
I’ve taken three small sips when a proximate growl causes me to look up.
‘Team?’
Above me stands a round-faced man in a docker’s hat and a paunch-plumped fisherman’s jumper, peering myopically through a pair of round, metal-framed spectacles.
‘Koj … Koyo?’
I stand, we clasp hands, he snatches off his hat. Having done so he swiftly teases the gelled grey hairs that sparsely colonise his head into short, messy spikes; this act, and its concomitant exposure of a flamboyant ring similar to that worn by Ringo in Help!, at a stroke lays bare his CV. No less plainly, the enormous, messy smile that now fills half his face reassures me that here is a good, kind man of stoic temperament. Today, I think, standing to retrieve the Fender case from under the banquette, there will be no red-faced, wild-eyed finger-jabbing.
‘You have a guitar?’
‘Yes!’ I blurt, driven by light-headed relief into an ecstatic statement of the bleeding obvious. ‘I thought I’d surprise you.’
‘How?’ says Kojo, his waxy brow furrowing.
Two minutes in, and yet to be served with a writ or injured, I rashly overplay my hand. ‘I thought we could play your song.’
‘My song?’
‘You know, um: Nuku Pommiin.’ Its erstwhile performer shoots me a sharp look, more bemused than offended. ‘I’ve learnt all the chords,’ I continue, watching those jolly eyes narrow. ‘We could do it … over there.’ I point at a distant unoccupied sofa.
Kojo squints at the distant unoccupied sofa I’m pointing at. ‘There? By the toilet?’
It’s poor salesmanship, and we both know it. ‘Nuku Pommiin,’ he echoes faintly, and a little coldly, as if greeting a girl who’d cruelly spurned his teenage advances, and was now here begging for an autograph. ‘Ah, no.’
The game’s up. Still, nothing left to lose now. ‘Er … yes?’
After a pause just long enough to make me wonder if I’m shortly to find myself face down in the gutter slush with two halves of a Fender Bullet for company, he laughs. He laughs a lot, a drawn-out, tar-throated cackle that shows his nicotined teeth and stops all surrounding conversations. ‘No,’ he repeats, when at length he’s able. Timo Kojo has just put the whole ill-conceived singalong scheme out of its misery, but the manner in which he’s done so has simultaneously resurrected my enthusiasm for the quest ahead. As his laughter fades, mine picks up the slack.
Wiping our eyes, we follow the waitress to our seats; I’m interested to see Kojo exchanging smiles and nods with three or four tables, all occupied by well-groomed professionals and their elegant companions. We sit down, Kojo placing two packets of Marlboro Lights on his sideplate, and I ask who they are. ‘Oh, you know. High-society people. See that woman? The richest in Finland. Her husband owns a lot of oil tankers. I mean a lot.’
Hardly the sort of company I expected an old nul-pointer to keep, but before I can think of a tactful means of saying so, Kojo offers an even unlikelier explanation. ‘Most of these people I meet through my country club.’
I repeat these last two words, in incredulous italics; Kojo blithely sparks up a Marlboro and squints rheumily through the following exhalation. ‘Yeah, for sure. For me it’s a golf thing. This is why I was in Dubai, you know?’
I had assumed to the point of certainty that Kojo’s time in the Emirates would have been occupied serenading Scandinavian guests in the sparsely peopled restaurant of a large, bronze-glassed hotel. ‘I have a patent for a golf driving range system that you can build out on to the sea,’ he says in a tone considerably more matter-of-fact than the words demand. ‘In Dubai some hotels are interested.’
It’s difficult to see how this extraordinary beginning to our conversation might be steered back towards the questions I need to ask: Kojo’s got a meeting at three, which gives me two hours to get his whole story down. More fortunately than it would have appeared in most situations, a waitress chooses this moment to catch my guitar case with her right foot, causing her to drop a dish lavishly slathered in redcurrant sauce. Coldly muttering her way through the clean-up process, she leaves Kojo and me dabbing sticky spatters off our flesh and clothing. It’s suddenly far easier to regroup the conversation. ‘So,’ I say, when we’ve finished, ‘Harrogate.’
I’d already experienced the inflammatory dangers inherent in such a brusque opening gambit, but Kojo quickly reveals himself as a man at ease with his past, present and future. ‘Eurovision was never my thing,’ he drawls, with the mid-Atlantic, mid-Baltic intonation now familiar as the voice of middle-aged Scandi-rock. ‘I was a rock musician, you know? I didn’t get into music to sing la-la-la songs to Spanish grandmothers – I wanted to get girls!’ Reaching round the table, he slaps my leg with blokeish fraternity; the waiter placing two plates of pasta and two glasses of wine before us widens his eyes. ‘Or I should say more girls. We are in Finland: it’s easy to find girls to have sex with!’ If only the tourist board had stuck that on its Eurovision banner, I think. The faces now angling towards us from most surrounding tables demonstrated that in 2005 as in 1982, decorum is not a word to be found in the Timo Kojo lexicon.
‘So I’m touring with this rock and soul band, and sharing a flat in Helsinki with Tchim, sometimes being his roadie … we were really not Eurovision.’ Well, Jim was, I say. At least a bit. Kojo’s pained shrug is his first display of awkwardness; not bad going given what we’re here to discuss. ‘OK, I must say, I didn’t like the song.’ A sip of red wine; another Marlboro. ‘The record company ask me to do it, and I told them straight.’
With the fag stuck in the corner of his mouth, he abruptly punches his hand. ‘I said: the melody is awful, it’s a nothing melody, you can’t catch it. I’m sorry Tchim. The first version had a great middle eight, but then even this was taken out before Eurovision.’ Kojo puffs his rosy, round cheeks out before expelling a long, lip-rumbling expression of pained disbelief. ‘I hate the song, but I like the idea.’ The idea? ‘The no-war message in the
lyric. It’s very heavy for Finland with Russia right here. We really felt strong about what we were singing. There was a real understanding.’
But being in Finnish, this understanding did not travel far. If the rest of us gleaned from Kojo’s performance that Finland was in mortal danger, we’d have assumed it derived from the populace slapping itself to death. I suggest to Kojo that Nicole’s winning plea for peace, however cloying and vague, succeeded through being expressed with a simplicity that transcended the language barriers.
‘Yes, but what is “a little bit peace”?’ He snorts with grandiose derision, and I figure there won’t be a better time to ask whether the man before me admits responsibility for one of Eurovision’s most celebrated quotes. Asked the day after the final for his opinion on the winning entry, Kojo is said to have succinctly epitomised its singer as ‘an ugly German virgin’.
‘Yeah, why not? I can’t remember saying it, but it sounds like me. I hate this taking the middle track, people who sing about big matters in this … blab-a-blab nothing way.’ How joyously liberating to hear such words from a Eurovision performer’s mouth; with the Kalvik blues now fading, it strikes me how lucky I am to be tracking down the entertaining misfits who wouldn’t or couldn’t play the Eurovision game, rather than its complacent, blanded-out winners. What’s Nicole Hohloch up to these days? Married to her childhood sweetheart, singing boompsadaisy schlager tunes and ‘acting as an unofficial ambassador for her native Saarland’, that’s what.
Twenty-three years on, it’s clear there was no false bravado in the smirk Kojo aimed at the cameras as the votes came in. ‘Of course! For us this was a joke, this Eurovision thing. It’s big for the record company guys, but bullshit for us. We went out to have some laughs, and we did.’
So what does a hard-bitten, road-wise rocker do for kicks with the Golden Girls and Jan Leeming for company, and Harrogate for a backdrop? The twinkle returns, with enhanced wattage. ‘We had a couple of real good parties. These nice Portuguese ladies, we have a very good time with them.’ The sequined Antpeople? ‘They had black-and-white hats … I don’t remember the song.’ He’s already confessed that not having once seen a recording of the final, he couldn’t hum a single note of any rival entry bar Nicole’s, or recall the name of any artist bar her. ‘I forget a lot about Harrogate, but I remember a very nice Portuguese ass!’ Ah, the Bem Bom bum. Here is one nul-pointer who didn’t fail to score.