Nul Points

by Tim Moore

  23 April 1983 Rudi Sedlmayer Halle, Munich

  Çetin Alp

  Remedios Amaya

  Turkey

  Spain

  Opera

  ¿Quien maneja mi barca?

  ‘TODAY WE HAVE to talk about a new died ESC-related person,’ announced the news forum on www.eurovision-spain.com, ‘as in this case the Turkish 1983 representative, Çetin Alp, who just had a heart crisis in his house.’ Sitting down to check out the Eurovision latest on my fortieth birthday had initially seemed sad merely in the contemporary sense. Now I looked at the screen, with its associated thumbprint photograph of a rather tentative-looking fellow in glasses and a beige tuxedo, and felt my innards slowly bind themselves into a knot. Fourteen had just become thirteen; of all the nul-pointers who had died on-stage, Çetin Alp was the first to die off it. And that meant there would be no meeting with the man responsible for the most extraordinary of all the 943 songs performed since Jetty Paerl took to that Lugano stage in 1956.

  I’d read a great deal about Çetin Alp and the Short Waves’ performance at Munich in 1983, but it’s not until six months after he was called to his eternal rest that Andreas’s DVD anthology allows me to witness it with my own saucered eyes. The millions who beheld Çetin’s three minutes are unlikely to forget them; but 1983 found me deep in the Eurovision void into which many fall between innocent childhood exuberance and pissed-up student irony. At nineteen, staying in on Saturday night to watch television was simply out of the question. (My vivid memories of Harrogate the year before remain an awkward enigma; it can only be assumed that what I recalled as a mild attraction to Jan Leeming was in fearful truth a desperate, slavish obsession.)

  Introduced by an interminable wonders-of-Germany tourist-board promotion – it would be seven long minutes before Marlene Charell welcomed us to the Rudi Sedlmayer Halle – the 1983 final efficiently sets out its stall as the most lazily tedious production I have yet to experience. The cavernous auditorium bears down on an insultingly inadequate sliver of stage; Marlene, struggling with her tri-lingual introductory duties, commits so many stumbles, slips and floundering, blithering illogicalities that the online community later releases a final tally (twenty-seven, including thirteen in the voting session alone). If the French have been looking to justify their boycott the year before – and you can guarantee they have – here it is on 400 million screens.

  Appropriately enough, Guy Bonnet marks his nation’s return to the Eurovision fold with the evening’s debut performance: who better to wipe the slate clean than the pianist veteran of two previous finals? Not so much playing his instrument as attempting to reanimate it with a weary facsimile of cardiac massage, Guy has the face and glasses of a student scientist, and the blue tuxedo of a diehard Europillock. (He’s now a Christian rocker and an international-standard ocean fisherman.) This desperate start is swiftly redeemed by the now traditional appearance of a wonky-toothed Norwegian and his winsome missus. Finding no trace of the conductor’s name on her cue card, Marlene boldly makes one up on the spot: ‘Johannes Skorgan!’ comes her cry, as we watch Sigurd Jansen fingering his baton in bemusement.

  She has no trouble with Jahn Teigen, but I do. Despite the ludicrous nose-to-the-stage bow with which he introduces himself, this is not the Jahn of old. If anything, it’s an even more dishearteningly castrated performance than that V-neck love-in the year before: he’s wearing an if-you-can’t-beat-’em white tuxedo, for pity’s sake, and what’s going on with these lyrics? I wasn’t expecting much from a song called Do-Re-Mi, and I don’t get it: each of the many choruses begins with the title, and ends in fa-so-la-ti-do. You shameless, cynical sellout, I hear myself muttering. You’re better than this. ‘A performance that redefined unoriginality,’ one of my Eurovision books had called it, and now I understand why.

  At least until I rewind to savour Marlene’s introduction afresh, and hear her name the lyricists as Jahn Teigen and Herodes Falsk. The old Prima Vera mischief makers … Sure enough, reviewing his performance in this light I can see that everything about it – that ridiculous dinner jacket, the childishly inane and contrivedly rootless lyrics and la-la-la melody, the way he spins round and plants a kiss on Anita’s temple near the end – is a Euro-baiting spoof. The previous year Jahn’s entry had been purged of alienating Nordic gutturalisms by that professor of linguistics; with Teigenesque bravado, he’s now taken this initiative to its idiotic conclusion, ordering song and outfit off-the-peg from Eurovision Rentals. His smile is as overbearing and relentless as a Monty Python quiz-show host; the smile of a man having his cheesecake and eating it.

  There are only three songs before Çetin, two of them performed by Sheena Eastons in bright yellow ra-ra skirts and matching calf-length boots; Sweet Dreams opt to sing on stools, thereby assuring the UK will not be adding to its tally of victories. ‘The following entry is the Turkish!’ beams Marlene, and as the conductor turns to face the orchestra, the German commentator describes Opera with something that sounds very like scorn. I’ve no idea what he’s actually saying, of course, but his mastery of audible quotation marks for derisive ends would have earnt an approving nod from Terry Wogan in the booth next door. And then here is a bespectacled man in a tan tux with gold lapels, conspicuously lacking the Teigen grin such an outfit demands. With no extant recording of the following year’s Balkan Song Festival, where Çetin was to win the Top Talent award, this is the only footage of him known to exist: he’s part Borat, part Leslie Crowther. His glasses, horribly, are tinted yellow, casting a sickly, liverish shadow that seems to spread across much of his face.

  But no one’s really looking at him. Strung across the shallow stage behind Çetin are the Short Waves; no other backing band sounded more certain to bound on-stage in canary jumpsuits, yet the audience finds itself faced with a quintet of musketeers and Empress Josephines, a perplexing medley of brocade, towering wigs and Austin Powers velveteen ruff-frills. These, as the German commentator has doubtless just revealed, are the characters who will assist Çetin in performing a three-minute opera. When our man inaugurates this by raising his arms and turning to lead the Short Waves into an extraordinary, swelling yowl, a vocal homage to Sergeant Pepper’s discordant orchestral climax, it’s clear we are watching Eurovision history being made.

  Çetin Alp’s Eurovision career had begun in 1979, when at the age of thirty-one he was invited to enter Turkey’s national pre-selection. Fifth out of eight wasn’t a great result, but then it was pretty much a shambles all round: the winning song was disqualified when someone found a dusty recording of it in their singles collection, and the runner-up substitute was told to unpack his suitcase after neighbouring Arab nations began asking aloud if Turkey was absolutely sure it wanted to send a delegation to Jerusalem.

  That lonely paragraph is the repository of public knowledge of Mr Alp’s pre-Munich existence. In the many Turkish ESC forums I patronised, and the four obituaries I had translated, his entire professional career was condensed into three terse, almost brutal words: the Opera man. So conspicuous was this one song’s Eurovision impact, and so predictable its shattering failure, that it came to eclipse all his other professional achievements. In life as in death, Çetin Alp was known only for the ‘three-part song suite’ composed for him by Bugra Ugur and Aysel Gürel.

  An opera about opera, entitled Opera, their effort was one of the more desperate of that year’s many attempts to circumnavigate the native-language rule, and in particular the subclause that states that ‘short quotations from another language are allowed so long as they are no longer than one phrase’. (As well as Jahn’s largely unilingual Do-Re-Mi, the Dutch pushed the regulatory envelope with Sing Me a Song, little more than an English-language list of musical genres from blues to ‘ballad of folk’.) Along with twenty-four repetitions of its universally intelligible title, Opera also leavened its modest Turkish component with the names of five composers, along with half a dozen of their compositions (both repeated twice).

  Opera, ope
ra, opera, opera, opera

  Opera, opera, opera, opera, Carmen, Aida

  Opera, opera, bu gece operalarda

  Tosca, Figaro, Fidelio var, coşkun aryalar

  Long before we get to these opening couplets, though, it’s clear that this song is going to do very, very badly – no other nul-pointer announces its intent with such efficiency. So convincingly does the spartan modesty of the performing area suggest a local variety show, when Çetin wanders near the side curtains I’m waiting for the old walking stick to shoot out and yank him neck-first offstage, followed by a muffled shout of ‘Next!’

  Within seconds of that introductory howl, Çetin’s resonant baritone is roaming uneasily across a musical landscape whose jarring, rearing evolutions have been defying effective description for over twenty years. A wall of Chic-pattern disco guitars is demolished by a jauntily brassed-up mambo chorus, Çetin splays his arms and pulses out a long burst of deep vibrato, and I’m lost. So too the hapless Mr Alp, who unlike every nul-pointer I’ve encountered so far, seems certain of his fate from an early stage.

  He’s been shirking the camera’s stare from the start, and as the central section’s unhinged Latin oompah careers without warning into a crooned aria, Çetin suddenly seems to grasp the slavering, hundred-headed absurdity of what’s going on up there. The thick lips tighten, the gaze shifts around behind those jaundice-shaded specs, the baritone begins to wander off its axis. Just before girding himself for the bellowed, Englebert Humperdinck finale, I see his face sag slightly, souring into a brief gurn of exasperation. I didn’t write this daft rubbish, he’s saying, Don’t take it out on me.

  I’ve seen Opera described as ‘part ballad, part Dixieland rag’; as ‘salsa squished into an aria sandwich’. The Times, in a recent Eurovision retrospective, called it ‘Radiohead’s Paranoid Android covered by the Divine Comedy’. For Allan Todd, an authority for the past thirty years who owns copies of every Eurovision recording ever released, it is simply ‘the worst of all time’.

  That it certainly is not: one man’s meat, after all, is another man’s cheese. Of the hundred-plus Eurovision songs I’ve already watched and heard, at least half I’d be happy never to experience again. But I defy anyone to listen to Opera only once. By any standards it is an extraordinary piece of music; put it on a Eurovision stage, and amongst the homogenous, formulaic ballads and pop froth it stands proud as a beacon of bold idiosyncrasy. In three mad minutes, it rewrote, defaced and ate the Eurovision rulebook.

  This much was plain from the forum messages that trickled on to Eurovision sites in the days after Çetin’s death. Scrolling through the tortuous efforts to instil respectful mourning with a sense of his uniquely esoteric contribution to the contest proved an oddly moving experience. ‘Whenever I want to show “non-ESC-fanatic” friends something special and genuine,’ wrote one, ‘his entry is certainly among those.’ ‘Çetin left the world a remarkable performance, one of my first visual adventures and memories regarding Eurovision … Opera is a very special and funny song for me and will stay an evergreen for ever and ever … I always thought of it as being one of the strangest but very nice songs sent by Turkey.’

  With a short wave and five Short Waves, Çetin departs the stage; it’s a solace of sorts to see him superseded by the woman who will ensure that this night, his will be a pain shared. Barefoot, wrapped in a vortex-striped swathe of fabric that suggests a flag-sized air-stewardess neck scarf, Spain’s Remedios Amaya knits those low, Latin brows beneath her thin headband and casts a deeply concerned gaze across the audience. Until three minutes before I’d never seen a Eurovision performer look so worried: perhaps she’s still as thrown as the rest of us by what has just taken place on the stage. After all that noise and fancy-dress madness, she looks very, very alone.

  Maria Dolores Amaya Vega (all flamenco artists seem to be given a nickname, though I never discovered what she did to deserve ‘remedies’) was born to humble parents of gypsy ancestry in Seville in 1962. By her teenage years she had already mastered the larynx-bobbing warble demanded by Spain’s native vocal form, and her precocious performances in Seville’s flamenco clubs swiftly earnt plaudits from Spain’s greatest male exponent of the art, the late Jose Monje Cruz (nicknamed Camarón – ‘The Shrimp’ – ‘on account of his wiry body and light-brown hair’).

  Curious impresarios followed in his wake: Remedios was young, swarthily attractive and vocally versatile – the perfect artist, thought producer Julio Palacios, to reverse the commercial decline flamenco had been suffering since the Beatles hit Spain, a trend accelerated by the pent-up pop-cultural creativity released after Franco’s death in 1975.

  The result was Remedios Amaya’s eponymous debut, an album that fused traditional castanet-clicking stage-stampers with foreign-flavoured pop into a hybrid the critics called ‘flamenco rock’. She was just sixteen when it came out, and eighteen when Julio produced a more blatantly commercial follow-up. Her first nationwide, big-label release came two years later, in early 1983, when the Julio-masterminded ‘Luna Nueva’ hit the shelves. The purists loathed what they called ‘this techno-flamenco’, bridling at its use of drums, keyboards and dance beats, but the album found favour with culturally influential modernisers associated with the newly installed socialist government, one keen to repackage Spain’s cultural heritage for the post-Franco generation. So it was that despite the album’s rather modest sales, its performer quickly found herself on a TV España Eurovision ‘internal shortlist’ that ran as follows: 1. Remedios Amaya’s ¿Quien Maneja mi Barca?; 2. Como el Agua de la Fuente by Remedios Amaya.

  The executives plumped for the first, a sort of bold Arabian tango, its kasbah-thumping, slapped-bass beat overlaid with a strident mantra that was little more than the title’s incorporated query – who’s steering my boat? – repeated with ratcheting vehemence. The composers were two brothers, the hairier of whom was to double up as conductor on the night.

  Remedios arrived in Munich two weeks before her twenty-first birthday. Few in Spain were aware that she had left behind a little boy not yet a year old: Luis, the product of her relationship with a chap from Madrid named Roman. In common with most of the younger nul-pointers I would later meet, Remedios went to Eurovision purely because she’d been asked to, because it would have been ungrateful, awkward and possibly traitorous to say no. A humble young mother more than satisfied with the modest local celebrity that had thus far been her reward, she came to the final unburdened by expectations of international stardom.

  But this was Remedios’s first trip outside Spain, and sweet-natured unworldliness would, in the days ahead, encourage her to read rather too much into workaday media attention. ‘Everybody is asking me for interviews and photos,’ she gabbled to a journalist from El Periódico de Catalunya. ‘With the welcome I’ve had I’m really confident of winning!’ She accepted an invitation to sing for Munich’s extensive Spanish community, being received with an enthusiasm that did little to dampen her optimism. ‘We’re giving Eurovision something fresh and original,’ she told the press. ‘All the other performers tell me it’s going to do really well.’

  Back at home, though, her song’s almost furtive selection was causing belated controversy. The more it was played, the more sharply it seemed to divide public opinion: one Spanish Eurovision nostalgic recalls ‘a hard confrontation between her detractors and defenders, even on the streets’. There were suddenly a lot of cold feet under TVE desks: without warning, the Spanish viewing public discovered that coverage of the Eurovision final had been shunted off on to the state broadcaster’s minority-interest channel, its place taken by the network premiere of A Fistful of Dollars.

  Native Eurovision fanatics had yet to forgive TVE for a suspected act of sabotage four years earlier, wherein the Spanish, in the lead and voting last, oddly contrived to hand ten points, and victory, to Israel: TVE had earlier hinted at their reluctance to meet the financial and technical challenges involved in hosting the final, and though no conspiracy
was ever proven, even the EBU’s official history cheerfully outlines the rumours.

  Lingering resentment was swiftly rekindled by Clint Eastwood’s unscheduled appearance on the nation’s screens, inciting Spanish Eurofans into a rage so bitter that over twenty years on the residual bile is still trickling out. Only the very drunkest gainsayer would find a good word for Remedios’s outfit, but it’s surely a little harsh to maintain – as the self-styled ‘King of Love’ did in an impassioned blog entry in 2004 – that by obliging her to wear it, ‘TVE seeded hatred in juries’. ‘This infamous blue-ray dress, the headband, her loose hair and a hideous excess of foundation and eye shadow – an unprecedented accumulation of nonsense.’ These people: he even gives the name of the TVE make-up artist responsible.

  What no one denies is that the hurried, shambolic process by which her song had been selected set a regrettable example for the B-team TVE delegation who accompanied her to Munich. The dress was almost randomly selected in last-minute desperation, and in failing to provide any complementary footwear the TVE stylists effectively obliged Remedios to go shoe-less (‘It’s more comfortable, anyway,’ she said diplomatically). Rehearsals proved predictably disjointed; by the time she stood in the wings waiting for Çetin to finish, the girlish confidence of her press utterings had completely evaporated. ‘She never talked back or argued,’ a journalist remembered, ‘and always did what the producers told her to.’ But now the producers weren’t telling Remedios what to do, mainly because they didn’t know.

  ¿Quien Maneja mi Barca? has in recent years enjoyed a rehabilitation amongst the Eurovision community: in an online poll held to determine the nul-point song that least deserved its fate, it emerged as a runaway winner. In the memorable phrase of one happy voter, ‘Long live the powerful, no-shoes woman!’

  After the still-fresh alarums of Koh Samui, any good news for any nul-pointer – even when it arrives twenty years too late – is good news for me. ‘Ole Remedios!’ I cry aloud as Jose Miguel counts the orchestra in. How deflating to discover his co-composition more eager even than Opera to bemuse and alienate the watching millions. I don’t know much about flamenco, but I know what I don’t like. And I’m about to listen to it for three minutes.