Nul Points

by Tim Moore

  Both songs are launched with a dramatically atonal symphonic crescendo, though this one sounds more like a prolonged orchestral sting in a horror film, as if Remedios is about to look down at her stripy dress and see a bloody metal fist punch its way out. That would at least warrant her increasingly visible fear: as she asks us, for the first of eighteen times, who is sailing her boat, it looks very much as if those brown eyes are about to start leaking.

  Subsequent exposure to rival exponents of her art reveals the ululating, off-key caterwaul she then releases to be the authentic sound of flamenco. Imagine an emotional mourner being shaken violently by the shoulders and you’re getting close. Easy listening it isn’t: and this, remember, is flamenco lite, watered down for ABBA-land. After Çetin, it’s almost too much. In the days since my return from Helsinki there have been moments when I’ve contemplated recommissioning my mothballed Fender duet scheme; from this point there will be no more.

  In haunting empathy with her on-stage predecessor, Remedios seems to sense the barren scoreboard harvest that looms. When the camera zooms in she quickly turns away, directing her incessant maritime enquiries at the floor, perhaps thinking: Sandie Shaw, me – it’s one extreme or the other with this barefoot thing. But after a craven minute or so, something seems to snap. Her face hardens into a look of noble hauteur, then hardens further into angry defiance. Very quickly she’s accompanying those quavery yowls with accusatory audience-directed finger-jabs, staring from face to unseen face in challenging rage. If someone doesn’t identify this mystery navigator pretty soon, we’re all going to suffer for it.

  I still can’t be having with the music, but her performance thereafter agreeably embodies the smouldering, frenzied essence of her national artistic form. Glowering imperiously Remedios twirls her skirt, showing a bare leg to go with the feet, covering the stage with as much haughty grace as that monstrous dress allows. She runs a hand through her thick dark hair, curls an arm aloft into a pose that cries out for a castanet, then shrieks out her song’s final word, its forty-eighth ‘who’.

  ‘I didn’t cry,’ Remedios told El Pais the next morning, ‘because all the other artists were so supportive, especially the Norwegian.’ Good work, Jahn. ‘And I know I sang well, because my friends told me. Nobody is to blame, not the song, not me, not anybody. It’s just bad luck.’

  It would be a while before Remedios came to understand that whatever you did to flamenco – spiced it up, slowed it down – the non-Hispanic world would never get it. ‘I was very young,’ she said in a TV interview ten years on, ‘and I didn’t yet realise that my sort of music doesn’t please the juries.’ Rare amongst her Eurovision rivals, Remedios’s homeland was blessed, or cursed, with a native tradition of popular music that simply doesn’t travel. Wincing through ¿Quien Maneja mi Barca? a second time I find myself reminded of a Faeroe Isles restaurateur’s response to the napkin-filling aftermath of my encounter with a platter of skate in tallow sauce: ‘Perhaps for you it is a little … particular.’

  Not that this would satisfy certain sections of the Spanish press. One commentator, with snide reference to her gypsy roots, brutally dismissed Remedios as ‘an illiterate peasant’, and another suggested that to avoid such ‘ridiculous performances’ in the future, Spain should retire from the competition for good. The Association of Spanish Television Viewers demanded the dismissal of those responsible for selecting ¿Quien Maneja mi Barca? and its singer, demands that were redoubled when the Director of Programming unwisely described the result as ‘a glorious defeat – better than finishing seventh’. Several anonymous callers phoned TVE to mutter darkly that ‘this would never have happened under Franco’. (In fact it had, twice: ‘62 and ‘65.)

  Others spared Remedios, instead heaping scorn at the foot of that old monument to drivel. ‘She endeavoured to act with dignity and professionalism,’ said one paper, ‘at this festival of maximum bad taste’; winner Corinne Hermès was pooh-poohed as ‘a total medicority’. For some Remedios was even a martyr, ‘laid down to the lions – a singing victim of political instrumentalisation’. More than one journalist earnestly portrayed her as an innocent patsy in a vile plot hatched by the militant socialists of TVE: Franco had milked much propaganda from the country’s back-to-back victories in 1968/69, and here was the leftists’ bid to undermine all that by making both Spain and Eurovision look really stupid.

  Not to be outdone, certain elements of the socialist press outlined an even more ambitious conspiracy. ‘They say that Eurovision is political,’ claimed one editorial, ‘and if it is thus, the new socialist Spain can hope for little in Germany, with its endemic xenophobia.’ La Vanguardia went the extra mile, claiming that by singing ‘gypsy music’ Remedios had assured herself ‘the same fate as those of that race persecuted so atrociously by the Nazis, whose repression was particularly brutal in the city of Munich’.

  With this sort of stuff flying around, no one was surprised at Remedios’s withdrawal from public life in the months that followed. After the release of an album recorded before her departure, and a brief appearance in a flamenco-based film, she retreated to Seville and little Luis. So profound was her disillusionment with music in general, and flamenco-rock in particular, that it would be an extraordinary thirteen years before her next professional appearance.

  Over a decade and a half of confident democracy, Spanish pride in the nation’s esoteric musical heritage had been restored. Traditional Shrimp-style flamenco was back in a big way, and Remedios Amaya’s 1997 back-to-basics comeback album, ‘Me Voy Contigo’, introduced the public to a very different artist from the one they’d last seen roaring around the Munich stage in a horrible shower curtain. Gone was the bare-shouldered, wild-maned girl portrayed on her pre-Eurovision albums: the red-shawled Remedios that scowled out from this cover wore her hair in a painfully tight bun, sternly surveying the record-buying public with a look that said: ‘Scrump for olives in my yard, would you?’ No synthesisers, no drums, just her and a busy-fingered guitarist. And you know what? It went on to sell over 150,000 copies – comfortably the most successful solo release by any nul-point artist.

  Her three subsequent albums haven’t quite scaled those heights, but Remedios’s lofty place in the pantheon of contemporary flamenco greats is assured. She’s a regular at all the big festivals, from Nîmes to – it says here – Chicago, and a legend in her homeland who has even been honoured with a website devoted to rhyming eulogies in her name, though just after I came across it the iron blew up and fused the house, and since the subsequent reboot I’ve never been able to find it again. She still lives in Seville, the only nul-pointer who’s now a grandparent.

  ‘Your idea is funny. Different, is it?’ So ran the reply to an email dispatched to Alicia of Montoya Musical, ‘Sevilla’s number-one flamenco agency’, at onerous length identified to me by her record label as Remedios’s management. As the agency’s sole Anglophone, Alicia would be hearing a lot more from me in the months ahead, generally via email owing to the Montoya receptionist’s lightning hang-up reflexes.

  Alicia quickly proved herself prompt, courteous and informative. Of course a meeting could be set up; Remedios was away at the moment, but her friend would let us know as soon as she returned. Good news: she’s back in Sevilla now … oh, but there’s a flamenco feria on – best wait until that’s over. It’s over! Remedios is now happy to meet you. Is next week good? Excellent! Thursday would be fine. Listen, Remedios is a little concerned that she doesn’t speak English, not a word, and nor does her friend. It isn’t a problem? Even though you don’t speak Spanish? OK, I’ll tell her. Oh: I tried to tell her, but her phone was off. Maybe next week isn’t so good now. And next week is the feria in Jerez.

  By this stage Alicia’s replies were no longer prompt; composed now exclusively of a brief flurry of shouty capitals, neither were they informative or courteous. I’M TRYING TO SPEAK TO REMEDIOS, BUT HER PHONE IS OFF AGAIN. WHEN I CAN SPEAK I’LL TELL YOU SOMETHING, OK?

  After a sile
nt fortnight, I began to recall my dealings with a Basque gentleman named Manuel Bazquez, two years previously. Manuel, I’d been told by a bilingual intermediary, owned many donkeys, and would be happy to sell me one for the trans-Hispanic pilgrimage I was then organising. Speaking through the middle man, Manuel confirmed his delight in offering me the pick of fourteen donkeys currently browsing his yard. That was on day one of our relationship. By day eight he had seven, by twelve, just one; as I was desperately organising a wire-transfer deposit and a flight to Bilbao, the despondent go-between phoned with inevitable news. Two days later, Manuel dispatched an emotional, self-flagellatory email mea culpa confessing that he hadn’t in fact owned a donkey for two years. With this in mind, I sent Alicia a further email, asking for a straight answer on the Remedios issue. Was I wasting my time?

  In failing to reply, she suggested I was. Yes, perhaps I could still cajole and coerce this reluctant and evidently reticent grandmother into recounting and reliving the betrayal, fear and humiliation that led her to lock herself away for a decade and a half. Or perhaps, in the cold, hard light of a post-Kalvik dawn, I could just leave her alone. When, after leaving it half-watched for long weeks, I resume my DVD journey through Munich ‘83 with a reprise of Remedios Amaya’s enraged, audience-cowing finale, this seems by far the best approach for all concerned.

  After the back-to-back tragedies of Çetin and Remedios in stage-slots six and seven, it’s hard for me to concentrate on the acts that follow: it seems inappropriate, almost unseemly, like playing Ding Dinge Dong at a funeral. Out of respect I lower the volume, though five acts on I’m having to crank it back up to hear anything of the drearily muted Cypriot effort, performed by a pair of stool-bound strummers with such insipid torpor that even the Greeks slumped nose-first into their moussaka. On the eighteen occasions in Eurovision history that the two have appeared together, Greece has lavished maximum points on the divided island no fewer than twelve times. On every other the Cypriots have never failed to secure less than six from their mainland neighbours, or rather every other but one: in failing to coax even a single point from Greece, Stavros and Constantina managed what may forever remain a unique achievement in Cypriot Eurovision history.

  Ah! But here’s lovely Ofra Haza, Israeli wonder-voice and, it seems, another Eurovision discovery. Alive (Israel Still Exists) is a catchy and exuberant showcase for her astonishing vocal talent, and a boldly symbolic choice for a contest held in the city that, as anyone peering over a Spanish journalist’s shoulder will be aware, gave Hitler his first break. Another class-of-’83 Eurovision tragedy, too: after finishing second and embarking on a highly successful international career, in 1997 Haza married a domineering and extravagantly dubious businessman, and abruptly contracted HIV. Apparently shamed by him into silence, she persistently refused medical attention, dying in 2000. Variously accused of deliberately infecting her, locking her in the bedroom for months and altering her will, her husband gave Israel’s many conspiracy theorists almost too much to chew on when, a year later, he suffered a fatal heart attack while apparently doing crystal meth with two friends, who themselves promptly disappeared.

  Belgium silence the audience with what sounds like a three-minute Gary Numan intro performed by trumpeting aerobic instructors, eventually vacating the stage for Corinne Hermès, French-born but Luxembourgeois for the night. Clasping her hands dramatically to her pink-clad chest and fixing the camera with a gaze of portentous defiance, Corinne powers her way through a torso-wracking turbo ballad that offers us a foretaste of the Céline Dion years ahead, but in most other ways her looming triumph marks the end of an era. French-language songs dominated the contest in the sixties and seventies, but only two have triumphed since 1983; Luxembourg hasn’t bothered turning up since 1993, Monaco only returned in 2004 after a twenty-five-year absence, and the French themselves have now been waiting twenty-eight years for a Eurovision victory.

  Snigger if you must, but to me these statistics are a poignantly eloquent reminder that Eurovision has failed in its proudest ambition. American Forces Radio might no longer present a threat to the European way of life, but only because the artistic values it espoused have already leached into almost everything we watch and listen to: in cultural terms the Atlantic gets narrower every year. How else to explain the ever-diminishing value of a Eurovision triumph? Corinne was to release only one post-Munich album, and these days earns her crust playing galas in Turkey.

  No one who witnessed it is likely to forget Marlene’s performance as hostess, but to ensure that even the deaf, sick or horribly drunk remember where they were on the night of 23 April 1983, in the pre-vote interval she does something no compere before or since has ever dared to. Tearing her Barbie ballgown off at the knee, Gin Fizz style, Marlene throws herself into the ongoing dance show, ending it held aloft by white-trousered young men, a picture of weary exultation. Panting heavily, she stumbles through the votes. Digits double, then treble; Çetin and Remedios are alone from a very early stage – the third round of voting – but at least they have each other, side by side.

  In keeping with the front-of-house standards, the green room is a breeze-blocked, strip-lit cellar that would more happily host a junior netball squad’s pre-match team talk. The competitors are squeezed together in tight rows of plastic chairs, their collective gaze raised at an overhead monitor. Corinne fixes it with almost furious intensity; Ofra and a couple of other front-runners with almost convincing ambivalence. As Marlene clumsily hauls the voting to a climax, we’re only rarely shown any other backstage faces. Slowing the wide shots to frame-by-frame advance I spot Jahn’s messy smile: he’s loving it, messing about with his sunglasses, gurning, holding up notes to the camera that I can’t read, even when I belatedly discover my DVD player’s exciting zoom facility.

  Employing this new tool with afternoon-devouring enthusiasm, I find no trace of Remedios and her conspicuous outfit. But it doesn’t take too long to spot Çetin, half-hidden behind his backing group’s wigs and tiaras, four rows behind a hooting Jahn. Perhaps aware that bewildered grief or thunder-faced embitterment is a tough one to carry off in fancy dress, the Short Waves opt for wry ruefulness. The one in the biggest wig idly fans herself, her small, lopsided smile carrying a hint of the I-told-you-so. The velveteen ‘tache-twirler beside her is a half-slumped, half-smirking picture of uncrestfallen resignation.

  But Çetin is not. At first I can only see his sickly yellow glasses and the Travoltine hair above, but when a foreground Belgian turns to her neighbour there’s the whole north face of the Alp. I freeze it: a strange, lost look, scanning the monitor in mildly perturbed confusion, as if it’s telling him that the 11.42 to Ankara is divided into two sections, with the rear four carriages terminating at Bodrum. On slow-forward, Jahn turns to the camera with a bestial roar that recalls the ephedrine-fuelled, lens-spittled mania with which Maradona celebrated his final goal for Argentina in the 1994 World Cup. Others smile, laugh, turn to each other, shrug. But Çetin sits utterly motionless, his expression unchanging. He looks at no one; no one looks at him. Then the last vote comes in, Corinne leaps to her feet, and in half a second Çetin and his Short Waves are brusquely barged aside by an engulfing tide of photographers.

  ‘Opera was our first null in the Eurovision,’ emailed Turkish ESC authority Olcay Tanberken when I requested his thoughts, ‘so Çetin’s career was affected by that. He was criticised a lot.’ Reminiscences posted by Olcay’s online chums coloured in the dark shadows. ‘He took the zero points very hard because people always make fun of his song,’ wrote one, ‘and the whole media defined it as a shame for the Turkish nation.’ The fat, black bottom line for Çetin was a nul-points afterlife that, in Olcay’s words, produced ‘nothing significant’.

  Indeed so. There was that Balkan Song Festival award; someone recalled Çetin winning something similar in the US in 1990. But neither could be verified, and in the apparent absence of even a single post-1983 recording or live performance, I was obliged to accept the ru
thlessly glib accounts that spoke of a shattered recluse, ‘the lonely Çetin Alp’, holed up for twenty years in his semi in the outskirts of Istanbul. Like Remedios, but without the happy ending.

  In spurning the opportunity to rehabilitate a bullied victim, the newspaper obituaries were at least consistent with the front-page abuse that twenty-one years before had propelled Çetin Alp into early retirement. ‘Died alone’, reads the caption below an image of Çetin in his jowly, stubbled later days; a heartless depiction of his last, being lugged through the front door in a bright orange body bag, is labelled: ‘Death of the artist who was remembered before every Eurovision song contest by his zero-score Opera in 1983.’

  The odd comforting detail emerged. Çetin’s son told the waiting press that his father had been due to sing at the Yenikapi Gar Casino that evening: evidently his professional purdah wasn’t quite as grimly reclusive as I’d been led to believe. Quotes from ‘Çetin Alp’s driver’ suggested a lifestyle inconsistent with the reports, as did the marble-floored threshold he was photographed crossing for the last time. Had it not been for the final paragraph of the final obituary, I might have been able to close Çetin’s book with a tight smile.

  Though conclusively attributed by most papers to a long-standing heart condition – the fifty-six year old had undergone cardiac surgery the year before – this one teasingly invited readers to speculate on a possible connection with a TV interview he had given the week before. I had to read that twice. What was Çetin Alp doing on TV?