Nul Points
Page 24
‘Thank you.’
Turkish nattering; a lull. Then: ‘Teeum: you have been drinking raki and wine.’ It’s Seyyal’s voice: you would never believe that its owner has matched the mumbling tramp beside her glass for evil glass.
‘Thank you.’
‘Teeum: I fly to Bodrum seven o’clock tomorrow, the morning. I must go now. Melis will take you to a taxi.’
‘Thank you.’
Before she departs, and just before my recorder bleeps off, something worryingly odd happens: whispers, giggles, a cry of ‘No, Teeum – shake, shake, shake, then put down fast!’ It’s a week, and five listenings, before I remember: one of the three was fortune-reading from the grinds in my coffee cup. I’m in no hurry to recall who it was or what she said.
A grubby hotel in Istanbul is no place to wake up after a night on distilled spirits. For an hour I lay slackly spreadeagled in the curtain-filtered sun, hands and feet hanging off the sides and end of my cub-scout bed, half-closed eyes on the half-painted ceiling as Joey and Chandler blabbered faintly at each other in high-pitched Arabic.
Hunched under the dwarf-dimensioned shower in a sort of skiing position, globules of recall bubbled to the surface in my slurried head, like corpses rising from a bog. Melis buying three roses from a distressingly soiled streetchild; N. Dogroll delivering a passionate eulogy to Jamie Cullum; one of the two summoning my taxi with an ear-bleeding whistle; me snatching Melis’s roses as I tumbled into the back seat and – oh, foul and fiendish 40-per-cent curse of the Ottomans – handing one to the driver.
I found the second rose composted in my jacket pocket as I groaned and shuffled towards a breakfast buffet whose emphasis was rather more olive-centric than I’d have wished. The troubling whereabouts of the third were revealed when I hoisted a pale and unsteady hand at the receptionist. The sickening wink that was his response meant an abrupt change of plan: instead of leaving my bag in his care while I touristed away the five hours before my plane left, I bundled it through the dirty glass doors and stamped raggedly away up the street.
The breathless, runaway energy of Locomotif’s Eurovision performance was everywhere. There were too many people doing too many things, and doing them all far too fast: walking, talking, begging, eating, and most notably driving. It was as if Garo Mafyan, his musical career brusquely terminated, had wound up conducting Istanbul’s traffic management. I imagined him alone in a smoky, screen-filled control room, eyes rheumily ablaze, empty raki bottle on desk, baton a blur in his flailing arms.
A bus bumped up on to the kerb at its stop, scattering the gathered queue; a police car in a state of alarming neglect reversed waywardly across a pedestrian plaza. Digital countdowns at the crossings heightened the sense of frenzied panic; every green light unleashed a slaloming stampede of battered yellow taxis, barrelling five or six abreast up three-lane potholed boulevards. Lugging my holdall around the kebab-shopped perimeter of Taksim Square, I wondered how I’d ever safely stop one: it was like trying to hitchhike at Le Mans. Then, recalling recent events, I stuck four fingers in my gob and delivered a shrill blast. A juddering shriek of rubbery protest, a flung-open door, and I was inside. ‘Grand bazaar,’ I said, feeling rather pleased with myself.
With sixty-five covered streets lined with 4,400 shops, the scale of the world’s oldest shopping mall is unavoidably impressive, but two hours later I wandered out of its distant back end rather saddened. Yes, there’d been gold and slippers and carpets, but the vast bulk of the bazaar’s 25,000 resident merchants had been energetically hawking precisely the same T-shirts and baseball caps that had filled every stall in Koh Samui. Nike, Ralph Lauren, Von Dutch – what brainless robo-consumers we’ve all become, what craven, biddable globo-dullards.
The lofty ideals that inspired Marcel and his mates in that Monaco hotel had seemed so sniggeringly twee, so unfashionably Eurocratic. A song contest organised by a committee of state-controlled broadcasters to foster European unity, a celebration of cultural diversity, a common front against the greedily creeping forces of transatlantic culture – oh, how quaint. Margaret Thatcher and her many pan-continental disciples had kicked that whole business hard up the arse. Market forces, small government, consumer choice. And now that we’d been given the choice, this was what we’d chosen: a world of sweatshopped, Yank-branded crap, piled high, sold cheap. You just can’t trust consumers. As someone who walked out of that bazaar with seven pairs of Tommy Hilfiger socks, you can take it from me.
It was a lot better in the streets outside. Here the commercial variety was bracing: one shop selling nothing but mortarboards, another holsters, another ladders. And there was almost none of the wearily relentless tourist schmoozing that had quickened my stride along those covered streets: ‘Please, sorry, new chemise for you, mein herr?’
With the 20,000,000 lira note in my pocket worth £8.20, or possibly 82p, I was having great difficulty recalibrating my bargain-ometer. And how do you decide what’s cheap in a country where McDonald’s do home deliveries and a qualified dentist earns less per hour than a London parking meter? Well, it was trial and error. And error, and error. When I finally got the hang of the exchange rate it became apparent that I’d already been shortchanged by a couple of million at a mineral water stall, and had blithely left a 200 per cent tip at the first of my many coffee stops. A minute later, though, I hammered out the deal of the century with a chap selling ten-colour biros by a bus-stop: a policeman uniquely committed to the eradication of unlicensed street vending leapt out of his car with a shout, sending my man pelting off down an alley and leaving me with three pens in one hand and the note I was about to hand him in the other.
As is often the way, my blearily unfocused wanderings somehow took me where I wanted to be. Tramping leadenly down a nondescript street of clothiers, I started hearing a lot of Polish being spoken. A vital discovery: no nation is blessed with such finely tuned budgetary radar. Anyone who travels around Europe with prudence aforethought will know what it is to turn up at the cheapest campsite or market or snack bar and find it overrun with pasty, smoking Stanislaws.
When two definitive examples slid out of a gentlemen’s outfitters looking slyly content I therefore swiftly marched in, and after a busy minute swiftly secured an astounding deal on an unusually well-finished three-buttoned suit. I was loosening the required notes from my lira-wad when the dapper young salesman held up an apologetic hand and withdrew the calculator that had so efficiently facilitated our haggling. The agreed price, I grasped at tortuous and humiliating length, was the unit cost on a minimum wholesale order of 200 suits. It was only an hour later, waiting in line for a mid-morning kebab, that I began to wonder what on earth Eurovision was doing to me. As well cut and sharply styled as it may have been, the suit in question was also unavoidably, incontrovertibly and blindingly white.
What a splendid piece of work is the kebab. In its indigenous Euro-Asiatic incarnation at least: I exclude from this judgement those crusted cylinders of mixed quadruped that blight British high streets. The one assembled for me at that pavement stall, and dispatched between oil-faced mechanics on an adjacent bench, featured a dozen chunks of grilled lamb and half a mixed salad crammed into a sliced baguette hunk. All the major food groups present and correct for a little under 30p. If I could only eat one thing for the rest of my life, I thought, angling my lightly oiled chops up at the sun, this would be it. Though that’s assuming I woke up every day with a fairly appalling hangover.
The taxis were so cheap, and the hailing process so entertaining, that after another heavily sedimented coffee I whistled one over and threw my bag in the back almost without thinking. ‘Um … just drive about,’ I said, with a vague circling motion of the right hand.
‘No poblim,’ smiled the driver, re-entering the vehicular fray with a manoeuvre that left a kerbside stallholder face down in his leather accessories. ‘Music OK?’ he called over his shoulder. ‘Turrrrkish music?’
‘No poblim,’ I said, without thinking.
Old men fishing off the bridges, a central reservation carelessly stacked with Roman column tops, carved Byzantine slabs and other apparently unwanted remnants of old Constantinople. The usual cheap-laugh billboards and signposts: Titiz, Arcelik, the Grand Hilarium Hotel. And somewhere, on every street, further evidence of the hastening erosion of an extraordinary national identity. A chemists’ window display dominated by pyramids of Viagra packets. A BMW dealer. A giant Tom Cruise failing yet again to look hard.
A droopy-eyed glance at my watch; best get cracking. ‘Airport,’ I called out, and my man nodded briskly. I’d more or less set up home in his back seat by now, but incredibly, the meter hadn’t yet topped a fiver. I can’t really complain at its subsequent quadrupling in the following fifteen minutes. Fall asleep in a taxi and you deserve all you get.
30 April 1988 Royal Dublin Society Wilfried Austria Lisa, Mona Lisa
TWO GLARING MISAPPREHENSIONS had taken hold when first I clapped eyes on that list of post-’74 nul-pointers. It didn’t take long to unearth the bikini-clad proof that Seyyal Taner wasn’t a man, but it wasn’t until I saw him next to Chris de Burgh at a 1988 Eurovision photocall that I discovered Wilfried Scheutz wasn’t a woman.
I can’t now begin to imagine how this dim delusion took hold – Wilma? Winifred? – but it was nonetheless a shock to have it so rudely shattered. Because Wilfried wasn’t just a chap, he was a huge-faced, ham-handed hulk of a man, easily the most male of all the nul-pointers. Looming mightily over wee Chris, it was as if he’d just smelt the blood of an Englishman. In consequence, I wasn’t as crestfallen as perhaps I should have been when it became apparent that my quest would have to be rerouted around the forbidding mass of Mount Scheutz.
‘Hello, Mister Moore!’ replied his wife Marina, minutes after I dispatched an explanatory email to the address given to me by Wilf’s agent. ‘Wilfried is in the moment on tour. He is back this weekend and is going to read your email. I hope, he will answer very quickly!’ No other nul-point quest had got off to such a flying start; it was only after a fortnight that I began to harbour concerns. A couple of unanswered emails, an unreturned call to his agency, then a long, long letter sent to him care of the same, describing in frank detail my sympathetic understanding of Wilfried’s predicament, and his associated reluctance to reply. On reflection, this made it easy for him to continue his stonewalling, and much harder for me to try another gambit. ‘Dear Wilf – you know how in my last letter I said I quite understood why you might not want to meet me? Well, in fact I don’t. I don’t understand at all. Come out and stop hiding, you giant nance.’
But it’s only when Andreas’s DVDs arrive, bearing in their 1988 volume a Wilf-themed catalogue of ill omen and wrongness, that hope is laid to rest. I gulp in distress as the big feller rounds off his pre-act filmette, shot at a Dublin racetrack, by joyfully cracking open the bubbly to celebrate a win. I recoil as the camera pans back from the Royal Dublin Society’s huge stage, allowing us to take in the box-shouldered, double-breasted bum-freezer that shrouds his vast torso, the creased matching strides, the great white barges anchored immovably to the performing surface. And then, after a faltering drum roll, I prepare myself for whatever sound this being is going to emit.
Lost in those mighty hands, the microphone seems like the mallet from a baby’s xylophone, and holding it Wilf looks as comfortable as a shy veteran goalkeeper asked to say a few words at his testimonial dinner. The crow’s-feet spread across his temples as he winces at the lights; he raises the mike to his lips. In conjunction with the visible signs of facial ageing, Wilf’s earring and slightly bouffant hair accurately suggest that he’s been in this business for longer than any of his Dublin rivals. His voice, however, does not.
In fairness to Wilf, Lisa, Mona Lisa is a musical nonentity: too many words, not enough tune. Not by accident did it come a comfortable last in an online ‘best of the worst’ nul-points poll, which attracted over 4,500 votes: here is Europe’s wrongest song. With a little vocal finesse, it might just about have made a late-era T’Pau B-side. But Wilf doesn’t do finesse. His lumbering, diesel-powered tones plough crudely into the opening verse, which diggiloo.net tells me is about a girl who paints fairy tales on her face. Beneath the wisps of that hair-sprayed fringe, Wilf’s great tombstone brow furrows as he ploddingly hunts for tune and meter, never too far off but never quite on. When his hefty female backing singer chimes melodically in at the first chorus, we all think: Why don’t they swap places?
But strangely, even as it’s all going so wrong, Wilf appears to grow in confidence. Even – eek! – in stature. He begins to hulk slowly around the stage, hand in suit-trouser pocket, smirking like some creepy motivational speaker. By the time the enigmatic object of his affections is tumbling through the glittering town, searching for someone who has a smile for her, Wilf looks as if he’s determined to end that quest. And then, filling those cavernous lungs, he works up to the big finale. This is what he’s been looking forward to, a chance to blast the audience flat with his maximum, unleashed throat-power.
What follows is transcribed by the compilers of diggiloo.net as a simple ‘Woah …’ But the fateful exhortation that Wilf now releases shares little with a workaday vocal filler that has quietly serviced the music industry for many decades. Sustained and emphatic, it thunders raggedly from his gaping, tooth-crammed cavern of a gob like the final utterance of a man who’s just seen the cable-car floor open up beneath him. Four letters, three dots, no points.
Just before that primal bellow finally empties his lungs, the orchestra crunches to a discordant halt, and for an awful second the audience sit in stunned silence. ‘Ja,’ murmurs the ORF commentator, above a smattering of bewildered applause. But here’s the thing: Wilf is loving it. There’s no relief in that face-filling grin, just triumphant delight. Having been selected without national qualification, this is the first time Lisa, Mona Lisa has been performed to a significant audience. A little concern at how it would go down was only natural, but that’s all gone now. He scans the crowd eagerly, warmly, gratefully: Thank you, Dublin, thank you, everyone, you’ve been great. Take care now. Goodnight.
There is no televisual record of Wilf’s brutal backstage reality check; the green-room coverage is devoted to the historic three points awarded by Turkey to Greece, and an unfolding battle for victory between Céline Dion and the UK’s Scott Fitzgerald. Belgium also bears a blank by its name – no zeroes on the scoreboard this year, just a stark void – but two rounds from the end France give them five, and the ORF guy groans softly. No one else notices. Having been seventeen points behind halfway through the penultimate round of voting, to boundless audience excitement Céline somehow pips Scott by a single point. The Swiss delegation leaps to its feet as one: they haven’t felt like this since the government doubled motorway tolls for foreign drivers.
Being thirty-eight, male and Austrian, the odds were stacked against the big man even before he opened his vast mouth. The demographic factors that doomed Wilf were those that had driven him to Eurovision in the first place: it was fifteen years since his biggest-selling Austrian single dropped out of the charts, and six since he’d had an album in the national top ten. On this basis, he didn’t have much to lose. But he lost it anyway. Having peaked at number twenty-seven, Lisa, Mona Lisa remains Wilfried’s most recent chart appearance.
As a price of his ongoing activities in the music in
dustry, Wilf is occasionally obliged to give interviews. In consequence, and with additional thanks to Google language tools and the members of escforum.com, denial of personal access did not prevent me from conducting a patchily fruitful investigation into his life and times.
Wilfried Scheutz was born in 1950 at Bad Goisern, near Salzburg, and lived out a bucolic childhood he has described as ‘not madly lucky’, perhaps because it involved sharing a classroom with future fascist pin-up Jorg Haider. (To my great relief, Wilf has described Haider’s waning political influence as ‘something that makes me very happy’.) Let’s then go straight to 1973, mainly because of the info-void that persists from his college days in Graz to the release of his first single. Wilf is twenty-three, and he’s recorded a self-penned folk-rock number entitled Mary, Oh Mary, which immediately shoots up to number three in the national hit parade (in the all-time Austrian singles chart – what am I doing on these websites? – it’s ranked at 698). Yet it’s Wilf’s next hit, 1974’s Ziwui Ziwui that makes his reputation, despite making it only to number six. Hauntingly described as ‘a half-roared, half-yodelled kick in the back of domestic popular music’, Ziwui Ziwui establishes Wilfried as a founding father of the movement that would be known as ‘Austro pop’.
Like Russian salad and British Leyland, this nation-noun combo should perhaps never have been allowed to get it together; left to breed they would eventually inflict Falco’s Rock Me Amadeus on the world. But Wilf’s ‘malicious spin’ on the genre is aimed squarely at the domestic audience: this is a country where a man with a BeeGees beard and a white jumpsuit undone to his hairy navel can have a big hit with a thumped-up cover of Run Rabbit Run. Churning out hard-rock near-parodies of Alpine folk songs, entitled things like Bilberries and South Wind, Wilf enjoys a steady stream of top-twenty singles – and a shallower trickle of top-twenty albums – that flows until the mid eighties. By then he’s swapped the jumpsuit for leathers and a Harley, and is shacked up in the forest just outside Vienna with his Slovenian wife Marina and their young son, Hanibal. He’s also retrospectively won me over by celebrating his thirty-first year with an album track entitled Never Trust No-one Over 30.