by Tim Moore
The show is compered by Italy’s two previous Eurovision winners – conqueror of Zagreb Toto Cutugno, and Gigliola Cinquetti, whose 1964 victory as the sixteen-year-old singer of I’m Not Old Enough to Love You was oddly unaccompanied by controversy (wisely retitled This is My Prayer, the song was later covered by a fifty-year-old Vera Lynn). If I may once more succumb to the lure of crass generalisation, the voting is a predictable shambles. ‘Helsinki, no Belgium,’ splutters Toto, ‘no … Istanbul!’ Throughout the procedure he and Gigliola squint sceptically at the TV monitor beside their podium, as if it’s transmitting an impenetrable Magic Eye image. When their knockabout incompetence is compounded with technical problems, stalwart EBU scrutineer Franck Naef briefly takes charge. All in all, it isn’t a good year to yield the most controversial result in Eurovision history.
After the last vote comes in, Sweden and France are tied with 146 points. ‘Mr Naef! Mr Naef!’ yelps Toto, and Franck wearily pronounces his verdict: though the two countries have the same total, and the same haul of maximum points, in accordance with the subclause introduced two years previously Sweden win by virtue of scoring five second places to France’s two. (His underwhelmed tone is explained by a muttered aside picked up by a nearby microphone and transmitted to the gleeful millions: ‘And that means the little witch has won!’)
Jeers and whistles ring out around the Cinecittà auditorium; even the implacable ORF guy uses the word ‘chaos’. But by then, of course, he’s in a sulk. And by then, Thomas Forstner appears to have left the building: in the extensive green-room coverage that heralds the contest’s denouement, there’s not a sign of that inflated mane and its owner’s equally conspicuous outfit. For the second time in three years, it’s goodnight Vienna. And goodnight Tom. That’s it: without fuss or flouncing or a histrionic press conference, he simply checks out of public life.
To say the Thomas trail has gone cold is to pay inadequate tribute to the months I spend hacking away at the internet permafrost. There are vague suggestions that he emerged in 1995 to release a schlager single with the incongruously dramatic title If the Sky Burns, but finding no concrete evidence of any additions to the Forstner back catalogue more recent than Venedig im Regen, I email his last known record company. The reply is instant: ‘I’m very sorry, but I can’t help you to get in contact with Thomas Forstner. He was formerly a Warner Music Austria Artist but I think he has no record deal at the moment.’ A tip from an ESC forum suggests a connection with a children’s charity, and I find a site connected with a 2002 ‘Light in the Darkness’ benefit gig whose line-up incorporates his name. I email every associated address, but cast no light on Tom’s post-Eurovision darkness. ‘I know about Mr Thomas Forstner,’ writes the sole respondent, ‘but I have absolutely no personal contact to him. I’m working in a bank office!’
The only promising lead is a chap called Gunter, a fellow Vienna Boys’ Choir alumnus who has left a post on a choral message board seeking information on his old chum Thomas’s whereabouts. I email him and a day later receive a reply whose introduction elicits a gasp of joyful disbelief: ‘Lieber Tim, hier ist die Adresse von Thomas Forstner.’ Expectation management is efficiently delivered by the sentence that follows the suburban Viennese domicile thereafter supplied. ‘I wrote to him there,’ reads my Google translation of Gunter’s farewell, ‘but he did not announce himself. Harm!!!’
A couple of weeks later, with two letters to the stated address both apparently given the Gunter-predicted brush-off, I cast my Tom net wider. Very occasionally, with a whoop of glee I’ll unearth a single Google-translated piece of jigsaw: in an Austrian list headed ‘100 important facts’, there between ‘In Germany, was a sausage with three ends developed’ and ‘Inspector Columbo a Peugeot Cabrio 403 drives’ is ‘Thomas Forstner as a computer programmer works now’. Following a rather brilliant piece of detection that ought to have bagged me a Peugeot Cabrio of my own, I find Tom on a (presumably obsolete) list of famous Austrians’ birthdays, Google in the date and his name and discover, on an arcane genealogy site, that Thomas Forstner was married – can’t pretend that’s not rather a turn-up – to a woman called Vanessa in Klagenfurt on 14 October 1991.
Less useful, but perhaps more fascinating, are the snippets mined through a long trawl of chat rooms and message boards. Erotikforum.at proves alarmingly productive: I learn of Tom’s hair transplant, and that the young Herr Forstner managed only six days of military service before succumbing to the ‘heavy fear and panic reactions’ that earnt him a reprieve. Elsewhere, former fans reminisce upon Forstner gigs and autograph chases, and grieve the moment ‘when he sang Venice in the Rain in such a wrong way’. For every fond musing, though, there is a snide riposte. ‘Our Eurovision performance is like our football team, a national joke! Wilfried, Thomas Forstner, Faeroe Isles 1 Austria 0 – do we like pain?’ (Very possibly – just ask Grazborn literary deviant Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. Harm!!!)
Tom crops up in an interview with Austria’s 2002 entrant, who rather unnecessarily calls him ‘a Song Contest prostitute who failed because he tried too much’, and brackets my man with Tony Wegas, who took up Austria’s Eurovision reins after Thomas, and in 1997 spent two years in jail for mugging old women to support his class-A drug habit.
So be it. Resigning myself to a process of elimination, I set about contacting all the Thomas Forstners I can find. Some I filter out before that stage: the local footballer, the geology student and the tree surgeon, all of whose photographic depictions could only be consistent with my Tom had that hair transplant proved merely the tip of a huge and horrible iceberg. Though there’s no photo of him, I also elect to dismiss the historian Thomas Forstner, whose name crops up with unsettling consistency in reviews of works such as Grüss Gott und Heil Hitler! and Der Vatikan und die Entstehung des modernen Antisemitismus.
But there are plenty of others. Every day yields another Forstner harvest; I find one email address and Google unearths three more. ‘Sorry for contacting you out of the blue (and in English),’ begins my standard email. ‘This is probably going to sound really stupid, but are you the Thomas Forstner who sang for Austria in the 1989 and 1991 Eurovision Grand Prix?’ Slowly the replies come in: ‘I am not this Thomas Forstner’; ‘Sorry! Good luck from a different Thomas Forstner’. It isn’t [email protected] and it isn’t [email protected]. Most dishearteningly, it isn’t the only likely Thomas Forstner I’d found, a jazz trumpeter: ‘I don’t think it’s the same guy,’ replies the bandleader. ‘In the years you are talking about he is playing trumpet with the Bamberg symphony orchestra.’
I’m noticing that none of my respondents ever comments wearily that this is by no means the first time they have been taken for that Thomas Forstner. Initially I assume this is down to the unenduring celebrity garnered by my Tom in his one-year micro-career, but the sheer numbers of namesakes I’m encountering suggests that it’s also a question of statistics. When a Google search for plain ‘Forstner’ yields 445,000 hits, I give up.
Not quite knowing what else to do, I put out a calling-all-Austrians alert to friends and family. So it is that a week later I’m on the phone to Wolfgang, a banker who lives next door to my friends Adam and Eleanor, and has done for long enough to attain an astonishing command of English. ‘Yes, I remember Thomas Forstner – that blond, short guy. Catered for the mature ladies, an ideal-son-in-law type.’ There are probably ways of bringing Tom’s teenybopper audience to Wolfgang’s attention that don’t involve telling the pubic-hair joke, but regrettably I can’t think of any. ‘Well,’ says Wolfgang, rather quietly, when I’m done, ‘you seem to have followed his career more closely than I have.’
Wolfgang wasn’t born when Austria won its first and only Eurovision title in 1966, but he namechecks Udo Jurgens with some pride and a familiarity that suggests the contest has a more durable popularity in his homeland than some compatriots had led me to believe. ‘Until the nineties, you know, the state had a broadcasting monopoly, and Eurovision wa
s kind of pushed down our throats,’ he says. ‘It was all over the TV and radio for many days. Do you remember this guy Wilfried?’ That’s funny, I say – I was just about to ask you that. ‘Well, he was quite a big deal – one of the first actual Austrians to make our charts. Before it was just Queen and ABBA, and many German bands. But his Eurosong …’ A small sigh. ‘Nobody forced him to do Eurovision, but I guess it was near the end of his Austro-pop career, so maybe he needed to try anything. Everyone in Austria knew it was a crap song, but we still kind of liked it.’ Wolfgang laughs, a little helplessly. ‘It was a schizophrenic situation. We knew he would fail, but maybe we didn’t care so much any more. We were accustomed to a bad result, to nobody understanding our taste in music. Then came Thomas Forstner, and then we had commercial radio and TV and Eurovision was not so big. Now it’s like a schlager contest, I guess, and for most people, young people, it’s just not cool.’
I’m not sure why it takes me so long to remember that a near-Austrian has been an important if indirect part of my life for the previous six months. Andreas replies to my email with the promptitude I’ve come to expect from his neighbouring nation’s non-Wilfriedian community. His opening paragraph echoes Wolfgang’s account of Eurovision’s declining popularity in Austria, whilst emphasising its apparently contradictory power to supply the coup de grâce to an ailing musical career: ‘The ESC isn’t really big in the German-speaking countries … I mean, some people watch it to make fun of it but no one really takes it seriously. So if you score badly at an ESC – or even 0! – it’s definitely the end for you!’ But Eurovision didn’t kill Tom’s career, I think: it was already dead. Five singles, four labels, two years: 1989–1991, RIP.
The second half of Andreas’s brief email is more arrestingly pertinent. ‘As for Thomas Forstner, I remember that he was interviewed in the Austrian national final of 2002 (or was it 2003?) – so maybe someone at ORF could help you.’ I dispatch an email to the contact he then supplies, and within fifteen minutes this lands in my inbox: ‘Hallo! Hier Thomas Forstner’s Emailadresse.’
And there it is. Just like that. I was never convinced that the address his old choirmate had given me was anything other than a childhood residence, but here I have a Tom contact known to be recently active. It’s a eureka moment, but determined to avoid a repeat of the Wilfrieds, I take a deep, calming breath and settle down to compose a missive as diplomatic as is reasonably possible in the circumstances. It isn’t easy – I can beat about the bush as much as I like, but in the end my thrashing is going to dislodge the word ‘zero’, and that alone might well be enough to consign me to Tom’s desktop dustbin.
And perhaps it is, because he never replies. As the days evolve into weeks, elation congeals into dismay, then hardens into resignation. What are the options? I could go over to Austria and roam the Viennese suburbs, or the comely lakesides and market places apparent in Klagenfurt’s civic homepage. I imagine myself leaning out of witch-hat towers and tram windows, beckoning my elusive quarry with coaxing calls: ‘Tommy, oh Tommy, pray where are you now?’ Or I could just move on.
Because perhaps it wasn’t desperation I saw in those big round eyes on the Rome stage; perhaps it was no more than brittle fatigue. Thomas had won his first talent show at the age of three, and ever since had been persuaded to do things – by his parents, by Dieter Bohlen, by ORF – that he may not have wanted to do. Perhaps he’d just had enough, and now wished only to be left alone with Vanessa, programming computers and having plugs of thigh-hair embedded in his scalp.
30 April 1994 The Point, Dublin Ovidijus Vyšniauskas Lithuania Lopišine Mylimai
THE MODERN EUROVISION Song Contest was born in Dublin on the last day of April 1994. The year before had witnessed the debuts of most bits of the now bloodily fragmented Eurovision stalwart Yugoslavia; a couple of months after the 1993 final, the EBU merged with its ex-Soviet counterpart the OIRT. The Irish, in consequence, found themselves addressing invites to nations whose presence would until very recently have been utterly unthinkable.
There are some funny new flags on Andreas’s DVD menu screen: when the scoreboard flashed up Russia, Romania, Estonia, Lithuania, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia, the watching West grasped for the first time the heady, mind-spinning realities of post-Cold War Europe. It was a moment that once again showcased Eurovision’s unlikely but enduring willingness to shoulder a burden of historical enormity: in an only slightly silly way, seeing Estonia’s Silvi Vrait take to the Dublin stage as Switzerland’s Duilio walked off it seemed more tangibly significant than the signing of any treaty.
Back in their mid-seventies pomp, the Soviets had boldly launched a socialist alternative to the EBU’s western spectacular, broadcast by the OIRT from Sopot in Poland. It should have been a winner: with its tarty make-up, fixed grins and general air of ersatz, wobbly set ineptitude, there had always been something slightly Warsaw Pact about Eurovision. No recordings survive, but the Intervision Song Contest’s artistic standards are apparent in its 1980 winner: Finland’s Marion Rung, a representative of the OIRT’s sole non-Soviet member nation, and a woman who had twice sung at Eurovision with her homeland’s traditional lack of success. Her victory was Intervision’s swansong. The year after, the signs went up outside Sopot’s Opera Lesna: ‘Song contest cancelled due to imposition of martial law’.
Yet the Marlboro-smoking, Wrigley-chewing, Benny-strength Eurovision proper had for years been finding its way through a chink in the iron curtain. With a big aerial, a little technical adventurousness and a devotion to Lulu more powerful than the fear of summary arrest and voltage-based re-education, plucky Estonians could pick up the contest’s Finnish transmission. ‘For us, it wasn’t only a chance to hear Western pop,’ said a now elderly Estonian whose underground Eurovision club met in the capital Tallinn for thirty-five of those special Saturdays. ‘We could also see how people interacted and dressed.’ Poor chap. At this very moment he’s probably battling through the Baltic wind in a pair of madly flapping Dan-pants.
Estonia’s long-standing exposure to Eurovision may have contributed to its 2001 victory, the first former Soviet state to win the contest. Though it conspicuously wasn’t much help at the nation’s 1994 debut, when Silvi Vrait returned from Dublin with two points, her countrymen cheered only by the fate of their rival Balts from Lithuania, who managed two less.
The Irish had won in 1992 and ‘93, and perhaps having exhausted every national cliché, opened the show with a parade of huge-headed papier-mâché mannequins tottering alongside the Liffey (only through internet assistance would I be able to identify these as caricatures of leading Irish musicians, including Bono and Sinead O’Connor). It’s all rather foolish, but recalling the desperately isolated ‘visit Ireland – PLEASE’ tone of the 1981 final, I can only conclude that all their Eurovision success has helped bolster Ireland’s self-confidence as an international player, just as Norway’s failures encouraged the bitter battening down of cultural and political hatches.
Sweden is first out, with a duo who set the tone for the contest, and indeed most subsequent finals. All creative energy has been expended on entertaining our eyes, leaving little for our ears to latch on to: one’s wearing a bowler hat and a ball-gown, and the other’s a native American with a pink cactus flower sprouting from his bald head, but the tune leaking fitfully from their garishly painted gobs is a worn retread of Love Lift Us Up Where We Belong. Finland in corsets and nighties, Russia in a bride-of-Frankenstein cowled red robe, a Dutchwoman with an owl, all trotting out faux-emotional mid-Atlantic inanities. Musically, it’s the dullest Eurovision yet by a vast margin, a dismally determined assault on the lowest common denominator: in terms of artistic influences, Bananarama and Bon Jovi are about as extreme as it gets. Even those dependably entertaining loose cannons Malta and Cyprus have dutifully nailed their artillery to the decks with a pair of ponderous plod-alongs; when a Greek bounds on with a bouzouki and yells ‘Diri, diri, diri, diri!’ I almost whimper in grateful relief.
The debutant nations, perhaps playing it safe in a bid for mid-table respectability, are a particular disappointment. The Bosnians get a hero’s welcome, but their offering proves only that they’ve given up guns and put their faith in the ballad-box. Nothing, though, plumbs the dreary depths with quite as long a line as the duo who, in an act of almost perverse defiance, turn up in outfits as bland as their song. Being Irish, they win.
Two blokes in jeans and rolled-up shirtsleeves droning turgidly on about their very distant youth weren’t expected to do well, and the suspicion has been widely voiced that Paul Harrington and Charlie McGettigan had been put out there to take a dive. Hosting Eurovision was a ruinously dear undertaking, and with three victories in the last seven years there wasn’t much promotional value to extract that the Irish hadn’t already extracted. Plodding and drab, Rock ’n’ Roll Kids was Ireland’s Springtime for Hitler – a copper-bottomed, sure-fire loser. And one that somehow ended up romping home with the highest winning total to date.
Perhaps with all those disturbing outfits and the unsettling presence of so many ex-Commies, a dose of unchallenging nostalgia offered the stuffy west-of-the-Wall Eurovision juries a port in the storm. ‘It was ‘62, I was sixteen and so were you,’ drawled Paul and Charlie, and the leathery electorate looked up from their voting charts and thought: Ah yes, happy days. Why didn’t we bomb the Cubans again? Rock ’n’ Roll Kids’ runaway victory sounded the death knell for the jury system. When the contest next returned to Dublin – to the twitching disbelief of the state broadcaster, just three years later – telephone voting had made kingmakers of the European public.
Coming on-stage after an Estonian who might have spent the afternoon ladelling dumplings into dinner trays, Lithuania’s Eurovision debutant is a chunky, stubbled, rather careworn skinhead of middle years, wearing PVC trousers and a suit jacket whose straining chest is severally accessorised with diagonal zips. It’s difficult to believe that Ovidijus Vyšniauskas, who in the brief film beforehand sat laughing behind a piano in a shapeless fisherman’s jumper, has chosen this outfit for himself. Moonfaced and tight-lipped, he looks like Phil Mitchell forced on to a catwalk at the point of a broken bottle.