Nul Points

by Tim Moore

  With his foot in the NRK door, the Melodi Grand Prix was the next step. After Tor’s first effort limped home ninth in 1987, his appearances became almost traditional. And tantalisingly well received: after finishing fourth in 1988, he was never out of the top three thereafter. His eventual triumph was accompanied by an almost audible sense of national relief. ‘You know, in 1997, I was thirty-eight, so it came along at a late time,’ says Tor, sinking back into his chair and flicking another Marlboro out of the packet beside him. Late indeed. Six months older than the Ov in his annus horribilis, Tor is the most senior performer to have suffered light entertainment’s ultimate indignity.

  He sighs a plume of smoke up at the ceiling, and when his eyes drop back down to meet mine they’re lightly glazed. ‘One of my first musical memories, you know, was Poupée de Cire, Poupée de Son.’ As he gently hums a brief snatch of Serge Gainsbourg’s 1965 winner, I imagine a little six year old jiggling about in front of a black-and-white telly, brush-microphone held to mouth, in a spotless, neatly trinketed Bergen sitting room. Taking the first tentative steps of a journey that will come to such a brutal conclusion thirty-two years later.

  For some time he circles around the wreckage, talking at great length and in utterly confusing detail about the Eurosong that had been his intended entry, apparently rejected by NRK for a refrain that they felt owed too great a debt to Give Peace a Chance. At any rate, he seems keen to emphasise that San Francisco – co-written with Arne Myskall, a friend and collaborator since the Salex days – was very much a second choice. ‘We would never have done a retro song,’ he says, ‘if we knew then what we know now.’ Hoping not to appear impertinent, I ask Tor what he does know now. ‘With the juries!’ he half shouts, sounding both aggrieved and astounded that I don’t appear to know what he’s talking about. ‘This year, ‘97, to try and turn the Eurosong to a younger audience, all juries had to be under thirty!’ His tone leaves no room for dispute, although I know for a fact, albeit a shamefully dull fact, that by unusually long-standing EBU decree, each eight-strong national jury incorporates four members over thirty and four under. By the same token, this doesn’t seem a good time to call Tor’s attention to the introduction of jury-circumventing televotes that year.

  ‘So we had this old-fashioned song – the only one in the whole show – and then I was told I had to use the orchestra. More bad information: I think I was the only performer who did! The sound was terrible! I had mail, even from Sweden, telling me to protest! And everybody knows it’s harder for a guy on his own – the girls get a few votes just for turning up.’ A look of embittered helplessness clouds Tor’s friendly features; a swig of brandy, a deep drag and it passes. ‘I’m not looking for excuses. It’s over, history. And you know, they still ask for that song at my concerts.’

  The smile that accompanies these last words is a little on the sardonic side, but it’s something to build on. Disregarding the final hours there, I suggest, being in Dublin must have been quite an adventure. ‘Oh, we had a hell of a week! Really, it was special. Of course I know a lot of the NRK guys there well. Maybe the nicest thing was to meet Ronan Keating and play ghee-tar with him backstage.’ Not for Tor the stand-up rows with producers that had characterised Jahn’s kick-against-the-pricks nul-points preamble, or indeed any Kojo-esque postmortem tirades against ugly German virgins. ‘Every night we had a little Eurosong party in our hotel bar. One time I was playing the Nicole peace song, a beautiful song, and a German TV guy comes up and says, “Oh, that’s so nice, that’s better than the original!”’

  Still, it’s not a surprise to find his memories of the night itself rather less complete, and rather more dark. When I ask him what he thought of his rivals that night, he lavishes semi-coherent praise on the interval act, then abruptly fixes me with a look of frail, shellshocked panic. ‘Who the fuck won? I can’t remember who won.’ His smile, when I enlighten him, is rueful rather than relieved. ‘Yes, yes, oh dear. In fact I met this Katherina one time afterwards, and she told me it hadn’t gone too well after her Eurosong success.’ There is no malicious revelry in his tone, nor in my off-topic research notes detailing Katrina Leskanich’s post-Eurovision fate.

  Having clung together doggedly through the twelve lean years that followed the global success of Walking on Sunshine, Katrina and the Waves swiftly fell victim to the curse of Euro-triumph. They would split before their Eurovision cash-in album hit the shops, leaving the band as a two-hit wonder and the headline to a dozen off-colour post-New Orleans hurricane headlines. Katrina herself waited five years before releasing a solo album (poignantly – or perhaps snidely – entitled ‘Turn the Tide’), and these days supports Spandau Ballet’s Tony Hadley in his travelling eighties roadshow. There can have been few more heart-rending studio sessions than that which spawned Katrina’s most recent single: the 2004 release of Walking on Sunshine, in Flemish.

  Ronan has clapped the last act off stage, the interval show is on and the juries are out. We’re into the valley of death, and Tor’s hotel room seems to be getting smaller all the time. ‘The only thing is,’ he says, coughing and letting his syntax wander, ‘when the scores, you know, start to come in, we are just watching there this TV monitor …’ A long pause, a longer drag, a girding slap on his thigh. ‘What happened, you know, it wasn’t fun. This is big-time television in Norway – everybody sees it. My country had been thrilled when I won the Melodi because I had been trying so many times, and then … I disappointed them.’ He breaks off, scratches his head, stands up and covers the tiny distance to his minibar. ‘I’m taking one more of these,’ he murmurs, taking out a brandy. ‘Please – you take something. It’s on NRK.’ I return his tired smile and say if it’s all right I wouldn’t mind a beer, thinking I wouldn’t mind eight beers and a promise signed in Tor’s blood that he isn’t about to go Kalvik. In a room this size, that could make a fearsome mess.

  ‘Until that moment I hadn’t thought about Norway. Because nobody, nobody had considered it was possible to get zero for this. Yes, I can say it was a shock.’ On the early evening of 3 May 1997, Norwegians turned on their tellies with a sense of genuine expectation. By the time they turned them off, their country stood, as still it stands, alone at the head of the nul-points table.

  Tor raises the miniature to his lips; it’s almost empty when he puts it down. ‘I’m the kind of guy who doesn’t let these things … but, you know, there were photographers there, and I’m trying to smile all the time, but of course they get one picture where I’m looking kind of gloomy, and then that is in all the papers: CRUSHED!’ Spitting the words out, he traces an imaginary headline between thumb and crooked forefinger. ‘Crushed.’ In silence Tor drains his Remy Martin; I tilt back my Tuborg.

  ‘Well,’ he says, at length, drawing the back of a hand across his lips and looking me right between the eyes for the first time in a while, ‘this is a special story. You know it’s the first time anybody asked me about it?’ In what I hope is a steady voice I tell him I had absolutely no idea. He smiles, but in a way that says, ‘I expect you’re wondering why you’ve been brought here, Mr Bond’. ‘Ja, but it’s OK, it’s OK. One consolation is that your slaughterer man in England – Terry Vaughan?’ I correct him. ‘Yes, him, he says – well, somebody told me he said this anyway – “OK, I’m not sure about his song, but what a performer!”’ I can’t thank Terry enough for those wise words.

  ‘So, when it’s over, my producer calls and says, “Remember: it’s just a silly little song. A silly little song.” And at the end of the daaaay, as your cab drivers say, at the end of the daaaay, me and Jahn [Teigen] and Bobby Sox [Norway’s 1985 Eurovision winners], we never have such a happy audience as when we come together to do those Eurosongs. It’s the happiest audience in the world!’ The words of a man who in May 2001 was the star of a three-day ‘Euro Song Cruise’ from Oslo to Copenhagen and back.

  The absence of one notable Norwegian from this rundown of fellow Euro veterans becomes more conspicuous shortly afterwards.
‘But you know, some people take it too seriously. This guy, I won’t say his name, he’s been in Eurosong a couple of times, and he took it so badly. I was back home in Bergen having a beer, I was almost over the whole thing, and this guy called me and he almost starts crying. Him! I had to give him, what you say, consolation. Because he was so crushed about this, it was everybody’s fault, not him. But I guess he meant well.’ There’s nothing to say. Finn Kalvik: A Warning from History.

  Three Norwegians; three very different approaches to shattering humiliation. If Jahn embraced failure and Finn ran halfway round the world to escape it, then Tor took the sensible and very human middle way, being really, really pissed off for a while, and then getting over it. When I ask if he’d rather have got zero points than three, Tor deflects the question: clearly, like most of us, he wouldn’t. ‘If you’re in love with music, and I can’t live without it, you just have new ideas and move on. After a couple of days the bad feeling was gone. You’re going to ask if I got lesser gigs?’ I shrug sheepishly. ‘I didn’t. In fact when I come back home after Dublin, the next weekend I have two gigs and they are totally packed. Before I go on-stage I think, Ah: maybe everybody wants to see this … special animal, this big loser. But at the gig I see they just wanted to support me.’

  And with that Tor’s off on another whistle-stop PR tour, highlighting the cabaret show he’s about to take on the road with his Lollipop co-creator, detailing the extent of his even more demanding two-church-a-day Christmas 2005 tour and sundry other engagements: ‘all things I could never do if I won in 1997, because if you win Eurosong you can’t choose what you do’. I almost don’t want to check up the VG chart archives, but when I do a sad truth makes itself plain: the last of Tor’s four albums to break the Norwegian top forty dropped out the week after Dublin.

  Whatever the long-term fall-out, back in the summer of 1997 he was touched by the public’s supportive response, give or take the odd bus-stop baiter (‘Eh! Eh! Zero-points man!’). ‘Most people are so sweet, they tell me to forget it. And a couple of years later, when I went in again to Melodi Eurosong, everybody says, “Yeah! That’s the way to do it, you show them motherfuckers!”’ He nearly did. Lover came in third.

  That was in 1999, the year the language rule was finally abolished: every one of the ten Melodi finalists performed in English. Clicking through Tor’s post-Eurovision discography, it had swiftly become apparent that San Francisco remains his most recent Norwegian-language recording. Coincidence? Tor says it was never a conscious decision, just a product of having grown up listening to English-singing groups. We end up talking a little about Norway’s cultural identity, and then Europe’s, and Tor latches eagerly on to Jahn’s suggestion that the country’s record non-haul of Eurovision points may have helped swing people away from the EU. ‘Everything has an impact. Sure, I voted No – I was so pissed that politicians from other countries couldn’t take the trouble to come to Norway to talk about the EU. My mother says, “You see – Germany won in the end.”’ As soon as he says this, he seems to regret it. As an entertainer Tor is the type who might on occasion rock the house, but never the boat. ‘But I’m European, for sure. My new record was done in Tallinn.’

  Yet alone amongst his compatriot nul-pointers, Tor has never pined for success beyond the continent’s longest frontiers. He’s recording in Estonia not because he’s a proud Europhile, but because it’s cheap. As a realist and a true professional, he knows which side of the Norwegian border his bread is buttered. ‘I’ve sold 600,000 albums here in Norway,’ he says, ‘and I’ve done that by knowing who are my audience, and by having a sense of music history. Eurosong is not maybe a hip thing to be in these days, but why should everything be for young people?’

  As a serial Melodi-enterer, all he’s ever sought from the competition was the domestic exposure, not a hiding-to-nothing shot at international glory. ‘I never wanted to win Melodi,’ he says, and I’m inclined to believe him. ‘My big hits came from the songs that came second or third. That’s what I hope for this time.’

  Chewing his lip, he leans forward and settles into a previously unessayed intense whisper. ‘You know why I’m in it again? Because I’m a stubborn son of a bitch, and because I’m Gemini.’ You’re … Jemini? ‘Yeah, and us Geminis like things to be … correct. If the pictures are hanging a bit wrong, all that … And I don’t like odd numbers! I had one album with eleven songs – it really upsets me still. And before this year I have nine Melodi entries … so I had to do it again!’ In one way I’m heartened by this belated display of the nul-points nuttiness I’ve come to expect, almost to treasure. But only in one way. This space is far too small to be shared with a suddenly wild-eyed obsessive-compulsive in orange make-up.

  Quietly, I suggest that in numerophobic terms he’d better leave it at ten. He sighs, then smiles. ‘For sure. This is it, the last time. Our song is kind of an anthem, inspired a little by my Christmas concerts. Hey – I’m just playing with the text, if you wouldn’t mind to see?’ Well, isn’t this something? My second contribution as a lyrical consultant; I’m really putting my stamp on Eurovision 2005! Only I’m not, because after a fruitless search for the relevant notebook, Tor starts looking at his watch. (In the event, Can You Hear Me! fails to make the Melodi’s final four, with Jahn’s My Heart is my Home winding up last of those who do.)

  Before I go there’s the traditional presentation – not Tor’s latest CD, with its Balto-symphonic arrangements of Broken Wings and How Deep is Your Love!, but 1999’s ‘Blue’. ‘Yeah,’ he says, acknowledging my thanks with a smirk, ‘it’s the one with eleven songs.’ Though if he’s looking to explain its modest commercial impact, I’d direct attention away from the Gemini-alienating track listing on the back, and towards the photograph on the front. Tor from the waist up, eyes closed, lips parted, black raincoat held slightly open, looking for all the world as if he’s being orally pleasured by a kneeling person or persons unseen.

  ‘Oh, one thing,’ says Tor, after we’ve shaken hands. ‘You have Jahn’s phone number with you? I think I may have a gig for him in Spain.’ I do have it, and reading it out from my mobile’s address book fancy myself being cosily inducted into the nul-points brotherhood. ‘He’s really a genius,’ says Tor fondly. ‘So … verbal. Like Frank Zappa or someone.’

  Padding down the thickly carpeted corridor, I recall Jahn describing himself as ‘not a typical Norwegian musician’. And that’s exactly what Tor is: a family entertainer, a straightforward, down-the-line pro with a wife and five kids back in Bergen. No shifty hangers-on or microbreweries, no underage elopements, no paintings of handcuffs and guns, no electro-dance paeans to female masturbation. Frankly it’s about time.

  3 May 1997 The Point, Dublin Celia Lawson Portugal Antes do Adeus

  I‘M LOOKING THROUGH the VG website’s Eurovision archive, and there it is: ‘1997: San Francisco, Tor Endresen, 24 av 25.’ He didn’t come last after all! I feel like calling him up with the good news. Tor’s hung up on numbers, but it’s letters that have spared him: by opting to rank equal-scoring countries in alphabetical order, the Norwegian press have (in an act of childish desperation) leapfrogged their man above his fellow ‘97 nul-pointer.

  When Eurovision underachievers moan about politics, they’re usually popping open an umbrella term for points lost to petty cross-border enmities. For Portugal’s contestants, though, that noun has always been uttered with a little more resonance. Unusually long sections of the Portuguese Eurovision agenda have been composed with the sombre profundity of a constitution. Few native singers would bracket their efforts with Tor’s self-proclaimed silly little song; there are no Wogans in Lisbon.

  Ever since Spain’s debut in 1961 there had been disquiet at the musical soapbox being offered to a fascist dictatorship – only by inviting Yugoslavia as a counterbalance was a crisis avoided – and when Antonio Salazar’s Portugal applied for entry three years later, the grumbles swelled into angry calls for a boycott. After these came to nothing, unknown
activists phoned in a bomb threat that led to a high-security cordon being thrown around Copenhagen’s Tivoli Concert Hall, and the juries went on to mete out justice in the only way they knew: Antonio Calvario came home without a point to his name.

  This painful baptism was to have a profound effect on his nation’s songwriters. Whilst the rest of us settled into the drooling imbecilities of the Boom-Bang-A-Bang era, Portugal’s thriving community of lyrical subversives stealthily hijacked the contest as an outlet for impassioned (if necessarily well camouflaged) political protest. In 1967, Angolan singer Eduardo Nascimento – pipped a year earlier as the contest’s debut black contestant by Holland’s Milly Scott – delivered an allegorical diatribe against his colonial overlord Salazar’s regime, entitled The Wind Has Changed.

  Perhaps irritated at failing to decode Eduardo’s mournful paean to democracy, the Portuguese authorities took a rather sterner line against José Carlos Ary dos Santos, who supplied the words to the country’s 1973 entry. ‘We’re going to grab the world by the horns of misfortune,’ ran the penultimate verse of the extraordinary Tourada, ‘and make fun of sadness.’ Probably nonplussed rather than outraged, the secret police opted to err on the side of caution, declaring the song a vile catalogue of anti-materialist sedition and throwing José in jail. Though not for long: he was out in time to see Fernando Tordo come home from Luxembourg with eighty points and tenth place.

  But it was Portugal’s 1974 entry that bequeathed Eurovision an unlikely assist in what remains Western Europe’s most recent revolution. Just after noon on 25 April that year, the national radio broadcast Paulo de Carvalho’s E Depois Do Adeus, the cue arranged by pro-democracy rebels in the military to take to the streets. ‘In your body, my love, I fell asleep,’ sang Paulo, as soldiers marched from their barracks with carnations in their rifles, ‘I died in it and after dying I was reborn.’ Not troubling themselves with this unsettling image – I’m thinking Alien chest-bursters here – the soldiers were cheered through the streets of Lisbon; by the end of the day, and with the loss of just four lives, democracy had been restored to a land enslaved by dictatorship for over forty years. Some consolation for Paulo, who nineteen days earlier had followed ABBA out onto the stage at The Dome in Brighton, made a frightful mess of his middle eight and wound up joint last.