by Tim Moore
‘Oh, but I was always quite a fan,’ she says, inscrutably. ‘As a child I was watching many, many Eurovisions. My first one I watched is 1974, I remember that one so well.’ Ah yes: Paulo de Carvalho’s dissolver of fascism. We share a happy sigh, and then I think: Hang on. That was a month before you were born.
‘Um …’ I say, before mumbling out the chronology. Celia cuts me short with a hold-it-right-there raised palm.
‘There’s one thing you must know about this,’ she says, low, sombre, leaning slowly towards me on her table-planted elbows. ‘I’m lying to you.’
I do my best to match the explosive laughter she now releases, but it’s not that easy. Here I am about to steer our conversation into the Bermuda Triangle of Dublin 1997, and my co-pilot has just leant across and yanked the control stick clean out of its socket with a crazed whoop.
Let’s go back a bit, I suggest, seeking refuge in dates and facts. We’re in ‘94, right? ‘Well, and that year actually was my first involvement with the Festival of Song [Portuguese state broadcaster RTP’s Eurovision qualifier]. I was in the backing group, the choir, for one of the songs.’ (I check it out later: sixth out of ten in the first semi-final.) From this followed other TV appearances, singing Elton John covers on RTP’s big Sunday-night light-entertainment show, and getting to the final of the native Stars in Their Eyes with her self-evidently uncanny Oleta Adams. As 1996 came to a close she was recording her first album, and had just been contracted to write songs for an expensively promoted new boy band. Still just twenty-one, it was all happening for Celia Lawson.
The way things were going, it can hardly have been a surprise when at the start of 1997 she was approached by veteran composer Thilo Krassman, who had conducted Portuguese entrants at five Eurovision finals. On 7 March, Celia went out on to the stage at Lisbon’s Coliseu dos Recreios, and delivered a rendition of Thilo’s composition that convincingly saw off nine Festival of Song rivals. ‘That day was a new page in my life history,’ she says, puncturing the portent of these words by numbing her tender mouth with a noisy and protracted cheek-to-cheek wine sloosh. ‘I had been with my boyfriend for four years, a long and complicated relationship, almost a marriage, and that morning we split up, completely.’ The morning of the contest? The morning before she went out on live telly and sang ‘Before goodbye, your dreams were mine; paradise, you were by my side’?
‘That’s right,’ she says, nodding slowly, ‘that’s right.’ Her eyes are fixed on mine; those puffy mouth pouches on the affected side of her face lend a Godfather-ish menace to this utterance. ‘We said goodbye, and I go to the festival, and then I win: it’s like a new life.’
The professional exposure Celia had already enjoyed did not in any way prepare her for what happened in the two months between that day and Dublin. ‘I was making videos, making TV, newspaper interviews, all the time, all the time, three, four a day.’ Just thinking about it seems to plump up those eye-bags. ‘Then some doctor gives me pills to keep me up.’ What a touching gesture, I think; how thoughtful, how responsible. ‘At first it was exciting, all this tasting success … Just my father, he was the only one who tried to calm it down. He was very, very serious: go slow, tomorrow is another day, take it easy. You know.’ A crooked smile.
Celia’s little-girl-lost performance in the Dublin green room was the culmination of three days of overwhelmed awe. ‘I was like the youngest performer, like a kid with all these big international singers. I went around getting albums from everyone; it was really fun.’ She considers this latter statement while laboriously dispatching one of the half dozen mouthfuls of pasta that are all she’ll manage. ‘Fun, but … I remember I was in this VIP room with Thilo and his wife, and his wife’s friend, and they’re all so jetsetters, and I was not comfortable. Those parts, really I detested them.’ Her wince of oral pain makes the small evolution into a gurn of disgust. ‘Really bad. Yeah, I was happy to have my mum and dad there.’ Having spent her mid-teens jetting off to England alone, perhaps the stresses of Dublin dredged up a belated bout of adolescent insecurity.
Celia shoots me a sudden look of urgent befuddlement. ‘Your name! I forget your name!’ Failing to purge my voice of a slight quaver, I remind her. ‘OK, Tim. OK. There’s something I wanted to tell you, Tim, and that’s about the hotel.’ She goes on to talk for some time, and with taut intensity, about the daft extent of the official entourage that filled a whole floor of her hotel. ‘Even we have two doctors … One of the backing guys, he has his grandmother! Like maybe thirty people total! To me it didn’t seem like Portuguese Eurovision committee – it was like a holiday camp!’
Her point isn’t quite clear, but I gather from this tirade’s pasta-muddled denouement that as well as the obvious distractions of an anarchic and unwieldy delegation, there was an economic grievance: Celia was personally made to foot the bill for some or all of the excess beds in her room, and some or all of the excess nights she was obliged to book. The bottom line is that she was narked then, and she’s narked now. ‘I can’t eat no more,’ she drawls, pushing her pasta away. ‘Just cigar now.’
Very warily, watching for any sign of Lawsonian instability, I move us from the hotel to The Point in Dublin. We talk about her dress – she mentions a large embroidered gold galleon that I’d somehow missed in the course of all those viewings. We talk about the preceding acts (affectionately discussing her rivals in some detail, Celia proves that she’s forgotten less about ‘97 than Tor remembers. ‘Oh, this Norway guy!’ she exclaims, when I mention him, clapping her hands. ‘I was so sorry I never speak with him afterwards! I try to find him, but he’s gone.’ Tor, I recall, never mentioned Celia). And then, prefacing it with a throatful of vinho and a cri de cœur on the injustice of her looming fate, I move us on to her three minutes on the Dublin stage.
‘You know, it wasn’t three minutes,’ murmurs Celia, looking a little mischievous. ‘You saw my big mistake?’ My eyes widen. ‘Oh, come on! We’re live, direct, and I jump off, forget some verse, go right forward to the last chorus … it was fantastic!’ She’s laughing again, anyway. ‘The orchestra, my singers, they did such a good job to cover it … but what a mistake!’
I manage some sort of indulgent chortle, convinced that it’s another of her fanciful creations. But when I get home and compare the lyrics of Antes do Adeus with her Eurovision rendition, there it is: she misses out a whole verse, and is therefore obliged to repeat the last. Four hundred million of us were never told of tears heard in all the street, or that in the other face of the moon your dreams were mine.
Celia smiles benignly throughout my potted account of her green-room performance, chipping in with a laugh when I mention her animated round of applause for the triumphant Katrina, who in besting Celia’s total by 227 points has just inflicted on her the worst defeat in Eurovision history (Tor of course being alphabetically spared this ignominy). ‘Of course, I was happy for her,’ she says simply, pausing to sing a husky snatch of Love Shine a Light. ‘Who wouldn’t be?’
Nevertheless, when her fellow competitors began to trickle away to the after-show party, Celia found herself succumbing to a powerful desire to be back with Mummy and Daddy in her hotel room. As soon as she got there, though, Thilo came knocking, and with a brusqueness perhaps borne of her lyrical mess-up, insisted that she come down and do her duty. ‘So I go to this party for maybe fifteen minutes, do what I must do, go back to my room. When I wake up in the morning, I make some phone calls, I don’t know …’
She trails off into a disjointed mumble – something about her mum and dad going to India, about newspapers, about a border (or possibly boredom). Somehow I can’t bring myself to demand, Thilo-like, that she amplifies and repeats it all. Instead I wheel out the Teigen/Taner hypothesis, suggesting that her countrymen might have pinned the blame on Europe. ‘No,’ she says, rousing herself to coherence. ‘People here were divided. Some didn’t like the song, and some didn’t like me.’ The disarming candour of this bleak assessment suggest that my
deliberations on continental fraternity will not thrive in Lawson-land’s stony soil, but I sow the seeds anyway.
Severally prompted, Celia mutters something about Portugal being perceived as more backward than its EU brethren, and asserts that she only feels Portuguese when she’s outside Portugal. Would she feel more American than, I don’t know, Norwegian? The question brings her to life. ‘Can I say something first? This Katrina, you know she was American?’ I do, I say. ‘OK, and after she wins, she says: “Once more the British have to get help from Americans.”’ Celia looks at me searchingly, as if I’m now expected to snort or curl my lip or – this is a Latin country – spit furiously on the floor. Because I don’t, she carries on herself. ‘Well, I’m sorry, but I don’t think she is a lady to say this.’ She settles back, haughtily; only after two forkfuls of risotto do I feel ready to return to my original query. ‘Oh, America, not Norway,’ she says, carelessly. More clinking of forks and glasses. ‘Actually I’m just saying that because I don’t really care where Norway is.’
The fatuous manner with which she announces this rallies me to the Nordic cause. For a minute or more I deliver a heartfelt but stupidly pompous valediction to Norway’s plucky nul-points martyrs; when I’m done, Celia looks modestly chastened. ‘I guess for some of these guys,’ she says, ‘their whole life is to compete in Eurovision. And that wasn’t such a situation for me.’
No regrets, then, I suggest. She recoils theatrically. ‘Regrets? Of course! Oh, God! I regret completely that I go to Eurovision! I wish I had stayed in the bath!’ There is indeed no mention of the contest in her website biography. So not even the thinnest silver lining? ‘The positive,’ she replies, quickfire, ‘is that because I did Eurovision, now I can go on TV any time I want. Maybe I can’t sell records or make shows, but TV is always there, until the end of my life.’ She sits back and folds her arms, challengingly, but I’m not about to argue. Maybe there’s an Icelandic small-world telly-thing going on here. ‘Until the end of my life. But I don’t go on, because I don’t want.’ A defiant, last-laugh grin.
‘And of course I get some money from the song, in time of Eurovision it is played on the radio. A few years ago it was on many times, almost every day. You know: here is the failure song, everybody.’ Gauging the resilience of the so-what face Celia’s pulling, I ask how she feels when she hears it now. She seems to shrink a little. ‘It’s difficult,’ she almost whispers, lightly scratching at a flake of table-top varnish. ‘It’s difficult because the lyrics talk about a … painful situation in my love history.’ I’m trying to work up a look of therapeutic sympathy when Celia’s body almost bursts in a sudden but prolonged release of savage comedic expression. The twenty-eight recorded seconds that follow are distorted to speaker-buzzing incoherence. It’s good to hear her laugh, but that’s at least twenty-three seconds too much of it.
Celia had all but completed her debut album when she went off to Dublin, and a couple of months after she came home to Sintra, ‘First’ was almost apologetically released. So profound and instantaneous was its commercial failure that by autumn Celia had stopped describing herself as a performer. ‘A career is being born, and then straight away it dies.’ She looks resigned rather than dismayed. ‘It was born in March at the Festival of Song, and a few months after, there it is, a small, dead thing … I have had my drink of fame, and I know I will never have another. That’s it, finished.’
As the more enduringly contented of my nul-pointers had demonstrated, it helps to have another iron in the fire when 400 million people take turns to piss on the hottest. Celia, already blessed with a portfolio CV at the age of twenty-two, insulated herself from ‘all the shit about Eurovision’ by getting stuck into songwriting. And with almost instant reward: Excesso, Portugal’s first home-grown boy band, had by Christmas shifted 120,000 copies of an album she’d co-composed. There were nominations for song of the year and other awards; the Celia-penned title track is still available as a ringtone.
That’s great, I suggest, but in fact it wasn’t. ‘No one in Portugal knows it is me writing this! Even my agency doesn’t want to put my name on the record, because of what had happened to me. So no one called, no more work like that.’ Well, that’s really shit, I say, and Celia nods stoically. ‘But one funny thing is that one of these boys in the band falls in love with me. Deeply-deeply! But I have to tell him: sorry, I’m into heavy metal.’
This time the chortling is shortlived. ‘Then I have enough of all this,’ says Celia, flatly. ‘I had pride as an artist, from fifteen to twenty-two it was all I had done, but then I have to walk away. My father has a contact with TAP, national airline, and I go there for a job.’ So here’s Portugal’s 1997 Eurovision performer, telling me how just six months after representing her nation in front of the entire continent, she’s pacing down the aisle of an Airbus, returning seat backs to the upright position.
‘The passengers were not easy,’ she murmurs, heavy eyed. ‘Here is a person who was on their TV just before, and now she is like their servant, working for them.’ Though that wasn’t the reason she didn’t last long. ‘I’m made of too special material to be sad about that, but I don’t like cleaning up vomit. And then there was this boy I had to look after.’ On a flight to Angola, it fell to Celia to chaperone a profoundly disabled child; describing his condition, she wells up. ‘Irons in arms and legs, he couldn’t talk, he was deaf. He had only his eyes … I was crying all the time.’ There’s a short break while Celia endures a reprise. ‘Day after, that was my last day.’
With a painful gulp, Celia swallowed her pride and went back to the music business. It was like starting all over again: she found herself singing in hotels and recording local-radio idents. But within a year she was writing modest hits for the latest wave of boy bands, and within two she was back on telly, providing backing vocals on variety shows. By 2000 she had secured a lucrative residency at the Estoril Casino – Portugal’s most lavish – and was working up nice sidelines as a karaoke-tape artist and a prolific composer of advert jingles (researching this later, I make the happy discovery that Coca-Cola translates from Portuguese as ‘cocaine glue’). Finally, five years after Dublin, she felt ready to stick her head above the chart parapet again.
‘Faith’ was the title of Celia’s second album; it’s fair to say it didn’t muster a challenge to the George Michael release of that name. Of all the post-Eurovision recordings released by my nul-pointers, none made as modest a commercial impression: entered together in Google, album and artist procure three matches, two of which link to Celia’s own website. ‘I am certain,’ she writes in the relevant cyber section, ‘that I have created an album with ten original rhythms, that in my opinion bring something new, something of the discotheque, to Portuguese Rock!’ The entry, dated 2002, is the last she’ll make.
‘There was a cabal against me with this album,’ she says, simply. ‘I came back alone with a thing of my own, that I produced myself, and everyone was … woah, no! What’s she doing back here?’ She chooses this auspicious moment to re-don her hulking celeb shades. ‘They all thought I was dead.’
For the next three years, Celia Lawson, singer, songwriter, performer, set about killing herself off. The Estoril residency gave way to occasional stints on cruise ships, and she stopped returning calls from ad agencies and TV stations. In 2003 she sent a song off to the RTP Eurovision-qualifying committee, under a different name: ‘I didn’t even get a call about it,’ she slurs, her after-laugh tinged with weary mania.
Her most recent Googled whereabouts were at Lisbon’s Tivoli Theatre, where in November 2004 she appeared in a musical comedy entitled Kiss Kiss. I’m keen to untangle a related anomaly: on one site she’s down as scheduled performer for the show’s whole four-month run, on another she’s right at the end of the cast list with an asterisk by her name, and a third contains no trace of a Lawson, Celia. ‘I quit,’ she says simply, as the waiter shakily scoops up my saucer full of euros, tinkling half on to the floor with a muttered imprec
ation.
We step out into an overcast, blowy afternoon, the wind chasing litter across the palace’s deserted forecourt. I comment again on Sintra’s charm, in slight defiance of the now imposingly desolate scene before us, and Celia enthusiastically concurs, outlining her plans to buy a place here instead of renting. ‘It’s expensive, but I don’t care,’ she announces, expansively. We shuffle about for a bit, then Celia asks if I’m in a hurry; when I tell her I’m not she suggests we take a short cut back to the station. A minute later we’re scrabbling down a near-vertical hillside, trying to follow a path that generally doesn’t exist. At length the undergrowth recedes and we’re in a lavishly fly-tipped car park near the valley bottom. Celia sits down on a low wall: it’s cigar time.
The two hours I spend in that car park form the most poignant, most affecting of all the many encounters my quest has or shall involve me in. With a Marlboro up and running Celia begins to discuss her Eurovision experience in a very different manner, one that finds room for a great many previously unexplored theories. In a furtive, significant murmur she tells of conversations overheard in the Dublin hotel, conversations about money, ‘the money you have to pay if you want to win’. There’s a lot of stuff about Expo ‘98, held in Portugal the year after Eurovision, and how in some way – jealousy, unpaid kickbacks, she’s not quite certain – this deprived her of many votes, particularly from the French. On she goes, speaking faster and faster until I’m catching only half-snatches: ‘… and the third rumour – no, the fourth rumour …’; ‘… we all know about the Balkan countries …’; ‘… some day I will make a data research of this …’