Nul Points

by Tim Moore

  By the end of the summer, Gunvor was touring the provinces with her mum and a tape deck, doing twenty-minute karaokestyle slots in ‘sausage tents’ at rural beer festivals. A journalist from highbrow weekly Das Magazin compiled an almost unbearably melancholic diary of a week spent in her company on this demeaning circuit. Gunvor emerges as a damp-eyed picture of total isolation, either ignored by half-drunk audiences or assaulted with hostile jeers and whistles. Her nails are bitten to the quick; she conducts a local-radio interview as if each question ‘was a tooth being pulled without anaesthetic’. When her mother erects a table and stocks it with CDs and T-shirts, the boorish inebriates who wander up are interested only in having their bare thighs autographed: ‘Fighting against the tears, Gunvor does as they demand.’ A quiet, polite chap who then approaches her identifies himself as an evangelist, offering to save her soul.

  The deepest depths are plumbed at a local football-stadium engagement, where she’s obliged to sing Happy Birthday to a leering skinhead as his friends wave a banner that reads, ‘GUNVOR – YOU HOT SOW!’ ‘People now just see me as a joke, a cheap joke,’ she blankly tells the journalist afterwards. ‘I’m more than ashamed. I hate myself.’

  Autumn incorporated another Rolf-plotted relaunch as a cabaret performer, one so disastrously ineffectual that hardly anyone noticed. Soon after, veteran film-maker Paul Riniker made contact: the eventual consequence was a documentary entitled Gunvor – A Media History, compiled from three weeks of footage and broadcast prime-time, on the main state channel, just before Christmas.

  ‘I’ve made forty-six documentaries,’ complained Riniker at the press launch, ‘but this was my most difficult. Gunvor didn’t want to say anything – my questions were usually longer than her answers.’ Riniker decided this reticence was the result of Gunvor’s immaturity, though I’d be more tempted to point the finger at his insistence on taking her back to the Birmingham National Indoor Arena for the film’s opening sequence. Four months after Eurovision, there she is weeping alone on an empty stage.

  ‘It was a terrible feeling,’ she said in a later press interview. ‘Afterwards I spoke to no one for weeks, and prayed to God to let an airplane fall on me.’ The week before she’d walked out of a chat-show after the host introduced her as ‘a tart’.

  A year on from Eurovision, she was still single, living at home, and struggling to see off her creditors with an eighteen-hour working day that encompassed office temping and tap-dance instruction. But Rolf was still on the scene, telling anyone who’d listen that Gunvor would soon be back like they’d never seen her before. In May she appeared on TV, with straightened hair and a sombre white trouser suit, singing an ‘ethno ballad’ that would be her third and final single. ‘Eurovision and all that is in the past,’ she told the host afterwards. ‘I have sung away the pain.’

  Rolf had pre-released Land of Fantasy under an assumed name to sidestep prejudgement, but it hardly helped. ‘For the third time in one year the singer has a new image,’ said one of the few critics to pass comment, ‘but the Gunvor brand has already been smashed beyond repair.’ Two years too late, Rolf found himself a client short.

  Gunvor took a job in telesales, with after-hours earnings still largely derived from clicky toe-heel instruction; even at a reduced booking rate of 800SFr few live-music venues expressed interest, and her vocal performances were restricted to no-fee charity concerts. In a rare interview she downgraded her showbiz ambitions, expressing a hope to sing at ‘big hotels’, but by Christmas 1999 found herself doing matinées as a tap-dancing harlequin at Zurich’s Circus Conelli. A year later, by now PA to a customer-service manager, she suddenly released her debut CD, ‘From A to Z’, with a chin-in-hands cover photo that revived her girl-next-door pre-Eurovision image. ‘Does anyone still remember Gunvor?’ ran a rare review. Negligible sales provided the answer.

  In March 2001, a court in Bern found Juerg Wyss guilty of sexual offences against minors, living off immoral earnings, extortion, drink-driving and failing to provide a blood test. No commentators appeared to find his thirty-month sentence inadequate, though plenty grumbled at the 2,000SFr awarded in damages to one of the plaintiffs, a Ms G. Guggisberg. Such sentiments were perhaps behind the story that Blick ran three months later, headlined ‘Gunvor again in the sex environment’.

  A retread of their two-year-old scoops – split-crotch pants, ‘diseased purchase behaviour’ – the piece was freshened up with the questionable testimony of a ‘Michelle’, who claimed to have recently worked with Gunvor in a Zurich brothel. ‘She told me this sideline of hers had to be kept secret, which was why she always wore a wig.’ The story’s half-hearted tone aptly reflected its subject’s waning tabloid appeal: Blick was poking around the cemetery of its victims’ reputations, kicking corpses in the hope that one might twitch. Hers didn’t. When in 2004 Gunvor finally filed for bankruptcy, Blick satisfied itself with a single paragraph headed, ‘Singer with sex past goes broke’.

  These days Gunvor works as a marketing coordinator for an international food company, unsuccessfully auditioning for the odd musical, accepting weekend bookings to entertain wedding guests. Her last recorded public pronouncement came after Switzerland managed the unprecedented feat of scoring nul points at the 2004 Eurovision semi-final, the abysmal nadir of a run of post-Gunvor form that has seen them fail to finish higher than twentieth, relegated every time they’ve competed. ‘We Swizzerians just have to accept that we do not have a lot of friends in Europe,’ she said. If the way they treat their own is anything to go by, you can hardly blame us.

  24 May 2003 Skonto Olympic Arena, Riga Jemini United Kingdom Cry Baby

  THE TWO-CARRIAGE SPRINTER strains desperately towards its modest design tolerances, running scared through the bedrizzled badlands. Embankments dense with upturned sofas, stations brutalised beyond identification, mossy asbestos lean-tos and cooling towers: head against rattling window, I watch the post-industrial north-west slide and flick drearily by. It’s the last leg of a journey that began at the Skonto Arena in the Latvian capital on a Saturday very nearly two years before, when ORF’s commentator, adopting the throaty, sensationalist tone of a voiceover artist flogging a Judas Priest compilation on MTV Europe, welcomed two blond youngsters on to the stage with a roar: ‘Jemini – aus Liverpool!’

  The gaps between wet-bricked terraces diminish; the train slows. These streets produced the greatest talents in popular music history, and a football club that has raised aloft the European Cup as often as all its English rivals combined. Marry the twin elements of this gilded civic heritage and enter a European pop contest: surely the opposition might as well not bother turning up. How, how, could the seeds of Eurovision disaster have been planted here?

  I was in a Spanish hotel room that night in 2003, but preoccupied by a sink full of lathery underpants and a vocally restless donkey out in the back yard, I never even turned the telly on. Events in Riga were only brought to my attention at breakfast the following morning, by a German couple I’d got talking to at dinner.

  ‘I am sorry for UK,’ said the husband, looking anything but.

  ‘Ooro-vision,’ explained his wife, her face pouches taut with painfully restrained amusement. ‘Zero points!’

  I’d subsequently read and heard many accounts of the two minutes, forty-nine seconds that followed the ORF chap’s dramatic introduction, but witnessed no more than a website snippet until Andreas entered my life. Even forewarned, the experience proved more literally agonising than any previous Eurovision encounter.

  In their pre-performance filmette, Gemma Abbey and Chris Cromby seemed the winning essence of chirpy Scousedom, merrily interacting with Riga’s stunt-cyclists and skateboarders. A handsome pair, too, whichever way you looked at them – as the rowdy audience cheers faded and the camera swept up to the festival of flesh that was Gemma’s rear aspect, stubbled faces from Bucharest to Ballymurphy must have creased in unwholesome lust. The frontal view revealed once the flamenco guitarist had wound up his
intro was no disappointment either; if, at that point, a Latvian technician had elbowed his coffee into the PA fuse box, we’d all remember Cry Baby as a pleasantly choreographed instrumental. Instead, when Gemma parted those delicate, glistening lips, what came out was the worst noise heard on a Eurovision stage in the contest’s forty-seven-year history.

  So raw and tender is this memory that dredging it up as the train eases into its terminus causes a peculiar shrinkage of the neck, as if my shoulders are in vain reflex trying to cover my ears. But it’s too late. The sound is in my head, and now here come the moving pictures to go with it; perhaps they will never leave. In a moment that lays vicious waste to the theory that it is always possible to judge a nul-pointer with the sound turned off, Gemma launches her voice a good half an octave shy of the urgent bass line that is her sole accompaniment. A continent puckers in agony; it’s like having your dental cavities plugged with wire wool. No aerial splits or bar stools, no daft trousers or sex scandals – this is a straightforward case of nil by mouth.

  Those pretty eyes dart and flicker, betraying an awareness that something is terribly, terribly awry; yet in trying to find her way back to the elusive melody, Gemma sets off in the wrong direction. For thirty toe-curling, tone-curdling seconds 500 million Europeans listen through hand-muffled ears as that young voice soars and swoops through a mercilessly exposed musical landscape, not so much off-key as off-keyboard, a desperate cat’s chorus howled through spreading cracks in a fixed smile. It’s only when Chris joins in that an approximation of tonal authority is restored. He does his best to erase the memory of what we have just endured, bouncing manically around, grinning his little Scouse head off, shouting ‘C’mon, Latvia!’ between verses. Not too little, perhaps, but much too late.

  Only five times has the UK finished outside the top ten, but as drunkenly wayward applause gives way to footage of Ukraine’s Olexandr duking it out with the trams of Riga in a yellow Porsche, even Terry Wogan must be aware that la Royaume Uni has just witnessed a performance certain to trump Nicki French’s portentously titled Don’t Play That Song Again, 16th in 2000, as its worst ever. By the time Lorraine Kelly appears two-thirds of the way through the voting to deliver the results of the UK tele-jury, the crash-and-burn Doomsday scenario is already beckoning. Her gentle voice steeled with Dunkirk spirit, Lorraine defiantly raises a half-empty glass of fizz and rasps, ‘But we’re still determined to have a wonderful night!’

  My phone rings as I step on to the Lime Street platform. It’s Jemini’s manager, Alan McCarthy, calling as agreed. ‘I’m in a black Jag,’ he says, endowing both nouns with a throaty Scouse denouement, ‘just out near the taxis.’

  Relief that the pair still enjoyed professional representation had not survived my second conversation with Alan. ‘You’ve got to take their current circumstances into account,’ he’d begun, reporting back on attempts to persuade his clients to agree to a meeting: having inaugurated his relationship with the pair deep in the post-Riga depths, he was clearly cutting their cloth accordingly. ‘Gemma’s working in a car showroom, and the lad’s in a clothes shop, so their first question was: how much is he paying?’ Alarm melted into something approaching pity as Alan then answered this awkward enquiry himself. ‘If you were happy to come up to Liverpool, a couple of hundred quid should swing it.’

  ‘We are Merseysound,’ stated the stark homepage of Alan’s management company. ‘WHO ARE YOU?’ Here I am, in a city of grudge-bearing finger-pointers, trying to loosen reluctant tongues with cash. Tightening my grip on the ten sweaty twenties stuffed deep in my coat pocket I scan the taxi rank for the author of this unsettling challenge, and the decaying gangster mobile suggested by his description. A hand waves in tentative welcome from the only black car without a yellow light on its roof. A Jaguar it is, but a spotless convertible of very recent vintage.

  A dapper, lightly bearded chap of late middle years with a diamond stud in his left lobe, the Alan McCarthy who drives me into a gated dockside development shares nothing with the lairy chancer of my imagination. On the short journey from Lime Street he’d described Merseysound as almost a hobby, a colourful escape from his evidently very successful day jobs as a sales-technique guru and ‘contract negotiator’. ‘A million dollars always seems to be the magic figure,’ said Alan of this latter role, one that sees him travel the world brokering deals between component suppliers and manufacturers. ‘If I can squeeze a contract above that level, there’s a cut in it for me.’

  Welcoming me into a plush marina pied-à-terre – after a life spent in Liverpool his family has recently relocated to the Midlands – Alan proves himself significantly more charming than must be typical in his line of work. Over cans of bitter we discuss at fond length our shared love of the Beatles, during which it emerges that Simon O’Brien, a friend of mine mentioned in relation to his domestic proximity to John Lennon’s Quarry Bank school, is Alan’s brother-in-law. When the entryphone buzzes, it’s almost an unwanted intrusion.

  After many unsettling encounters with shadows of a distant televised youth, it’s odd to shake hands with such perfectly preserved nul-pointers. Fresh of face and bright of eye, Gemma’s simple comeliness is undiminished; give or take a little extra forehead on display beneath those artfully distressed fringe spikes, the Chris who bounds up to greet me is the one who leapt about the Skonto Arena. Less than two years have elapsed since that devastating night in Latvia – is it really fair to pick away at a scar that might not yet have healed? The new bulge in Alan’s wallet assures me it is.

  Chris and Gemma accept a lager each and sit on the sofa facing out across the fat brown Mersey mudflats; Alan and I take our places on its opposite twin. ‘Well, OK,’ I begin, awkwardly uncertain how to tackle the novelty of a nul-point pair, but also aware that the meter’s already running. ‘So, um, what was the musical background in your families?’

  Their voluble response to this feeble opener correctly suggests that in terms of words per quid, I’ll do pretty well for myself in the hours ahead. Chris talks engagingly of a recent discovery that his father had once worked the Liverpool clubs as a compere, with a sideline in Sinatra/Elvis covers; Gemma fondly recalls her mother’s vocal performance on that doyen of talent shows, Opportunity Knocks. ‘And I always used to watch Eurovision as a kid,’ she adds, unprompted. ‘I remember asking my mum how you got in to do it, to represent your country, and it’s just weird that we ended up doing it.’

  Chris lays no claim to a similar heritage. ‘Well, I cried my eyes out when Sonia came second,’ he giggles, ‘but then she was a Scouser.’ Later, it emerges that he didn’t realise Cliff and Lulu were already established stars when they appeared at Eurovision. But then why should he? Devil Woman came out six years before Chris was born; even in 1993, when Sonia had him in tears, he was only eleven. Having lived all their young lives in the era of Terry-tainted teasing, these two are simply too young to remember a time when Eurovision was taken seriously.

  The pair met at a local variety-theatre stage school, the Starlite near Everton, and by thirteen they were touring Liverpool’s pubs and clubs with the academy’s kids’ roadshow. ‘We were doing Motown covers, and all the big showstoppers,’ says Chris, ‘playing gigs every weekend, for two years. You can’t beat that sort of experience. Plus Gem and I became best mates.’ I’d always assumed theirs was a combination manufactured purely for Eurovision; watching them titter and nudge each other in childhood reminiscence, it’s clear that their long friendship would have been a comfort in the aftermath of Riga – Seyyal Taner and Locomotif aside, Jemini are the only non-solo nul-pointers. (Friendship is all it was: long before he confirms it with a rundown of the clubs that are his regular hangouts, it’s apparent that Chris is not a ladies’ man. As one of four brothers raised in a terraced house in the Dingle – one of the toughest suburbs in a city that hosts many – his must have been a challenging adolescence.)

  They put their first band together having left college at sixteen: ‘Chris, me and this
other girl,’ remembers Gemma, ‘working with loads of songwriters, and doing our own stuff for a while, putting showcases on and doing gigs.’ Having rather stupidly not yet decoded its ‘Gem and I’ derivation, I ask if they were then known as Jemini; Chris embarks on a merry, boisterously Scouse saga that begins with him sitting on a fridge, then somehow breaking it, and naming the band Tricity in its honour.

  As a threesome they gigged around the north-west, earning enough to buy their own gear, but the search for more lucrative employment drove Gemma to fulfil solo residences at holiday parks, crowned by a two-week stint at a resort in Lanzarote. ‘Top place: five-star,’ she says, a little defensively.

  By late 2002, both now nineteen and established as a duo, the pair took it as just a workaday session job – ‘another day, another song’, in Gemma’s words – when Martin Isherwood phoned one evening to ask their help in recording ‘an idea he’d had for Eurovision’. They’d worked on Isherwood projects many times before: as a multi-tasker who combined studio work and band promotion with a conspicuous role as head of music at Paul McCartney’s Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts, he was a major player in the regional pop scene. Isherwood had some years previously become the first student in the land to complete a degree in songwriting and sound recording; by 2003, his compositions had already made the final stages of A Song for Europe three times. The melody for Cry Baby had come to him on a train journey from Manchester to Liverpool; arriving at Lime Street he’d run straight into a phone box, dialled home and hummed the tune into his answer machine.

  ‘It was all a bit rushed,’ remembers Gemma. ‘The deadline for entries was the next afternoon, so we had to do it all in a day, from scratch.’ What did they think of it? The two exchange a silent, shifty glance. ‘We thought it was a bit cheesy, really,’ mumbles Gemma; clearly the song encapsulated by its promoters as ‘a slice of pure, infectious, disco-driven pop’ didn’t really do it for her, and two years on she’s finally allowed to say so.