Nul Points

by Tim Moore

  But popular music moves on, even in Austria, and Wilf’s 1986 live album only just scrapes into the charts. Austro pop will not be declared officially dead until Falco meets an unhappy end in a 1998 car crash, but for Wilf it’s already all over bar the roared yodelling. His ‘musical monuments’ have now all been erected, though they’re still tall and shiny enough to attract the Eurovision spotters from ORF, who in early 1988 team Wilf up with a couple of veteran songwriters from Graz. Lisa, Mona Lisa is the consequence, a happy one only in that as Wilf’s last chart single it creates a pleasing titular symmetry with his first, Mary, Oh Mary.

  It’s hard to imagine a performer nicknamed ‘the hoarse bard’ thinking much of the ploddingly feeble Lisa, Mona Lisa. Wilf has gone on record to describe leather trousers as ‘the most beautiful article of clothing of the world’; how awful to picture him cravenly slipping into that polyester grey two-piece in a Dublin dressing room. So why his boundless on-stage delight? I can only assume that after a fallow five years he couldn’t withhold his joy at being back in front of a huge, sell-out crowd. And perhaps, at thirty-eight, he was wise enough to know he might never get to experience that buzz again.

  ‘After Wilfried’s last place with the Eurovision Song Contest 1988,’ wrote the compiler of one online biography, ‘he is disappeared.’ Well, not quite. Taking the holiday from music that is a traditional part of the post-nul-points recovery process, Wilf gamely essays a career in acting. In 1992 he bags a reasonably major role – a teacher named Walter – in a thirteen-part ORF drama ‘set approximately around love, power, money and jealousy’. Though perhaps he doesn’t do a great job of it, as his next (and final) screen appearance is a walk-on part in a 1996 TV crime caper.

  By then Wilf’s back in the studio, working on the first of the eight albums he’s produced in the post-Eurovision era, none of which has yet found favour with a mainstream audience. Rather more productively, 1996 also sees Wilf founding 4Xang, an a cappella group that you’ll no doubt be as happy as I was to see hailed as ‘a genuine Austrian bomb’.

  A middle-aged male four-piece, 4Xang (which I’m sure in German sounds a lot less like an offroad driving club) still tours the Anschluss lands with sufficient regularity – around ten gigs a month – for fifty-four-year-old Wilf to call it a full-time job. It’s fair to say they have fun. A bald listing of their humdrum influences – jazz, blues, rock and classical – doesn’t do justice to the silliness apparent in CDs entitled ‘Alp Fiction’ and ‘Papa Was a Yodelling Stone’, or their fondness for pulling madcap faces and procuring percussive accompaniment from a big metal suitcase. In the words of kabarett-news.de: ‘One power purely. Go! Shortly in Mainz and Nuernberg!’

  So I guess it’s all going OK for Wilf. It must be a little painful to see his 1997 best-of CD sitting there reviewless in the ‘Schlager und Oldies’ section of amazon.de, and having to deal with the occasional likes of me wanting to pick through his bins, but in general Herr Scheutz seems at ease with himself. He’s succumbed to the temptation of old-rocker hair – shoulder length, and in his case dyed auburn – yet still cuts an unquestionably finer figure than the rep-suited Hagrid who lurched around the stage at Dublin. His wife – certainly ten years younger than Wilf – looks as bright and cheery as her email manner suggested, and their son Hanibal, now twenty-four, is a rock and jazz drummer who’s up for the occasional father-and-son gig.

  In his most recent interview, Wilf articulated an understandable disillusionment with the music industry – ‘you could say it’s almost eating itself’ – and said that he was no longer concerned with traditional definitions of success: ‘I’m primarily interested in mastering a task, for my own satisfaction.’ In fact, other than Jorg Haider and his Freedom Party, there’s only one thing that seems to really get under Wilf’s tanned and leathery skin these days. ‘Every year I think it can’t get any more terrible, and every year I’m wrong.’ Clue: it’s on telly one Saturday every May, and isn’t the FA Cup Final.

  6 May 1989 Salle Lys Assia, Palais de Beaulieu, Lausanne Daníel Iceland Þa sem Enginn Sér

  THEY WERE COMING thick and fast now: 1989 was the third consecutive nul-point year. And the hat-trick performer – it had to happen sooner or later – was the first who had entered a world in which I was already included. Just nineteen when he stepped on to the stage at Lausanne – half Wilfried’s age in Dublin – Iceland’s Daníel Ágúst Haraldsson wasn’t even born when Cliff Richard locked himself in the Albert Hall loos, and barely sentient when Agnetha clomped on to the Brighton stage in those towering silver platforms. All the other nul-pointers had already hit the professional heights when the big nix came to call; wee Dan hadn’t even finished growing.

  They’d won the right to host the final courtesy of a Canadian singer, a Turkish composer, and a one-point margin over Britain’s Scott Fitzgerald, but none of that was about to stop Switzerland claiming the Eurovision bragging rights. Céline Dion had given them their first victory since Lys Assia back in that inaugural 1956 contest, and by naming the Lausanne auditorium after the singer of Refrain they reminded us all that Eurovision had come home. They also reminded us what a very strange country they lived in, courtesy of an introductory film in which a violin-toting child of indeterminate sex was driven around his or her homeland in his or her daddy’s gigantic Mercedes, sombrely waving at armoured military vehicles. The 1987 contest had been a strident celebration of European fraternity – at one point in the pre-voting film break, we’d seen a mountaineer planting an EU flag on a mountain top – but the message here couldn’t have been more twitchingly isolationist. We’re loaded we are … but don’t even think about it. Switzerland: look, but don’t touch. When at the film’s climax the child steps out of the Merc to be greeted by the over-toothed reigning Eurovision champion, you’re expecting him (or her) to demand to see Céline’s papers. And wouldn’t that have been awkward.

  Céline sings – twice – and then there’s a record five-language introduction, comprising the usual suspects, plus Italian (spoken by around 10 per cent of the Swiss population) and Romansch (tongue of choice for fewer than one in a hundred natives, but the language selected for that year’s Swiss entry). Young as he was, Daníel is far from the night’s youngest singer: filling what one of my Eurovision guides calls ‘the graveyard second spot’ is a twelve-year-old Israeli boy in chinos. He’s a steady quarter-tone off-key, with a toothily persistent smile that must have clenched jaws across the continent. But thank Christ somebody loved Gili Natanel enough to hand over a few votes: hard to imagine knocking on his door, nul-points questionnaire in hand, and finding myself welcomed inside by an untroubled twenty-eight year old.

  As you’d expect from the hosts, everything’s well organised but dreadfully predictable. The pre-song films all require the relevant artists to interact as best they can with lazily selected national props: a train, a cow, a music box. After the Te Deum, the tedium. The Brits finish second (for the twelfth time), the Turks try and squeeze 400,000 syllables into their song and wind up with five points, those in between have once more trawled their sartorial inspiration from a pop galaxy far, far away (in this case Madonna’s 1984 lace gloves and ra-ra skirt phase). Though that’s not nearly far enough for Denmark: they give us a stoutly venerable soap-opera barmaid backed by a couple of grey-haired Dick van Dykes, clicking their digits through a number that owes a lot to Max Bygraves’ 1954 rendition of Gilly Gilly Ossenfeffer Katzenellen Bogen by the Sea. But this is Eurovision. They come third.

  Following the tradition that gave us Riki Sorsa’s pre-Kojo Finnish reggae, we have Finnish flamenco: it’s beginning to look as if they’re scared to show us their own musical culture in all its blank-faced, alien weirdness. Another titch: France’s eleven-year-old Nathalie Paque, a sort of Mini Pops Kate Bush. (The Israeli child appears to have disappeared, but I swiftly tracked Nathalie down: she’s currently spa manager at the Bangkok Marriott. Slip her 2,500 baht and she’ll fix you up a ginger foot scrub.)

  A
Spanish girl with Brian May hair scrunches her eyes closed so tight that she might be enduring an ice-cube enema (probably not on Nathalie’s treatment card, but you can only ask); perhaps inspired by this, few of the following acts trouble to stock up many visual memories of their time on-stage.

  And then the hosts – Benny Hill’s straight man and a woman with the dress of Queen Isabella I and the face of Victor Laszlo II – gather to introduce the twentieth of the evening’s twenty-two songs, Þa sem Enginn Sér. ‘Each of us has a dream that no one else can imagine,’ intones the male half of the partnership, only in French. ‘This is the theme of the very mysterious Icelandic entry, That Which No One Knows. Young Daníel asks the moon to show him the way to find his dream, and swears that he will not share this secret with another soul.’

  Well, that sounds all right, even if it does take me fourteen rewinds to translate. The portentous poetry is rather compromised, however, by the ensuing film, in which Dan and his compatriots arse about in a cobbled village, snatching children’s hats and mobbing an old chap with a vast wheel of Gruyere balanced on his head. Such is the gleeful nonchalance of Eurovision artists unburdened by national expectation: first invited to the finals in 1986, in that year and for each of the next two Iceland had finished a lowly but consistent sixteenth.

  But standing out on that big stage beside the grand piano manned by Þa sem Enginn Sér’s composer, Valgeir Gujónsson, Daníel doesn’t seem quite so lackadaisical. He’s undoubtedly a good-looking young chap, in an orphaned, androgynous sort of way, but those pallid, delicate features and cropped hair impart a look of consumptive desperation; one might almost imagine him auditioning for the workhouse choir. Carefully described by one critic as ‘the most interesting of the night’, Dan’s outfit is one of unparalleled bagginess: billowing white shirt buttoned to the neck, windsock-wide grey trousers yanked up closer to the nipples than even Simon Cowell would dare. On anyone else, such generous tailoring would impart an expansive swagger, but poor, wan Daníel looks like a remorseful urchin turning up at court in his fat uncle’s wedding suit.

  Let’s get the good news out of the way first. There are two important factors in Daníel’s favour: despite a marginally dodgy high note, he has a fine and surprisingly powerful voice. Second: it’s a decent song. Far too gentle to ever win Eurovision, and with a rather jarringly jaunty chorus, but a spirited effort nonetheless. Though there’s no longer any practical purpose in doing so, that evening I get out my guitar and falteringly decipher its chords. Months later, Pad sem Enginn Sér is still well up in my hum-along-a-Eurovision top ten. Sadly, as I’m now well aware, singing a good song well has never been at the top of a jury’s checklist. Eurovision success – and more particularly failure – is decided by eyes, not ears.

  Awkward and immobile, Daníel clutches the microphone in one knuckled hand while the other, held stiffly to his hip, fidgets itself into a knot. When the music kicks in he goes dutifully through the motions, raising his hand to that moon of his, lightly jiggling his legs. But his heart’s just not in it. Whenever he tries to smile, it comes out somewhere between a shuddersome corpse-grin and the vicious leer perfected by Malcolm McDowell during the first half of A Clockwork Orange.

  Every time the camera zooms up to his face Daníel blinks first, turning away to survey Valgeir, his backing singers, the ceiling. The only time he doesn’t, he tilts his head back, treating the watching millions to an unfortunate approximation of casual disdain. Like the man said, this is between me and the moon: you lot keep your fat noses out of it. If Dan has a nul-points moment, this is it.

  As the song nears its conclusion he begins to seem marginally more at ease, though the kiss Dan plants on the crucifix round his neck after the final, muted chord is one of brittle relief. He almost grimly acknowledges the applause: I did it, I did it, and my trousers didn’t fall down or catch fire and I wasn’t sick on the piano and I didn’t say poo instead of moon or anything. I’ve rarely seen a Eurovision performer depart the stage so swiftly.

  Two songs later the final act, Yugoslavia’s Riva, emerge from the wings, a five-piece symphony of period hues: black and white and red all over. A flavourless wodge of bubblegum rock ‘n’ roll, Rock Me also bends the native-language rule so far you can almost hear it yelp in protest. Its composer, the ambitiously self-styled ‘Quincy Jones of the Adriatic’, might have utilised only three words of English in compiling his lyric, but each (the title inevitably appended with ‘baby’) is repeated eighteen times.

  The pre-vote interval show represents a memorable departure from the drab efficiency of the production to date. That slavish adherence to national stereotypes inspires an unlikely tribute to William Tell, in which a happy chap with a crossbow bounds on to the stage in an outfit that explores the overlap between jumpsuit and lederhosen. The trickshot preamble of burst balloons and decapitated carnations gives way to an enduring drum roll: here come’s the inevitable Bramley-on-bonce finale. The drums fade to silence, he chews his moustachioed lip in theatrical trepidation, and then – thwack! The bolt slams into the board he’s standing against, a clear two inches or so left of the intended fructiferous target. To uncertain applause he desperately frees the missile, clumsily wedges it into the apple and in shifty triumph holds the impaled fruit aloft. Then, adding insult to averted injury, we’re shown a slo-mo replay, patently filmed during some more successful rehearsal, in which the fruit is pierced right through its pips. Bloody Swiss, I’m afraid I think. And that’s before the Sony logo ghosts up on the screen: for the first time, a Eurovision final has been brought to us in association with a corporate sponsor.

  There’s very little green-room coverage in the voting, and none of it features Daníel. We have to imagine his tribulations as he watches Luxembourg and Turkey, who have kept Iceland company for round after pointless round, belatedly pick up votes. Yet there’s obviously a new interest in the race for the wooden spoon: when Bana Bana and Monsieur break their ducks, the hosts want us to know it. ‘Ooh! Premiers points pour Turquie!’ they pipe up, to lonely cheers. ‘Premiers points pour Luxembourg!’

  It might be sympathy, it might be schadenfreude, but in all likelihood this unusual focus on the scoreboard stragglers is down to the slightly unfortunate result unfolding at the front of the field. Rock Me was hardly an obvious winner – UK runners-up Live Report publicly berated its blandness and Terry called it ‘Eurovision’s death knell’ – and the crushing enormity of its subsequent commercial failure cemented the contest’s evaporating influence on Europe’s record-buying public. It was recorded in French and English (‘It happened once upon a time, the son of a mayor invited me to listen to a great piano player’), but failed to chart anywhere outside the Balkans; such was their humiliated embitterment that the following May Riva became the first winners not to show up at the contest they had brought home.

  It’s tempting to think of Yugoslavia’s debut victory as Eurovision granting communism a sort of lifetime achievement award, now that it was a harmless, wheezing invalid about to peg out. The prospect of going to Zagreb for the final wasn’t nearly as scary as it would have been three years before. Or indeed as it would be three years after: the revised Eurovision annals now discreetly credit Riva’s victory to Croatia.

  With 293,000 inhabitants, Iceland is comfortably the least populous Eurovision nation. There are more Maltese than Icelanders, and almost twice as many Luxembourgeois. Twin this demographic with my wife’s nationality, and you’ll understand why I didn’t anticipate much difficulty in tracking Dan down. When I mentioned his name she chewed her lip a little, then said, ‘I’m pretty sure my mum knows his girlfriend’s dad.’

  Busying myself with the more obvious looming obscurities of Lithuania’s 1994 unfortunate, I stuck Dan on the back burner. There he simmered away happily, my pet nul-pointer, just waiting for the call. Or rather the email: some cursory Googling swiftly revealed the existence of a ‘contact me’ button at danielagust.com.

  Visiting this site, however,
offered pause for thought. Birna had some idea that Daníel’s post-Eurovision career had seen him embark on a very different cultural journey – ‘indie stuff’ was the phrase used – but by taking the form of a scribbled, bearded and violently flatulent spider, his homepage’s menu screen told of a man who was not as other nul-pointers.

  Accessing the clickable links on this creature’s scrawled legs did not undermine that hypothesis. One section displayed photographs: of barbed wire, of bottles hung in trees, of the hollow-cheeked, hollow-eyed man himself in poses glaringly beyond the norms of Eurovision’s artistic expectations. Dan outside a mosque in a woollen cape, Dan in a knackered felt trilby with ‘Beauty’ written on it in four different languages, Dan sticking his pale, bearded face and one hand out of a dense bush.

  The videos revealed by clicking the next leg along were no easier to square with the timid young man who had taken to the Lausanne stage after Marianna Efstratiou. He’s tying strings to his bare toes, he’s tying these strings to a tree, and it’s getting darker, and darker, and, oh, bugger it, there’s something really odd happening but it’s now too dark for my ancient monitor to deal with. Next up: an old Saab crunches to a halt on a stately, gravelled drive, Daníel runs out, mummifies himself from the knees down in packing tape, sprays his feet gold and flailingly breakdances with practised incompetence to the point of exhausted collapse.