Nul Points

by Tim Moore

  He’s been glowering throughout my investigations into life under the Soviet yoke, but when we get towards Eurovision, the Ov settles into a pudgy, rueful smile, like a retired heavy-weight asked to recall a mildly humiliating knockout. I’m belatedly struck by his resemblance to Kojo; though four years younger, he looks at least a decade older.

  The Ov, naturally, never watched Eurovision as a child. ‘He knew that it happened,’ says Lulu, ‘but the first year it is in TV here, 1994, is same year he is singing. So he never see it before he is in it.’ Like Daníel, but for very different reasons, the Ov had no understanding of the contest’s magnitude, and seemingly as little respect for its heritage. When I ask whether being selected to represent his country in the Eurovision was the most exciting moment of his musical career, he listens to the translation unfold with a wondering frown. ‘The Ovidijus say he has been competing in many international contests, and he has been winning ten of these, so just one more did not seem so important.’ Where were these? All I’ve been able to discover about the Cavan Song Contest, as namechecked in his Eurovision CV, is that Cavan is in Ireland. ‘All countries, as in Bulgaria, Romania.’ I try to look impressed, but apparently fail. After further mutterings, the interpreter diplomatically announces that of course Eurovision was very interesting to the Ovidijus, and that he was very responsible to sing for Lithuania in the final.

  Lopišine Mylimai, he says, came to him in a single afternoon. Lithuania’s admission to the final had been only belatedly confirmed; one afternoon he was rung up out of the blue by ‘director of concert halls and everything’ and asked to deliver a song, pronto. With no time to organise a national qualifier, selection was a shambles that year. As indeed it remains: in the spring of 2004, a bored Lithuanian prankster who had submitted a cassette recording of Michael Jackson’s Ben was astounded to receive an invitation to perform in the televised semi-finals.

  Then living in Vilnius, the Ov sat down in his apartment, banged out a tune ‘in three minutes’, then rang up his long-term collaborator Gintaras Zdebskis and put in an order for lyrics. I’ve developed quite a fascination for the words he quickly supplied. ‘You are untouched by me, my dream is pouring you its wine in that night of ours’: there’s a poetic mystery not often encountered in Euroland, along with a noble chasteness we haven’t experienced since Gigliola Cinquetti’s spirited defence of her virginity back in 1964. Is it about any woman in particular?

  The Ov curls a fleshy lip and – it’s only been a matter of time – pulls out a packet of fags. Speaking now like a solicitor defending a sulky criminal client, the translator says, ‘He tell me it is not about any person – only about love.’ Muttering darkly to himself, he pops a thin, dark cigarette in his mouth and sparks it up. I look down at the stretched red packet: the Ovidijus has just set light to The More. Something has upset him, and I’m not sure I want to know what.

  ‘What he says,’ I’m told in this new bureaucratic monotone, ‘is for Lithuania was first time in Eurovision, and nobody understands here what is the game, how to do what kind of music, what kind of text. Everything was done quick, too quick to make it better.’ Another whispered confab. ‘Also in Dublin, the music arrangement is bad. The Ovidijus was not satisfied about the pianoforte player, who was a woman.’ She purses her lips; to pursue the legal analogy, she’s now informing the desk sergeant of her client’s improbable and morally odious alibi. ‘He says as we all know women do not understand what real love is, so he would prefer men to play his pianoforte.’

  With that off his meaty chest, the Ov cheers up: a moment later he’s even happily confessing that the guitar solo – which in the certainty of its addition by some bored Irish session musician I’ve just described as ‘terrible’ – was his idea. There’s much laughter as we discuss his wardrobe, the work of a Lithuanian designer chosen without consultation ‘by some family friends’. ‘All so fast, no time to change nothing.’ Dublin incorporated ‘many good times and warm people’, though he found certain of his rivals a little remote: ‘some are looking at him like he was from, you know, not Lithuania, that he was Russian’.

  He got on famously, though, with ‘the two brothers from England, who win the competition’. When I put him right on both these scores, he shrugs amiably. ‘But one thing bad: they tell the Ovidijus their song is fourteen years old. This is unlegal, yes?’ If true, certainly, I say. ‘It is true.’ Not knowing how to respond, I find myself relating Paul and Charlie’s post-Eurovision careers, how Rock ’n’ Roll Kids didn’t even make number one in Ireland, and how after a solitary album the pair split, with Paul now presenting Music from the Movies every Monday night on Dublin’s Lite FM, and Charlie playing pubs. It’s at this points that the Ov, eyes alight, blurts his English-language debut. ‘Pubs!’

  Even having watched the video that Gintaras recorded for him, he recalls few of his fellow Dublin competitors and their musical endeavours. He’s been particularly diligent in erasing the deux-points Estonian effort from his memory, explaining that Lithuania has a good friendship with Latvia, but with Estonia there is no connection in music, in language, in politic. Once more I’m reminded that in Eurovision, you make those lazy assumptions of cross-border fraternity at your peril. The Ov’s strongest memory of the evening is one of general awe at the contest’s pomp and scale, ‘the scenes, the light, so much cameras and professional work’. It hadn’t been like this at Bucharest or County Cavan.

  If that was a surprise, the result as it unfolded backstage was not. ‘Maybe he hoped it will not end for him like that, but it wasn’t nothing like a shock.’ He thinks he may have attended an after-show party of some sort, and certainly remembers shunning the commiserations offered by some fellow competitors. ‘The Ovidijus don’t like it for people to come and say sorry, he like it to survive everything alone. And when he come back to Lithuania, it’s good, because then he learns who are not his true friends.’ The Ov juts out a stubbled jaw; its jowly appendages tauten in manly defiance. Before me is the hardbitten son of a crow eater.

  The national nul-points hangover was more pained and enduring than I’d been led to believe. ‘The magazines are writing a lot about it, more than if he would have won. He said that in other contests, when he won the first stage or the second stage, in the magazines, there was only a small little place, but when he lost all the magazines were full with it. So it seems we are living where good news is not good news.’ And indeed where 400 million viewers across Europe are not four dozen Bulgarians in a field.

  ‘Some are saying that he is the wrong singer for Eurovision, some are saying that he is just a too bad singer. For about maybe one year, he feels he has done something wrong for Lithuania.’ The Ov narrows his pouchy eyes and chuckles in quiet disbelief: the combined effect suggests he can’t believe he allowed himself to care that badly. ‘But then he understand that when someone says something bad about you, you can learn from this.’

  At thirty-seven, the Ov might have felt like a senior canine signing up for a course of new tricks, but if so he passed with distinction. ‘He was sad, the Gintaras was sad, but they print a new song together and it become very popular, a big hit.’ By way of emphasis, the translator delivers an enthusiastic round of applause. ‘And it is a song about Lithuania, about our beautiful islands in Baltic.’ The first half of the title she then gives is concealed by a strident parp of sax in the bar’s grisly muzak, and the second by a rumble of heavy Ov laughter. ‘He tells that if they enter this song at Eurovision,’ chortles the translator a moment later, ‘it would be worse than last!’

  Whatever it’s called, that song remains a highlight of the gigs that along with ‘expensive parties’ are now his professional mainstay – it’s two years since the release of the Ov’s last album, another of the greatest-hits anthologies that my nul-pointers have been releasing in such profusion. He reckons to do one live show a month around Lithuania, and every summer goes off on tours that have to date encompassed Russia, the US and almost everywhere in Europe.
‘His wife is not so happy about it!’ trills the translator to their amusement if not mine: how could I have neglected to establish his family circumstances? Such is my flustered embarrassment that when he fills me in – the eldest of his three children is a twenty-seven-year-old daughter based in Norway, the youngest a boy of four who lives with him here in Kaunas – I merely nod and smile without considering the implications of those chasms in age and geography.

  Other than that he fishes, keeps terrapins and goes hunting. It isn’t a challenge to picture him engaged in two of these three hobbies, but at the risk of diluting Lithuania’s appeal to the world’s most appalling tourist, he’s never even seen a bear, let alone killed and eaten one. He clearly loves life here in Kaunas, saying what a shame I couldn’t see the city in summer, and urging me to check out the river Neman, a durable inspiration to him. ‘Is most proud, most Lithuanian city,’ says the translator, ‘not like Vilnius, with so much Polish and Russian.’ I’m beginning to get a feeling that the Ov understands a lot more than he’s making out; certainly, this latter pronouncement causes his eyes to bulge in paranoid alarm.

  With slight reluctance he reveals he was amongst the 91 per cent of Lithuanians who voted to join the EU – the highest proportion of any new member state – and feels it was a big step for the nation, if only because ‘before not anybody can find our country in a-map’. But when I ask whether he feels European, whether he’d feel closer to a Swede than a Russian, he considers his answer for some time. ‘The Ovidijus say if someone ask what is your nationality, he would say “musician”.’ It’s the old keep-your-nose-clean KGB-era self-preservation again.

  He talks tactfully of the importance of preserving ‘all small cultures in this EU big culture’, and to that end extols Eurovision as ‘a popular way to have all countries together to show their cultures’. Even if they’re all now singing in English: ‘OK, but it’s good they do this, better than for him when no one can understand what he is singing.’ So how did he feel about Lithuania’s five-year post-Ov Eurovision absence? ‘This is just a law of the competition.’ I’m not going to tell them it isn’t: relegation of the bottom-placed nation was indeed a new addition to the Eurovision rulebook, but this merely precluded Lithuania from entering the 1995 contest. Instead I ask if he’d consider entering again, and after a dutiful address on allowing opportunities for younger musicians, and perhaps mentoring them through the process of artistic competition, he lets out a lip-wobbling, tongueless raspberry and turns those hang-dog eyes on me in weary exasperation. A long mutter in the translator’s ear. ‘You know,’ she smiles, ‘he says if you are not coming here to talk, he will have forgotten about Eurovision. When it’s good fishing, he doesn’t even watch it.’ A lugubrious laugh from him, a shriller one from her; no choice but to join in with a simpering, apologetic chortle.

  We wind things up with a round-up of his future ambitions – he still dreams of making a record with ‘someone world-known, a legend’ – and a swift retrospective of his career to date. ‘The Ovidijus says he is proud and lucky to have job that brings joy to people,’ says the translator, looking a little misty-eyed. Yet what strikes me isn’t the good fortune of all the veteran performers I’ve encountered, but their astounding resilience, still getting up on-stage and baring their souls, strutting their stuff, after twenty, thirty, forty years.

  The Ov rustles out his greatest-hits CD and insists on penning his own touching dedication: ‘From Ovidijus to Tim, thank you for nice meeting.’ No, thank you, I say, and after checking my watch ask if I can buy them lunch, somewhere more … Lithuanian.

  ‘Ah, I must return to office,’ says the translator, wrinkling her nose in apology, ‘and the Ovidijus has practice for concert on Friday. But you have many people to meet also?’ Um … I do? ‘Aiste, Skamp, Aivaras – other Lithuania performer, from other Eurovision year?’

  The sensation that now annexes my internal organs is interestingly akin to that experienced stepping out of the hotel doors the night before. Somewhere along the rusty, fractured chain of communication that put me in a room with the big man before me, my mission was never properly explained to him. That I’m not talking to every Eurovision performer, nor even to every Eurovision loser, but solely to the tits-up, egg-faced, losers’ losers, the non-starters amongst the also-rans. ‘That’s right,’ I mumble, avoiding both sets of eyes as we shake hands.

  Sagging under the twin burdens of shame and remorse, I shamble round-shouldered up to my room. I’d hoped to spend the bulk of my remaining twenty-eight hours in Lithuania with the Ov, being taken round the deep-frozen delights of Kaunas, bonding over a fireside bottle of plum brandy. Now what? I stick his CD in the player under my telly, and listen as the music overpowers the grating swish of nail-studded winter tyres coming up from the street. I desperately want this to be the most rewarding auditory experience of my life, but of course it isn’t. Even to ears that have heard it all in the last few months it’s a challenge, an ill-fated marriage of east and west. Mildly anthemic MOR and snatches of slap-funk bass are interspersed with mournful solos on a sort of synthesised balalaika; one track suggests Those Were the Days covered by Doctor Hook. Ten minutes later, fuelled by penitence and boredom, I’m down in the street buying a massive pair of checked old-lady mittens from a tiny woman manning an outside stall. And after another five I’ve finally managed to stretch, yank and bully them over the two pairs of gloves I’m already wearing.

  Contact with his fellow citizens and the monstrous environment they are currently enduring makes it easier to understand the Ov’s hard-bitten, I-will-survive take on his Eurovision disaster. The lowest temperature recorded in Kaunas in 2004 was -19.1°C, and the highest 33.2°C; unflappability in the face of extremes is the entry-level requirement for residence. Stamping woodenly up Freedom Avenue with my features in frigid spasm, I’m surrounded by people who’ve grown up knowing how to take the rough with the rougher: a gloveless old woman reading the paper on a bench; a quartet of kneeling, headscarved beggars; a drunk in a wheelchair, slurring abuse at a local TV crew.

  The collision between east and west apparent in the Ov’s music is no less messy on the streets of his home town. A basement supermarket in which I seek climatic refuge is teeming with schizoid shoppers, excitedly appraising the camembert and balsamic vinegar before filling their trolleys with great drums of sauerkraut and tins labelled only with the smiling head of the animal puréed within. There’s a preserved-meat aisle to die for – cannonball salamis, a whole cured ham for a fiver – and a fresh-produce aisle to die at: box after malodorous box containing the ineptly mummified victims of a terrible avalanche on the lonely eastern face of the EU’s fruit and vegetable mountain.

  Back outside, the quest for generated warmth propels me at ever greater speed along ice-glazed pavements thinly populated with housewives dressed and made-up to appeal to ABBA-era kerbcrawlers. A street vendor sits hunched before a towering rack of CDs and cassettes, which I scan for as long as I can bear to stand still: some Sting, a lot of Bon Jovi, entire columns of poodle-haired Lithuanians. But no Ov.

  The buildings recede, pavement gives way to frost-scrunched grass, and there I am in the spindle-treed emptiness that looks out over the confluence of the two mighty rivers that converge at Kaunas. To my left the Neman, the Ov’s muse, and to my right the majestic Neris, lazily relentless conveyor of plucky swans and knobbled hunks of ice. At 5 p.m. it seems like 5 a.m., the park around me an unpeopled wintry wasteland, the low, pink sunlight more dawn than dusk. I turn to inspect the factory chimneys smudging the rosy sky with carcinogens, and when I turn back the rivers have turned to gold, their ice hunks to black, the combined effect suggesting the clinker-topped outflows from some alchemist’s foundry. It isn’t hard to understand what draws the Ov here.

  ‘Well, you know after Eurovision it was real difficult for him.’ The young taxi driver ferrying me back to the hotel is responding to my hypothermic mutterings, using English diligently acquired during engagements as a Br
istol-based strawberry picker and carpenter. ‘His career …’ Tutting in empathy, he jabs down at his dashboard with outstretched fingers as we pull up. ‘But my parents like him still. He does charity TV shows, and I hear a pretty song he is singing with a nice lady.’

  Four hours later I’m prostrate in my room, innards aglow with a local aperitif memorably described in the hotel bar’s menu as ‘bread-smelt alcohol made with old technology’. On a room-service tray beside me lies the plate I’ve just managed to clear: three cheers for sour cream, guaranteed to enliven even the chewiest crowburger. ‘Next up,’ drawls the overexcited ESPN announcer, ‘big guys throwing beer kegs over a high wall!’ With a bloated, intemperate grunt I fumble for the remote, flicking through until I hit something black and white. Snow, newsreel music, a caption: ‘1960 Winter Olympics, Squaw Valley, California.’ I can’t imagine who’s broadcasting this, or why I spend the next forty-five minutes watching square-jawed skiers acknowledging cheers from the podium. But I’m glad I do.

  For an event staged forty-five years ago it’s extraordinarily slick, the smooth camera work almost contemporary, the crowds enthusiastic but well drilled. No confusion, no petulance, no sequinned salopettes and certainly no Eddie the Eagles. It’s a masterclass in how to organise a major international event. Halfway through the Nordic Combined, I roll over and lethargically retrieve my travelling Eurovision library, creasing open an illustrated anthology at pages relevant to the 1960 Eurovision Song Contest, broadcast live from London’s Royal Festival Hall three weeks after Squaw Valley’s polished and professional closing ceremony. I admire Nora Brockstedt’s fur-trimmed folk outfit, thrill to the presence of Fud Leclerc, beam broadly at the judicial dithering that saw the French belatedly docked two points, and the consequent audience rowdiness that hostess Katie Boyle struggled to quell. And, finally, I raise a bedside toothmug in honour of the winner: Jacqueline Boyer of France, with her musical tale of a fellow who owns two castles, one in Scotland, one in Montenegro, and goes by the name of Tom Pillibi. Before Georg Thoma crosses the line for Nordic Combined gold, I’ve fallen in love with the Eurovision Song Contest all over again.