Nul Points

by Tim Moore

  The hated regime was no more, but Portugal’s unshackled songwriters didn’t want anyone to forget how hated it had been. ‘I’m singing the praises of a land that is reborn,’ sang former army lieutenant Duarte Mendes in 1975, ‘for there can’t be enough songs like this.’ So indeed it proved. The year after, the two socialist MPs handed the lyrical responsibilities kicked off with, ‘I could call you my homeland, and give you the most beautiful Portuguese name.’ In 1977, Os Amigos managed to condense forty years of pain and injustice into the most unforgettable opening stanza in Eurovision history: ‘Portugal was the reason why one day my brother died.’

  Perhaps satisfied at having produced the honed antithesis of the contest’s lyrical dementia, or perhaps belatedly recognising that this sort of stuff wasn’t doing them any favours with the juries, Portugal abruptly changed tack. In 1978 they trotted out Dai-Li-Dou, and within five years we were deep into Bem Bom territory. Securing EU membership provoked a melancholic last hurrah in 1987 (‘In my country, sadness is called loneliness’), but otherwise Portugal settled into a run of unchallenging ballads remarkable only for the consistency with which they finished eighteenth. Until 1996, when Lucia Moniz secured sixth place – the nation’s best result – after revealing that her heart had no colour. (Seven years later she re-emerged as Colin Firth’s non-Anglophone girlfriend in Love Actually.)

  Consciously or otherwise, Portugal’s 1997 entry, Antes do Adeus (Before Goodbye) echoed Paulo de Cavalho’s portentous E Depois Do Adeus (After Goodbye). Probably otherwise: it’s difficult to peel away too many allegorical layers in the former’s bitter-sweet recounting of a failed love affair, though being a Portuguese love affair that didn’t preclude a namecheck for Communist poet Jose Saramago. The vocal messenger was a young woman dressed in black who stepped rather uncertainly out on to the Dublin stage twelve acts after Tor Endresen. By name, Celia Lawson hardly sounded Portuguese, but her dark hair and brown eyes ensured she certainly looked it.

  I watch Celia’s performance more times than most, convincing myself I’m doing so in order to pick up clues as to the stubbornly mysterious fate bestowed upon her song, rather than because she’s comfortably the cutest nul-pointer to date. Antesh do Adeush, as it emerges from her lips, is an understated cocktail-bar smoocher, well suited to the unexpected huskiness of Celia’s voice. If you’re desperate to pick holes in it – and after the fifth hearing I am – you could argue the song’s a little on the torpid side for Eurovision. And that abrupt, slightly atonal ending wasn’t a good idea, catching the audience offguard and so tainting their applause with a fitful uncertainty that could have influenced any vacillating juries. But the bottom line is that in the online poll of which nul-point offering least deserved its fate, Antes do Adeus came home a comfortable second (to Remedios Amaya’s full-on flamenco shriekathon).

  It’s not the song, and it’s not the singer. On the third run through, now as brutally critical as a Pop Idol hatchet-man, it occurs to me that Celia is possibly a little overdeveloped in the jaw area, and on the fourth that her leather-look bodice top might be a tad tight in places it shouldn’t. But in essence, being young and female, she’s the physical inversion of the nul-point stereotype.

  Her backing singers are a slight liability – a vaguely slap-pable assortment of suited, sunglassed Matrix agents – and, oh, I dunno, maybe all the juries are holding their fire for overwhelming favourite Katrina, who’s up second last. But in general, I’m clueless. If her performance begins a little tentatively, it’s in a way that invites sympathy rather than scorn. ‘The girls get a few votes just for turning up,’ Tor had complained, and I can’t begin to understand how this girl hadn’t.

  There’s no sign of Tor and his canary-yellow jacket in the green room: he’s either run back to his hotel for some minibar solace or is down in the backstage toilets doing a great big Cliff-sulk. But there’s plenty of Celia, looking small, lost and very, very young at the far end of a Matrix-agented sofa, glancing about the room with a rather helpless smile that seems more connected to awe at her surroundings than her unfolding fate. As Ronan leads the victorious Katrina and her Waves back out towards the stage, there’s Celia in the hailing throng, clapping heartily, looking genuinely pleased for them. I’ve seen nul-point backstage faces hardened with bitterness, sagging in confused dejection, pulled madly about by sod-it-all hysteria, but I’ve never seen this.

  ‘Celia Lawson released an album just before the ESC 1997,’ emails Andreas a couple of weeks later, failing to buck a well-established trend by ending this sentence with the words ‘before disappearing’. Though, again as ever, that isn’t quite the case. She has her own website, for a start, even if it doesn’t appear to have been updated for some years. But there’s a little biography, which kicks off with a deeply touching black-and-white snap of an infant Celia standing on a chair with a toy Fender round her neck, and ends with a brief personal message that includes an email contact and the site’s only words in English: ‘So long suckers of Rock&Roll!!’

  One, two, three emails are fired off to the specified address, without reply. Feeding the biography into Google translator I find mention of sundry record labels and music publishers, and after a little telephonic foolishness get through to one who speaks English. ‘Yes, I have a number for Celia,’ says the polite young chap at LX Publishing, ‘but it’s a long time since we speak to her. At this time she is sometimes singing on the cruises, on Italian boats.’

  I’m thinking what fun that would be when, at the end of a week spent acquiring familiarity with the Portuguese for ‘if you would like to leave a message’, Birna answers the phone as we’re sitting down to supper. After conveying her quizzical uncertainty through a series of wondering hums, she hands me the receiver. ‘I almost put the phone down,’ she whispers. ‘Sounds just like one of those foreign telesales people.’

  In a sleepy, hoarse voice apparently assembled from elements of Russian, Thai and Spanish, Celia Lawson introduces herself, then, as fulsomely as her slightly medicated delivery permits, expresses an enthusiasm to meet me. ‘Oh, it will be funny to talk about Eurovision once more. I am with holiday here in Lisboa, sometimes in Sintra. You come, why not?’

  In the event, it’s Sintra, the palace-strewn World Heritage hill town 30km west of Lisbon that I’d last passed through as a student, with a consequent memory bias towards holiday economics. (So cheap were the taxis that I recall taking one to the supermarket.) A family week in the Algarve excepted, that was also my most recent trip to Portugal; standing outside Lisbon arrivals I’m glad to be back. For a start, this is my first gloveless nul-points pilgrimage since Thailand. The condensation-bottled beer ads on the airport billboards are perhaps a touch ambitious this early in spring, but with a coat on I’m overdressed. And when the bus into town arrives, the driver cuts short my Euro-fumbling with a dismissive wave: last time transport was cheap, but now it’s actually free.

  Well, almost. But even when I do have to stump up for the next leg of my journey, the forty-minute ride to Sintra is a snip at €1.30 – a lot less than half the price of a short-hop central-zone ticket on the London tube. This disparity aside, bumping along through the suburbs in a carriage full of lunchbreak students and office workers, I find I’m feeling at home. Portugal, famously, is Britain’s oldest ally: through thick, thin and Fascist dictatorship we’ve been an item, and no couple stays together for 600 years without sharing an outlook on life. There are lemon trees between the dusty pink apartment blocks, and birdcages on the balconies, but most are familiarly girdled with graffiti. And my fellow passengers are straight out of a London-model, post-colonial melting pot, a testament to globe-spanning ethnic harmony.

  More to the point, there’s none of the shouty Latin histrionics that should by latitudinal logic colour the journey. Everyone is either gazing dully out of the window, reading the overhead adverts or muttering almost inaudibly into mobiles. And they’re all a bit of a mess: crumpled jackets, cheap shoes, none of the preening haughtines
s you’d expect in most European capitals. I look around warmly: these are my people.

  I phone up Celia when we’re halfway, to confirm my safe arrival. ‘Oh, I’m so pleased!’ she laughs. ‘It’s really so beautiful here. You will love this town!’ It’s a delight to hear her sounding so much brighter, more alert. I don’t even mind when she goes on to explain that she’s going to be a little late, owing to a rescheduled dental appointment she’s currently en route to. In benign content I listen to her bounteous apologies, just happy to listen to Celia discussing her everyday business, like the down-to-earth, gyroscopically well-balanced young woman she is. Or so I’ve been hoping since my previous conversation with her, two evenings earlier. ‘I’m sad, very sad,’ she’d mumbled, sounding more melancholically Russian than before. ‘Just walking about Sintra, in this rain, feeling sad.’ An hour later I’d gone back to her website and found a new pop-up advert: ‘Find Christian singles in your area!’ It was a bad night all round.

  But that was then. It isn’t dark, it isn’t raining, and when I get off at Sintra into a steeply pitched, multi-coloured realm of Moorish turrets and tiles, it’s impossible to imagine anyone who lives here feeling bad about life for too long.

  It’s about a mile into the old town, around a road that clings to the rippling valley slope. The air is deliciously tainted with woodsmoke and lavender; whistling along the sinuous pavement I suck in great draughts, gazing up at the castle that crowns the highest hill and the streaky, ochred palaces and villas stacked up beneath it, tutting at the ale-centred philistinism that blotted all this out to me twenty years before.

  Celia has arranged to meet me on the steps of the Palacio Nacional, the sturdy white edifice whose Klansman-hat kitchen chimneys dominate the old town. I sit down to wait, idly ticking off further evidence of cross-cultural London–Lisbon fertilisation: their old numberplates are just like our old ones, and imagine if that postbox wasn’t blue, or that phonebox wasn’t white. Isn’t that beer truck a Bedford? It is. Ay caramba, mate: I didn’t even have to change my watch.

  A lazy peloton of club cyclists eases up the steep, tight road ahead and swishes past out of town; an old man in a big beret tilts back his head as he passes a restaurant, savouring a whiff of lunchtime garlic. OK, the presence of a cheesy accordionist and one of those foolish road-bound sightseeing trains suggests this place might get a bit much in the summer, but for now, as a nul-point venue, it certainly knocks room 312 at Oslo’s Hotel Bristol into a cocked hat. A cocked hat containing squashed up bits of a half-painted bathroom in Istanbul.

  Celia’s late; later than she’d said. A school next door to the palace disgorges a flock of teenagers, who mill about in front of me and provide the first solid evidence that Celia’s manner of speech is down to geography, rather than methadone. The air is filled with lispy ‘ssshhs’ and drawled ‘owws’; everyone sounds slightly drunk. Then I look round and spot a slight figure, the front half of her head cowled in a pair of black-lensed Yoko face-hiders, pacing slowly across the square before me.

  I stand up, bully my features into an I-come-in-peace face and raise a hand. A smile underscores Celia’s huge shades, followed by a wince and two fingers pressed lightly against a swollen right cheek. ‘Tih? So-ee, I a lidl bi lay,’ she says, apparently by way of explanation. ‘Too mush anasedic in here, you unnerstah?’ I follow her across the flagstones, thinking: Well, this is going to be interesting.

  We go straight to a dark, half-empty little restaurant on the other side of the square, patrolled by a hungover waiter whose chair-scraping, plate-slamming inartistry dominates much of my recorded conversation with Celia. In conjunction with her post-dental incoherence, it makes the transcription process a laborious challenge. Even there and then, with Celia separated from me only by two feet of knackered mahogany, it’s difficult to decode her statements with total confidence until the mouth-slackening medication has worn off, roughly around the time our coffees are blearily crashed down in front of us.

  Celia takes off her welding-grade sunglasses to reveal a pair of bright brown eyes, underhung with pouches of fatigue and lightly ringed with grey. Her hair, faintly streaked with lines of blonde, hangs across her face. The artfully grunged-up effect works a lot better than its description suggests – when the waiter isn’t punishing crockery he’s gazing moonily at Celia from behind his bar-mounted coffee machine – but mentally downloading the image of her fresh-faced twenty-two-year-old Dublin self, I can’t help thinking that the last eight years haven’t been too easy.

  With her orally forgiving bowl of pasta ordered, we make a start on Celia’s family background. It takes some time, this epic tale of colony-hopping wanderlust: her Indian paternal grandmother was a Portuguese army nurse who ‘married in Bangalore this Lawson guy, originally from Bolton’ (she still has relations in Lincolnshire: Celia’s half-British mother was born a Morgan); after being separated from her husband in the war, she pitched up in Bombay, and then Goa, where Celia’s parents met and married. It’s a microcosm of Portugal’s convoluted multi-culturalism.

  As a colonial administrator, Senhor Lawson was obliged to decamp and retreat along with Portugal’s crumbling empire. From Goa the family moved first to Timor, and then in the early sixties to Angola, where Celia was born two months after the Eurovision-catalysed carnation revolution. A year later, in 1975, the outbreak of a vicious civil war in the African colony forced the Lawsons back to Lisbon (in Celia’s early teenage years, the family moved to Sintra). ‘And that’s all I know,’ she says, blinking those tired eyes.

  It was her dad who first got Celia into music, who bought her that toy guitar, who took the soul-squeezing photo of her hanging it round her infant neck. ‘He was a singer, he played guitar. For fun, you know, a hobby. In Angola he played with an army band, they win talent shows on radio, they were quite known.’ But when, as a fourteen year old, Celia applied herself to learning the guitar, she did so without paternal instruction or encouragement. ‘It was like a revenge on other girls,’ she says, working up to a winning snigger. ‘My teeth were all out of place – yes, still then! – and boys didn’t pay me attention. So I teach myself the guitar, and carry it into school, and in one week I have boys talking to me!’ An invigorating tale of one girl’s unorthodox triumph over orthodontic disadvantage: our laughter ricochets off the panelled walls and low ceiling. ‘Oh,’ says Celia at chortlesome length, ‘do you mind if I smoke a cigar?’ I’m hardly surprised when my assent leads to a packet of Marlboro Lights being plopped on to the table.

  Evidently impressed by the perks of rock-chickery, Celia applied herself to developing the relevant talents with great enthusiasm, and almost instant success. ‘I like to imitate people, behind their backs,’ she says, with a mock-evil narrowing of the eyes, ‘so is why I speak all these languages, and sing like all these singers.’ And so, at the age of fifteen, she found herself fronting a multi-lingual covers band called Summertime, playing bars, clubs and – within a couple of years – some of the biggest hotels in Lisbon. ‘One moment,’ she says, hoisting out a laptop from her shoulder bag and powering it up beside her pasta. A minute later I’m looking at a photo of the 1989 Summertime line-up: four arms-folded blokes in jeans and trainers, and beside them a hunched, timid girl in sunglasses, two-thirds their height and half their age.

  Her parents are slipping off our conversational radar, and when I ask how they felt about their fifteen-year-old daughter’s conspicuous lifestyle, Celia’s response is a blithe shrug. ‘But already I’m going alone to England, to see my aunties in Peterborough. And you know I was making some big money – only real rich kids have attitudes that I have at that time. I have all the records I like, all the clothes. In Carnaby Street I’m buying my leather jacket, oh yes, with these big metal, how you call, pins.’ Studs, I say, and she repeats this word with a savouring, nostalgic grin.

  I’m looking at the jacket a minute later, as the waiter slams two glasses of wine down perilously close to Celia’s laptop. ‘That was us,’
she says, clicking up a picture of Mital, the all-girl hard-rock ensemble she joined at the age of eighteen. Though once again the baby of the line-up, this time she’s the wised-up, cocksure one with her arms crossed. One of the others appears to be wearing a Pringle jumper under her leather. ‘Rock, heavy metal – it’s my first love.’ She smiles. ‘For this band I did my first songwriting, kind of Iron Maiden style.’

  At this point, to Celia’s babbling excitement, I announce that my son shares his classroom with the Iron Maiden lead guitarist’s daughter. When I go on to reveal that the band’s lead singer and creative genius (oh, how my typing fingers twitch over the inverted commas) drinks at my local, her eyes almost treble in size. ‘Bruce!’ she squeals. ‘Uncle Bruce!’ It’s a long minute before I can coax her back to our timeline.

  It didn’t take long for Celia to outgrow the Pringle-rock of Mital, and before her eighteenth year was out she’d accepted an invitation to join established Lisbon-based headbangers V12, playing the capital’s big venues and a lot of festivals in the south of the country. The relevant photo shows a performer homing in on the big time: the previous shots have both been grubby snaps taken outside backstreet bars, but here’s Celia on a serious stage, knee-deep in dry ice, bent backwards, aiming an eyes-closed AC-DC rock shriek at the overhead spotlights. I’ve said it before, to Jahn, to Kojo, to Daníel, and here I am saying it again. Eurovision and you: why?