Nul Points

by Tim Moore

  ‘I remember when we got in the car after the session,’ says Chris, ‘I said, how did that go again? And we couldn’t remember. To be honest we didn’t think about the song again until Martin called back in February to tell us we were down to the last eight.’

  ‘Oh my God,’ says Gemma, widening her eyes in exhilarated recollection. ‘That was an amazing moment.’ Whisking through the first radio-based elimination, on 2 March they found themselves live in the BBC studio, waiting in the wings as Terry Wogan introduced Cry Baby as one of the four Song For Europe finalists.

  The BBC had invited along the UK’s three most recent winners, and it’s significant that only one of these had carried off the title in Chris and Gemma’s lifetime. Perhaps significant too was their backstage encounter with Katrina Leskanich. ‘She said Eurovision was the worst thing she had ever done in her life,’ says Chris, with a humourless, thanks-for-that smile. My attempts to defend Katrina, with mention of that pride-pummelling pre-vote rendition of Ding Dinge Dong at the 1998 Swiss qualifier, prove counterproductive – the pair nod flatly, clearly thinking: What, and that’s worse than a sodding car showroom?

  ‘That was a good time, the best time,’ says Chris, fiddling with a thigh pocket on his baggy combat trousers. ‘Those X-Factor and Pop Idol shows, it builds up for weeks, but all this has happened to us in days.’ Gemma shakes her head – I notice only now that her hair is appreciably darker than before – still awed at the fame and opportunity so abruptly foisted upon them, and perhaps at the shocking brutality with which it was all snatched away. ‘We thought that was it, we really did. We thought we were made.’ A Scouser isn’t often lost for words; I drain my ale as their gaze settles out of the window behind me, somewhere out there amongst the estuary mud and gasometers.

  Seeing his young charges in distress, Alan embarks on a long, soothing treatise upon Eurovision’s commercial and artistic irrelevance in the MTV world, making all the right noises about festivals of kitsch. ‘Yeah,’ says Chris, still scanning the desolate horizon, ‘but you still want to win it.’

  In the breathless two months that followed A Song For Europe, Jemini went on the road to support Pop Idol star Darius, lip-synched Cry Baby on CD:UK and Top of the Pops, hit the studio to record an album for post-Eurovision release and signed up with Atomic Kitten’s management company (in the Reykjavikesque city-village that Liverpool clearly is, I’m hardly surprised to learn of Chris’s pre-existing friendship with the band).

  Arriving in Riga to take on the hapless buffoons that a lifetime of Woganism had groomed them to expect, they must have felt almost over-prepared. Certainly some accounts reveal a degree of cockiness amongst their entourage: a reporter from a Merseyside weekly was ordered by the duo’s PR Mike Cockayne to tell his readers to start planning their wardrobes for a Liverpool-hosted Eurovision 2004. ‘We’ve got the best song and the best act,’ their manager Martin O’Shea told a press conference. ‘We’re going to win.’ Checking in at their hotel, Gemma and Chris would have stood there watching the likes of Jostein Hasselgård and Karmen Stavec shuffle about and thought: Any of you lot got a good-luck message from Sir Paul McCartney to stick on the dressing-room mirror?

  Blithe self-confidence did not survive the first rehearsal. ‘It just didn’t feel right,’ says Gemma, shifting about a bit on the sofa. ‘The backing track seemed to come out wrong, the sound was all weird. But the manager said it would be fine, not to worry, and you don’t want to moan or get negative.’ The pair’s response was to lock themselves away in their room, rehearsing remorselessly in the six days that remained, skipping the parties and clubs and evidently failing to establish themselves as part of the Eurovision family. When I ask if they made any friends in Riga, Chris says, ‘Yeah: the BBC production crew were great.’

  As the final approached, the things that were supposed to be getting better got worse. Gemma’s dress was a £15,000 backless, bottomless, semi-frontless wisp of red fabric intended, as one paper said, ‘to get a big photo of the wearer in the Daily Star’, but when it arrived, she was appalled. And still is: ‘The designer had literally cut the arse right out of it,’ she squeals, as outraged as a Liver Bird goosed on the Empire dance floor. ‘I told the manager there was no way I was going on TV like that, with my bum cheeks hanging right out for everyone.’ The consequence was a dispiriting tour of Riga’s boutiques in search of modesty-preserving hot pants in the correct shade of glittery scarlet. When – to universal astonishment – a researcher came up trumps, Chris spoilt the celebrations by asking if someone could sort him out now: he’d forgotten to pack a shirt for the final.

  No less inept were the managerial team’s attempts at spin-doctoring and story-planting. The press didn’t bother to print their ambitious assertion that Jemini’s hotel-room purdah was the unwanted consequence of mass fan hysteria; when the Sun did run one of their confections, it neutered an account of Gemma’s supposed harassment by lust-crazed faux lesbians tATu with inverted-comma qualifications. The Russian teenagers and their management had almost idly whipped up a storm of hype, successfully convincing reporters and petrified EBU officials that their performance was to incorporate simulated acts of Sapphic love, and unsimulated nudity. ‘Let’s just see if they can sing live,’ Chris told the press, as its unkinder members would remind him twenty-four hours later.

  Confronted with the crushing might of the tATu PR machine, and the lavish extravaganza that was their stage show, Gemma and Chris began to accept that the UK delegation had both underestimated the opposition and failed to grasp the Eurovision shift from songcraft to showmanship. ‘Some people told us we needed a gimmick, you know, like Bucks Fizz and their skirts,’ says Chris, ‘but the manager was saying no, the song will do it, all you have to do is smile and enjoy yourselves.’

  A nagging fear that they might have neglected the nonmusical side of their performance swelled into malignant misgiving at the last rehearsal. ‘tATu unveiled this amazing routine, all these bits of the stage started moving about and everything,’ Chris mutters. ‘We had no idea you could do that sort of stuff. Our stage show was just the crappiest nothing. Everyone else had all these amazing lights and all that, and we just had this sad little graphic of rain and clouds, like a shit memorial service.’

  Gemma nods eagerly. ‘And then the Irish lot came up to us and said: “Where’s your ear things?” We looked around and realised everyone else had these little ear monitors, so they could hear themselves above the backing track. But the BBC said it was down to our management to provide them, and the management said it should be the BBC, so we never got any.’

  Alan tuts theatrically, then sighs. ‘They’re only about 100 quid a pop.’

  ‘And then Terry Wogan comes up,’ says Chris, with an almost deranged smile, ‘and he goes: “You know, with the Iraq war you’re not going to get any points.’” Perhaps that’s Gaelic for ‘good luck’.

  Tactfully sensing that I’m now about to discuss Eurovision’s ugliest vocal apocalypse with its perpetrator, Alan leaps to his feet and offers refills: there are no refusals. This stage of almost every nul-point conversation has required an alcoholic prelude; how grateful my innards will be that this is the last.

  Dabbing lager froth off her top lip, Gemma nobly takes the stand. ‘As soon as I started I just knew it wasn’t right,’ she says, looking me straight in the slightly red face. ‘Martin explained to me afterwards why I couldn’t keep the pitch, that there was something missing in the track, and of course the monitors, but I’ve only watched it back once, and that was awful: I whacked the sound right off.’ Chris idly manipulates an earlobe, saying nothing; Gemma’s going to have to get through this alone. ‘I mean, all the crappy graphics we had, you just get on with that, but the sound …’ Alan and I nod slowly. ‘I wouldn’t have minded about the nul points if I’d sung the best I’d ever sung, but because I sang … wrong at the beginning, terrible in fact, that’s what puts me off it, that’s why I don’t like watching it.’

  I want to
stop her now, but she seems oddly keen to get it all out. ‘All week I’d been worried about it, I would go back to the room on my own, and just sing, and sing, and sing, because something wasn’t right, and I thought, maybe I’m just not getting it, maybe it’s me …’

  ‘Yeah, it was you,’ Chris might have blurted into the pregnant pause that follows, but instead he just takes on board maybe a quarter of a pint of lager.

  Weeks later, turning up a rogue domestic cache of Andreas-labelled DVDs – I have well over 100 scattered about behind tellies and under computers – I find one marked ‘UK ‘03’. It’s the Song For Europe final, and giving it a spin a gratifying truth becomes belatedly apparent: Gemma Abbey can sing, and sing beautifully. ‘Love, love’s not enough, I need your trust, but you don’t try any more …’ Hearing her sonorous tones, I wonder how on earth anyone, from me upwards, could ever have thought otherwise. Tone deaf she’d hardly have got into the Starlite variety academy down Limekiln Lane, let alone been offered a Eurosong by the big cheese at Paul McCartney’s academy. It was those silly monitors all along: I’ve forced a gentle young woman to confess to a crime she’d never committed.

  Stepping off the Skonto Arena stage to a rowdily enthusiastic reception, ‘one of the best of the night’, the misgivings stockpiled during their performance were joyously discarded. ‘The crowd were so brilliant and behind us, we thought we’d done really well,’ says Gemma. ‘I asked the manager about the dodgy bits and he didn’t know what I was talking about – the crowd was making so much noise he hadn’t noticed.’

  Sandwiched between the backing musicians and their management on one of the green room’s cloud-shaped sofas, Jemini felt their adrenalined anticipation decay into bemusement, then disbelief, as the votes came in. ‘After all the cheers and applause it just didn’t make sense,’ says Chris, looking as if it still doesn’t. ‘We were thinking, We must get a vote, someone’s got to give us a vote soon. It just went on and on and on …’ He wrinkles his nose at the dusk-shrouded world outside, then expels a bleak laugh. ‘About halfway through I went outside for a cigarette.’

  This obligatory nul-point comforter was followed by greedy indulgence in the world’s best-loved bringer of solace when Chris came back in to find Cry Baby still stalled on the line. ‘Every time we didn’t get a vote, we had a drink. So obviously by the end – hah! – we were absolutely hammered.’

  ‘I love the voting,’ Martin Isherwood had told the press weeks before. ‘It’s like watching a World Cup penalty shoot-out.’ Slumped dismally in front of his telly (fear of flying kept him away from Riga), Martin might, with reference to his nation’s record in the latter, have reflected on the grim aptness of this analogy.

  Later, Chris and Gemma made all the right noises about the enhanced publicity benefits of a truly abysmal result. ‘Getting nothing is the best result if you can’t win,’ Gemma ambitiously maintained to London radio station LBC. ‘Nul points is better than six or seven,’ said Chris. ‘It’s what people remember.’ But backstage in the Skonto, there was only horrified shock, and feverish alcoholic efforts to blunt its impact.

  Moments after the Slovenian jury had confirmed Jemini’s historic infamy (and indeed Turkey’s debut triumph), a BBC delegate emerged to inform waiting journalists that the pair would be coming out to answer questions once they’d composed themselves. For Chris, this was not a straightforward process. ‘I found this massive room that was set up for the after-show party, with a big swimming pool in the middle and all these kind of motorised swans going round,’ he says; there’s nothing forced in the cacophonous merriment the pair now emit, and which Alan and I are powerless not to amplify. ‘I just jumped straight in with this flag I had and climbed up the nearest swan, and I’m standing up on it waving a big Union Jack …’

  ‘Everyone else is all like calm and collected, having a little glass or two,’ says Gemma when at length she’s able to, ‘and there’s us, completely bladdered, dancing about, flags everywhere …’ My laughter is underpinned with an odd surge of pride: unedifying and unsophisticated as it may be, this is the British way. How splendid if Chris had conducted his interviews from that swan’s back; as a compromise, the Union Jack was still in his fist as he dutifully lowered himself on to the cloud sofa.

  The shellshocked managerial team’s initial spin on the disaster, as relayed by the pair with an articulate efficiency that belied their wine intake, was a simple heads-held-high, strength-in-adversity job; the gathered journalists nodded and scribbled in sympathetic silence. The tactics quickly shifted, though, when after the interviews Martin O’Shea returned to the Jemini dressing room and found it in vandalised ruin. ‘The door was kicked in, the walls were smashed,’ he was quickly telling journalists. ‘It was specifically targeted.’

  As he spoke, Martin Isherwood’s family trooped by with Union Jacks at half mast. ‘I’ll tell you what tomorrow’s headline should be,’ bellowed one with a flag wedged in her topknot, ‘“Tony Blair – nul points!’”

  Thus was born the international conspiracy theory, first espoused by Terry Wogan the day before, which would form the case for the defence. Jemini had paid a terrible price for their government’s conspicuous prominence as a founder-member of the coalition of the willing; Eurovision had created its latest political martyrs. When the sound-monitor issue was wheeled out, it had been repackaged to suit: there were now loud hints of mixing-desk sabotage, and certainly no mention of the petty internal wrangling that had deprived the pair of an in-ear solution.

  ‘We were naïve to think politics wouldn’t come into it,’ says Chris, with Gemma adding that though she doesn’t feel any resentment, it’s a shame that people felt they couldn’t vote on the music.

  But even as I purse my lips into a tight smile of empathy, I’m thinking: Oh, come off it. So intolerable was the aural distress inflicted of Cry Baby’s opening minute, you could have delivered it from the back of a nude and whimpering Donald Rumsfeld and still come away with nothing. It’s also worth pointing out that of the twenty-six nations competing that night, precisely half were fully paid-up supporters of Operation Enduring Freedom.

  No, our disastrous meltdown was precipitated by years of ratcheting complacency. In most rival nations, pre-selection remained a prime-time showcase; by 2003, A Song for Europe had been consigned to the Sunday mid-afternoon graveyard. Coming third that Friday evening in 1989, my friend Jane had picked up 47,664 votes – more than Jemini captured in their triumph.

  Turkey secured their first victory by sending in an artist who had sold four million albums and duetted with Ricky Martin and Jose Carreras; what did we honestly expect from a pair who had yet to release a record and whose most significant professional engagement was as support act to a Pop Idol reject? ‘We were just two Scousers, out there trying to do our best for our country, but having a laugh while doing it,’ says Chris, and when he does so it all slots into place: we’ve become the game here-for-the-beer part-timers who have been Terry’s targets for all these years, turning up without shirts, too green to grasp the technical requirements, then too tight to meet them, outthought, out-spent and outperformed by the opposition, but, what the heck, having a giggle while we’re at it. We didn’t know the score, so we didn’t get one.

  Our indifference, and Jemini’s associated disaster, was the inevitable consequence of a cultural distillation that had over the decades boiled Eurovision down from an exalted international competition to two hours of patronising, chortlesome xenophobia. As the acknowledged motherland of pop, we had nothing to gain by competing in earnest at this daft artistic irrelevance. Chris recalls music-biz elders telling him how they’d cringed when Save All Your Kisses For Me won: as early as 1976, Eurovision success was for many Britons a cause for shame rather than celebration. Everyone knew we’d win every year if we made that effort, but like Man U in the League Cup, to be seen making that effort would represent an intolerable loss of face. So like Man U, we’d become the arrogant bastards everyone else wanted to see
come horribly, messily unstuck.

  The dismissive sneering was apparent even in the agonised autopsies that would fill the comment pages in days ahead. ‘How was the UK beaten by Austria’s entry,’ asked the Independent, ‘an ecological protest song containing the lyrics “Little rabbits have short noses, and kittens soft paws”?’ In similar vein, the Guardian called Austria’s Alf Poier ‘an apparent cretin surrounded by toy animals’.

  We’d been at it since 1960, when a British reviewer described Italy’s Renato Rascel as ‘a short fat man with big ears’. Ignorance and its sidekick xenophobia have been drawing weary corrections from the BBC’s continental broadcast brethren almost every year since: Mr Pete Murray, there is no such principality as Monte Cristo; not every Greek male is called Zorba, Mr Terry Wogan. And what kind of message were we sending out by entrusting the 1967 commentary duties to Rolf Harris?

  If the rest of Europe was punishing us, it wasn’t for getting in bed with the Yanks so much as what we’d caught off them in consequence. When Chris told a Riga press conference that he’d never even heard of Latvia until winning A Song For Europe, there was no trace of shame in the bumptious chuckle that followed.

  And for too long we’d been trading on past Eurovision glories, looking back to Sandie Shaw, to Lulu; even, once the second bottle’s open, to Brotherhood of Man. From the sixties to the eighties we’d been the contest’s top performers, but anyone who studied the form would have known how virulently the rot had set in thereafter: down to third in the nineties, and twenty-third since. In the previous twenty years, even Norway had won more Eurovisions.

  It was no better in the big wide pop world outside Eurovision. In 1980, British acts filled half the places in the year-end German top-twenty singles chart; twenty years later that was down to two. Having been proudly responsible for very nearly a third of all US music sales in 1986, by the time Jemini set off for Riga, UK performers accounted for less than 0.3 per cent of the American market.