Seventy years ago, in January 1955, the European Broadcasting Union set up the committee that devised the Eurovision Song Contest, aiming to promote cultural understanding and peaceful co-operation in a Europe still recovering from the destruction and animosities of world war two.
These days, the event’s official slogan is United By Music – a fair statement given that an estimated 163 million people watched the 2024 broadcast – but considerably fewer people were brought together by the original edition which took place in 1956. Televisions were something of a luxury item in those days, and while nations such as Germany and Britain had a history of broadcasting dating back to the 1930s, others like Spain or Sweden only began transmitting in the year of the first contest.
The 2024 event featured 37 entrants (whittled down by semi-finals to 25 on the last night), yet a mere seven countries took part in 1956: Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Switzerland, each performing two songs apiece, and all fielding their own two-person jury to help pick the winner.
Over the years the voting system has changed, as technological advances enabled telephone and text voting, and from 1998 the use of juries was mostly abandoned. However, the subsequent rise of the partisan bloc vote threatened to skew the results along territorial lines, highlighting old rivalries, therefore since 2009, variations on a part-jury, part-televote system have prevailed, although this too has its critics, especially regarding the choice of jury members.
From the outset, those in charge of Eurovision banned the use of overtly political songs or nationalistic statements, but as the contest has mushroomed in size, those good intentions have been tested almost to breaking point.
In 2023, the UK played host to the ESC in Liverpool on behalf of Ukraine – who had won the previous year but were unable to stage it at home in the wake of the Russian invasion – while Russia themselves, regular Eurovision participants since 1994, were barred from appearing. Chris Harms, singer with Hamburg goth/metal rockers Lord of the Lost, was right in the middle of things as they represented Germany that year with a song called Blood and Glitter, and he remains a firm advocate for the event:
“I still feel like I haven’t really processed all of it’, he tells me, ‘because it was one of the most intense times in our career, it was so different.
“We’d played 1,000 shows before that already, been on tours in more than 40 countries. Some people don’t realise that Eurovision is not just a one-night stand, that you go there for two weeks, and we had hundreds of interviews. Even before, there’s weeks when the production team is rehearsing.
“You have to imagine there’s the changeover between the acts, fifty-five seconds. That means there’s a hundred people on stage doing the changeover and it’s actually like ballet dance choreography.’
All of which is a far cry from the inaugural ESC show staged on May 24, 1956 at the 700-capacity Teatro Kursaal in Lugano, a lakeside casino and former theatre close to the border between Switzerland and Italy, at which the singers performed live backed by a 24-piece orchestra, with the previous three days allotted for rehearsals. One of the many differences between that event and its modern incarnation is the Grand Final Flag Parade, first introduced in 2013, in which the competitors walk out on stage one after the other, holding their national colours.
This might seem uncontroversial, given that these days the live audience is characterised by a sea of flag-waving. Yet in the 1990s this avowedly non-political competition had struggled with the divisions and tensions between certain countries which affected the event during the Balkan wars. Then, in 2014, following the invasion and annexation of Crimea, the Russian entry was booed by the crowd, prompting the ESC to introduce anti-booing audio technology the following year.
At the 2023 contest – taking place in the shadow of the continuing war in Ukraine – waving flags was never likely to be a completely neutral gesture, and Lord of the Lost’s solution was not to carry one at all, as Chris explains:
“We said in many interviews over the years, you will never see us going somewhere waving our national flag. We thought that running around with this sheet would just look stupid. I totally despise nationalism in general. I myself am very happy that I was born here, I feel very privileged, but I cannot be proud at being German.”
Their refusal to carry one provoked a vicious backlash in their home country, compounded by the fact that Lord of the Lost came last in the voting. While the band were accustomed to playing 50,000-seat stadiums supporting Iron Maiden, exposure to a live television audience of 167 million was in another category completely, and brought them a whole new level of scrutiny and abuse, including death threats.
“After Eurovision,” says Chris, “the amount of hate comments from German right-wing people about the flag and stuff, it was so intense, we had to block them all, and I needed to clear my mind about that.”
Yet there had been so many good sides to the band’s ESC fortnight in Liverpool – such as visiting a local school to play music with pupils and answer questions, or doing an acoustic show at the Cavern Club – that they decided to prolong this positive experience by travelling the following year to Malmö where the event was being staged and performing a show of their own the night before the grand final.
Echoing the belief of the competition’s founders that music can be a unifying force, Chris states that the band would happily enter Eurovision again: “If you just go there because of the contest and you lose the sense of musicality and the art and the togetherness, it doesn’t mean a thing. We could still enjoy it even if we’d go last again.”
Of course, Malmö 2024 took place under heightened security measures on account of the Israel/Hamas war and the previous year’s Quran burnings in Sweden, with a no-fly zone to guard against drone attacks, pro-Palestinian protests and gestures by several entrants, calls for the banning of Israel’s entry, and alterations to the song eventually performed by its contestant, Eden Golan, on the grounds that the original lyrics were too political. Throughout most of her stay, Golan was confined to her hotel room under heavy guard because of threats.
All of which would have come as a huge shock to the European Broadcasting Union’s original 1955 committee as they planned the first contest with the intention of promoting harmonious international relations, but unless a lasting peace comes to Europe and the Middle East, the current organisers of Eurovision are likely to need their anti-booing technology a while longer.
Chris Harms’ solo album, 1980, is out now. Lord of the Lost have a new album out in August called OPVS NOIR Vol. 1 and tuor the UK in October and November
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