jawnbc | Questions

That pocket o' kiwi goodness

mikeybill asks two things:

Just where did your Eurovision obsession come from, and what has been your favourite winning song of all time?
I was familiar with "the Eurovision" thanks to the relations in Ireland growing up. No one ever quite explained it to me, but I knew it was a song contest of some sort.

A few years after I moved to Vancouver I started dating a rather dapper chap originally from Dublin. During our brief, intense fling he mentioned "we won the Eurovision for the third time in a row." A couple of years later he mentioned "well we didn't win the Eurovision, but we did this year again!"

Around that time I picked up "The Best Irish Album, Ever" from Virgin Records in London. Turns out that all 7 Irish winners of "the Eurovision" were on there and all were songs I thought "wow, that's a pretty good song...why've I never heard of it?" By then we had the innerwebs and I found fan pages, including rudimentary blogs about attending the Contest in 1998. That year was Dana Int'l's year and she made headlines around the world.

In 1999 I was dating another guy (hey I've been....popular...at times) and we were flicking channels when I noticed "Concours Eurovision de la chanson" on francophone cable channel TV5. We tuned it, found it bizarrely entertaining, and couldn't figure out why the Swedish amazon won with such an obvious ABBA knock-off. At that point my fanboy button'd'been pushed. The year after I watched again, but with a few friends--my first ESC party--and they were all hooked.

My favourite winning song of all time remains In Your Eyes by Niamh Kavanagh (1993, Ireland). Coincidently my fanboy dream might be coming true this year: for the first time since '93 Niamh is back having a go. Tomorrow night in Dublin is Eurosong and her song is tipped as the new favourite, after the songs were débuted on RTÉ radio this afternoon. Have a listen to It's for you:

I really, really like it.