This year's EurovisionSongContest will be quite different than past years.
Over its many years, the Eurovision Song Contest has come to be a sign of the times. So it is perhaps fitting that, in coronavirus times, nothing will be happening on Saturday at the scheduled venue of the Ahoy Hall in the Dutch port city of Rotterdam. In 1974, it was ABBA that ushered in a new era for the once-staid and conservative song contest; in 2020, it is another acronym, COVID-19, and everyone hopes its reign will be brief.
“We’re, like, 41 people that are all in some kind of weird little club that didn’t, like — the Eurovision that never was,” said British entry James Newman. Belgian Eurovision expert Peter Van de Veire feels particularly sorry for Iceland’s Dadi Freyr, and his quirky and danceable “Think About Things.” “Iceland had a top song and it could well have won, had the contest gone ahead. They might have had something of a global hit. That won’t be so now,” he said.
Then came 1974, and with it a sea change. Almost half a century later, you may cringe at the glittery outfits if you want, but never underestimate the impact it had. The ABBA song “Waterloo” proved to be anything but a crushing defeat for the competition itself. It launched the Swedish foursome as a superband of the seventies, and allowed people to dream that at Eurovision, anything could happen. And really it did. Somehow, it became a vector of camp and kitsch.
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