and Making Your Mind Up is schlock pop, annoyingly catchy, and with the added gimmickry of the girls losing their skirts! How could it fail?

As a native English speaker I think this is unfair!

It’s certainly time to break the habit of “language imperialism”, in the Eurovision Song Contest, and use a song, sung in Esperanto instead!

This is a serious suggestion, as you can see from the Esperanto music which is already available at http://www.vinilkosmo.com/?prs=listen or at http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8837438938991452670

There’s even cheesy Esperanto music available! See http://www.ipernity.com/home/56084

I’d never heard the whole song before; structurally it’s positively a Macarthur Park compared to most Eurovision entries. And I like the way it includes the lyric “blah blah blah blah blah blah.”

(Seeing as that year’s winner had a chorus that went “La la-la la, la-la la, la-la la”, Odd wasn’t that far from the Euro zeitgeist).

i have somehow all my rockcrit life known there were two bands called popol vuh — it’s the kind of stupid thing i remember (see above for the kind of stuff i remember incorrectly) — but i’ve no idea why i know this, or if the second one was this norwegian one, or if there were actually THREE bands called popol vuh!

(i actualy think given hippy-prog fascination with mysticism and the provenance of the name “popul vuh” it’s not that surprising it was hit on more than once) (cf also nirvana heehee)

The Norwegian in aviators and skinny tie was singing “Don’t drop that neutron bomb on me”, I think – topical but, strangely, unpopular.

“We Are The Winners” was hysterically funny and should have won.

It was a no.1 in Norway. “According to Wikipedia” Teigen started off in a band called Popol Vuh (not THAT Popol Vuh), and turned down an offer from Genesis to audition as a possible Peter Gabriel replacement.

But my fav Norwegian entry is 1968′s Stress by Odd Borre, a Jarvis Cocker lookalike, mainly because a song called Stress by someone called Odd Borre was never, ever going to win.

I think some of the posters on here have been unduly hard on Bucks Fizz. There’s nothing about this song that pretends to be any more than it is and the arrangement is likeably envigorating from the first moment. In fact it’s one of those songs that when it comes on I immediately think ‘Oh I like this’ and then realise what it is and feel slightly ashamed.

Plus, no one ever wore velour quite like The Fizz.

Though now that I’ve typed that down it does look like precisely the sort of thing that I’d dream.

It was complete crap.

It won.

Bear in mind as well that there are a few obvious exceptions to the above. I don’t think anyone who saw Ruslana’s Wild Dances did not think that it was the winner straight off, and ditto with Lordi (not becuase it was necessarily so great, but it had a Europe wide metal audience primed for it).

Or is it more because they “share taste in music”