The Judge
RAVES!
Date: 02/05/14
Kojo - "Nuku Pommiin" (1982)
As part of my ongoing attempt to refrain from writing anything (as a form of post-modernist take on Writer's Block), let me distract you once more with my wayward tastes in music.
I had a curious relationship with the Eurovision Song Contest from the mid-70s to about a decade later. First was a minor sort of Brit-Nat flag waving which I can now comfortably dismiss as coming from a time when I knew no better (I viewed Jeux Sans Frontières in the same spirit), although I only bought the winning entries by ABBA (Sweden, 1974) and Teach-In (Netherlands, 1975); this was replaced by the sort of snorting derision which is de rigueur for adolescents, that is to say a derision tempered by a secret, sneaking, unspoken (if not unspeakable) regard; finally ending up with a slightly more mature response in which I could both appreciate a worthwhile effort whilst being certain that no truly interesting song would ever win the thing.
This little example comes from that final stage. There are other songs from that period which I liked a great deal - Norway's Lenge Leve Livet from 1984 (far better than the fake rock'n'roll that country won with the very next year); Jacques Zegers' Avanti La Vie for Belgium the same year; but what follows is special.
Finland had not had an overtiring impact on Eurovision; a handful of top ten finishes and a glorious zéro in Napoli in 1965. So when the contestants gathered for the 1982 showdown at the somewhat unlikely venue of the Conference Centre in the northern English town of Harrogate, few would have expected very much. What became apparent when Timo Kojo and his backing band took the stage and veteran conductor Ossi Runne set things going was that this was going to be a rather different business to the liggy-jiggy pop and lukewarm ballads which preceded it.
Daft costumes had long been a part of the Eurovision Experience, of course. I could recall a Greek entrant dressed as Charlie Chaplin singing a song about...well, guess; Swedish conductor Sven-Olof Walldoff wearing a Napoleon hat to lead ABBA onto the road to superstardom; and 1981's 'let's whip the girls' dresses off to reveal hot pants underneath' schtick which may have helped that manufactured phenomenon and Spoonerism Bucks Fizz to their triumph in Dublin. But here we had a bunch of bearded musos wearing suits and bowler hats being led by someone who looked as if he was angling for the Johnny-Rotten-meets-Duran-Duran market.
The song itself was a jaunty one about how we were sleepwalking into an apocalypse, and contained a neat little guitar break in the middle. You can read the lyrics (in Finnish and translation) here while you listen.
So here's how it went down in Harrogate that spring night in Yorkshire (and dig those modern computer-generated captions!):
The audience were somewhat nonplussed by all this. What more did they want? It even had someone banging a great, big, fuck-off bass drum for goodness sake! The juries scattered throughout the non-Soviet part of the continent (and Israel) were even more unpersuaded; not a single one of them could bring themselves to award so much as a point, and so Kojo and his boys were left - in this regard if in no other - pointless, much as the Norwegian entry had the year before, and repeating Viktor Klimenko's feat seventeen years previously. And all this whilst the Grand Prix was carried away by a simpering German teenage girl singing a thoroughly insipid song about peace.
Perhaps Kojo was not in the best of voice that evening, perhaps Finnish is not the most euphonious language in Europe (Finland was brought into the EU to boost the continent's vowel production; Poland was brought in some years later to do the same thing for consonant output) but I thought then - and think today - that a surly nil from an entire half-continent was scant reward for giving us something different. Moreover, I still believe it's a bloody good song, so here it is again, this time in the studio version which shows the whole piece in a rather better light:
