29 March 1969
Fair play to Austria, who seem to have been the only country to boycott the 1969 Eurovision Song Contest. Okay, they didn’t actually come out and say it was because of the contest being held in the fascist dictatorship of Franco’s Spain; perhaps it was a bit too soon for the Anschluss’s party of the second part to take the antifa moral high ground. Today we’d be having healthy public debate, or toxic online hatred, about the merits of sending an Irish representative to such a politically compromised global TV event, much as how Ireland deliberately didn’t qualify for the World Cups in Russia and Qatar. But wait, says you: the Yugoslavia of Tito, a communist dictatorship, went to Eurovision 1969, so clearly it was cool with Franco’s ideological enemies, and hadn’t Yugoslavia given their final vote the previous year to Ireland, effectively seeing Spain over the line? Diametrically-opposed totalitarian regimes as poles of the moral compass: just another day in Eurovision discourse.
In slight mitigation, while the winner’s medal was designed by ardent Franco supporter Salvador Dalí, Eurovision 1969 doesn’t seem to have featured torchlit military rallies with fascist paraphernalia as an interval act, nor were there video postcards with competitors jovially warming their hands on a Madrilenian public bonfire of Federico García Lorca’s collected poems. Ireland did its little bit to offer reconciliation and progress: Muriel Day was our first Eurovision representative from Northern Ireland, and our first who was a woman. Also, in what appears to be some sort of post-Vatican II Catholic Eurovision outreach, onstage Day wore a minidress that looks to have been made from a priest’s vestments, and a fairly short priest at that. Maybe Eurovision 1969 was having a loosening-up effect on all manner of repressive autocracies.
As for Ireland’s song that year, the first thing to consider is its strange title. ‘The Wages Of Love’ sounds like what a bordello madame counts out at the end of the night. Otherwise, it sticks to the ‘Puppet On A String’ template like peel on an apple, an impression that’s copperfastened in my mind by Day’s similar black bob and swinging stagecraft to Sandie Shaw. The tune is catchy, the bounce is fun, and the hips are swinging, plus I’ll always think kindly of any ’60s Irish hit that’s actual pop rather than showband drivel, but ultimately ‘The Wages Of Love’ stands or falls on your indulgence for it as a blatant Puppet On A Shoestring. In a year when it proved harder to lose Eurovision than win it—more on that here shortly—the national juries clearly tended to the latter.
