Nul Points Read online

  ‘Oh! Oh! You av beeeeg power!’ she giggles, raising a hand to cover her mouth. I laugh, partly because I have rarely felt my internal batteries more completely drained, and I’m still smiling when the airport minibus arrives five minutes later. As we bump and slap our way up the concrete-sectioned road, I look out at the palm silhouettes and think: Yes, on the one hand I have just travelled half way round the world to make a grown man cry, at great cost to us both. But on the other, I have big power.

  24 April 1982 Harrogate Conference Centre Kojo Finland Nuku Pommiin

  ‘LET ME GO check,’ whispers the tentative transatlantic female. ‘I think he might be asleep.’

  It’s midday, Finnish time: Jim Pembroke, musician, producer and songwriter of forty years standing, is clearly still keeping rock hours. Born in north London in 1946, Jim first went out to Helsinki in 1965 in pursuit of his girlfriend, a Finnish au pair; give or take the odd couple of months back in Finchley and a five-year nineties stint in Kansas, he’s been there ever since.

  Jim’s modest experience in London pub bands sufficed to see him through the sixties in a procession of Helsinki-based beat and blues groups; in the decade after he took the Teigentrodden path into Scandinavian prog rock. Wigwam enjoyed enduring success in their homeland – the band retains a healthy cult following – and after a UK tour supporting Gong came tantalisingly close to securing a big deal with Virgin Records. But 1977 wasn’t the best time to be releasing an album entitled ‘Daemon Duncetan’s Request’ (narrowly out-progging Jim’s earlier solo offering, ‘Corporal Cauliflower’s Mental Function’), and adjudging the work ‘too low-key and noncommercial’, Branson’s boys pulled out the Wigwam tentpegs.

  After four years of dwindling success, Jim gulped down Virgin’s bitter pill with a lunatic cackle of if-you-can’t-beat-’em bravado. In the winter of 1980 he sat down and wrote what may be the only reggae number to feature an accordion solo, and entered it for the Eurovision Song Contest. Performed by the majestically mulleted Riki Sorsa, Reggae OK triumphed at the Finnish national qualifiers and, as I can hardly fail to forget, was prominent amongst Aldri i Livet’s rivals in Dublin. Despite the aesthetic disincentives of Riki’s harlequin trousers and his backing band’s walrus-themed face furniture, it earnt twenty-seven points from the international juries: sixteenth place was considered a solid result for a nation that had come home last the year before, and never finished higher than sixth.

  Winning the Eurovision Artist Award Society’s ‘Originality Prize’ was a bonus, and indeed a telling indicator of the contest’s stifling artistic constraints, but no one was more surprised than Jim when over the following weeks Reggae OK hit the top ten in eleven central European countries, selling 100,000 copies. If he’d sold out, it had paid off. After years of poorly remunerated prog-rock toil, he’d made a stack of cash with the silliest song he’d ever written. Sod it, he thought, I’ll have another go.

  Perhaps inspired by that Originality Prize, for the 1982 qualifiers Jim decided to push the Eurovision envelope a little further. With cruise missiles at Greenham Common and Soviet SS-20s in silos all along the Iron Curtain, the threat of nuclear confrontation was the dominant issue of the day – this was the year of Nicole’s success with A Little Peace – and nowhere was the threat more tangible than frontline Finland, a nation that shared a 1,200km border with the USSR. After all, wasn’t Eurovision founded to stop another war? Nuku Pommiin (Bomb Out), Jim’s follow-up, put a nation’s fears into words, words that inevitably suffer rather in the translation mix:

  If someone soon throws some nuclear poo here on our Europe

  What will you say when we get all the filth on our faces!

  If someone slings a bomb at your neck you probably won’t even notice

  Hardly typical fare to place before juries that the year before had given Jean Gabilou 125 points, and third place, for Humanahum. But then Jim was hardly a typical Eurovision songwriter.

  The tune he set these words to was rather more straightforward: of all the Eurovision songs I would attempt to master, none proved less taxing. Nuku Pommiin’s four power-pop bar chords formed a simple framework for its furious lyrical polemic – this was about the message, not the medium.

  Regrettably, the message was elucidated in Europe’s most impenetrable tongue. From Portugal to Cyprus, Ireland to Yugoslavia, Eurovision watchers would gather merely that something had made these Finns pretty damn angry. What’s up with this lot, eh? Elk crap in the sauna again?

  “Ello?’

  It’s perhaps three minutes since his girlfriend went off to retrieve him, and Jim’s wound-down Cockney is barely intelligible. I explain myself as best I can. ‘Kojo?’ For my benefit, he pronounces the name of Nuku Pommiin’s performer as a rhyme for ‘mojo’. But in the course of the half-dozen conversations with venerable and/or retired Finnish music executives I’ve enjoyed to get me this far, I’ve been made aware that it’s definitively Ko-yo. ‘Yeah. Just … ah … yeah, um …’

  In the background I think I can hear the growl-accompanied keyboard stylings of Tom Waits; maybe, I ponder while waiting for the man at the other end of the line to get his act together, this is the recorded sound of Jim Pembroke.

  ‘Dubai!’ Almost audibly, a penny has dropped in the Pembroke mind, and it’s dropped into a slot it might have taken me months to guess at. ‘Yeah – he’s out there now.’

  Dubai. Dubai! Hardly a destination you’d have thought likely to roll out the red carpet for impoverished losers. If only I hadn’t just come home from Koh Samui, and discovered how nul-points trouble can thrive in paradise.

  ‘Yeah, um … let me, ah, let me give you his cellphone number.’ He does, and after appropriate thanks I let him mumble a farewell. It’s already impossible not to picture his life in Helsinki as an enduring homage to that obscure celebration of Scandinavian groupiehood, Norwegian Wood. Every time I talk to Jim Pembroke thereafter, I imagine that following our goodbyes he’ll crawl off to sleep in the bath.

  Timo Kojo was twenty-nine in 1982. As a boy he’d been more interested in sport than music, displaying such natural aptitude for football and ice hockey that at youth level he represented his nation at both. For two years running he was Finland’s technical football champion, the king of keepy-uppy; then, at seventeen, a series of injuries – a badly cut foot, a dislocated shoulder – cost him a year of training. To fill the void he began messing around in school bands, grabbing the mike to bellow out sixties soul covers. Encouraged by his violinist father, after graduation Timo dropped his first name and began to tour Finland with a band that majored in Wilson Pickett, with a sideline in transatlantic rock.

  The Finnish music scene being as you’d expect, it wasn’t long before Kojo met Jim Pembroke. They became friends; between gigs he began to roadie for Wigwam, and soon he was flatsharing with Jim in downtown Helsinki. When in 1979 Kojo finally made it into a studio, Jim went along to show him the ropes. The resultant English-language album, ‘So Mean’, was an immediate hit; it still shows up today in the my-favourite-records lists that are so unsurprisingly de rigueur amongst Finland’s extensive online community. In 1980 he released a second album, and in 1981 a third: more of the same, though neither quite as successful as his debut. Pushing thirty, he must have started wondering whether that was it.

  Finishing off his new Eurovision composition, it inevitably struck Jim that his flatmate’s passion-cracked way with a tune made him an obvious choice to articulate the rhetoric of an impending apocalypse in a way that Riki Sorsa’s harlequin trousers didn’t. If Jim had asked him to perform Reggae OK, Kojo would have laughed the roof off the sauna, but as things stood both men understood he had little to lose. Make it to the Eurovision-selection finals in any Scandinavian country and the TV coverage guaranteed you at least a minor national hit. Make it to the contest proper, and, as Riki Sorsa had demonstrated, you didn’t need to be ABBA to shift records across Europe.

  Ten songs were performed at the 1982 Finnish final on 19 Februar
y, and a compact jury of music and media luminaries duly voted Nuku Pommiin the clear winner. In second place, thirteen points adrift, was Ami Aspelund’s substantially more conventional Eurosong, My Apple Tree. In any other year, the jury would have played it safe. Indeed the next year they did, dispatching Ami and Fantasiaa off to the 1983 final in Germany. She came home with forty-one points, the best Finnish total since her sister Monica pulled in fifty six years before.

  Wiltingly disheartened by The Kalvik Misfortune, I flick Andreas’s disk of the 1982 final into my bedroom DVD player with diminished enthusiasm. I’d set off on this journey hoping to undo a great injustice, to restore the dignity and reputation of Eurovision’s fallen warrior-minstrels, but after that harrowing night on the Big John beach I’d begun to wonder if I was trying to right one wrong with another. Jahn’s what-the-bollocks exuberance when I’d met him had been followed by Finn’s histrionic collapse; if there was any progression in these matters, my encounter with Timo Kojo could only end in the kind of Armageddon the man himself had prophesied in song. If nuclear poo was going to be thrown at anyone’s neck, that neck would be mine.

  Andreas’s menu flicks up: five flags before the Finnish, five songs before I come face to long-ago face with my next nulpointer. A vulnerable vocal tremor, a freeze-framed look of frail panic, the half-glimpsed hint of a backstage breakdown – any one of the above, Timo, and perhaps we should call the whole thing off.

  1982 was a crisis year for Eurovision. The French drivel-boycott was supplemented by Italy’s absence through sheer apathy, and the Greeks pulled out late after their new socialist government condemned the contest as a showcase for globalised commercialism. Rather more dramatically, the hosts Britain were involved in an apparently ridiculous colonial war that had already provoked many of the remaining countries. As the performers rehearsed, a naval task force was en route to the Falklands; exactly a week later, the Belgrano lay on the South Atlantic seabed.

  Harrogate was the unlikely benefactor of Bucks Fizz’s narrow triumph the year before. Boldly acknowledging its own obscurity, the 1982 transmission welcomes 300 million viewers with animated captions reading ‘Where is Harrogate?’ in every Eurovision language, soundtracked by the sort of jauntily pedestrian orchestrations that suggest a local Vauxhall dealership showcasing its facilities before the main feature to a very small afternoon cinema audience. I only remember I’d watched all this at the time when newsreader Jan Leeming steps out on to the stage, wearing one of those sparkly art deco headbands briefly popularised that year by Princess Diana. Ah, yes! I recall Jan and that outfit partly because my girlfriend’s dad fancied her, but mainly because I did.

  To my profound disappointment, if not the unflinchingly sombre Austrian commentator’s, there is to be no filmed horseplay of Cypriots chasing each other round north Yorkshire’s beauty spots. Instead, each competing nation prefaces its performance with an unapologetically blatant promotional film: ‘Discover the miracle of the Mediterranean,’ begins a typical caption, ‘discover … Israel.’

  As suggested by the Guinness-and-Joyce Irish broadcast the previous year, it’s clear that just two decades back Europeans remained stubbornly ignorant of even their closest neighbours. We were consecutively urged to visit the realms of sand and horses (Portugal), then rain and viaducts (Luxembourg). Big Ben, alpine chalets, that weeing Belgian statue, windmills and tulips – it’s all so dreadfully banal. And what a long twenty-three years it’s been: the Spaniards didn’t think twice about showcasing a bullfight in their slot, and the star dominating the Yugoslav flag stresses that though Marshal Tito has now been dead eighteen months, communist autocracy is alive and well.

  In the trademark quaver I’d found so appealing as a youth, Jan introduces the show openers. Doce are four Portuguese girls dressed in highwayman homage to the year’s most conspicuous pop success, Adam Ant; the caption that announces their entry’s title remains the perfect encapsulation of Eurovision’s improbable blend of the inane and the pedantic. ‘Doce – Bem Bom’ it reads, before seguing into the English translation demanded by tradition, and evidently settled upon only after lengthy committee debate.

  ‘So unless anyone has anything else to add on Jij En Ik, we move to item 11a on your itineraries, Bem Bom. You will recall that in Gran Canaria last month we finally reached a consensus on Bom, which in line with the 1978 precedent of Denmark’s Boom Boom we’re opting to leave as is. It’s the more complex issue of Bem that concerns us today. Yugoslavia?’

  ‘Bem, Bem, Bem. We must all ask: what Bem it say to us? Maybe for you is more Bam, for you is more … Broom.’

  ‘Yes … I’m not saying we should discount the likes of “Broom”, but-’

  ‘Bront!’

  ‘Yes, Cyprus, or “Bront”, but I think a degree of consistency is important. Adhering to the B-vowel-M format, we need something that captures the spirit of “Bem”, but isn’t “Bum”.’

  ‘Bum-bum!’

  ‘Thank you, Turkey. The options, then, as I see them are fairly straightforward: Bam, Bom and Bim. A show of hands, please? Well, I think that’s conclusive: the Bims have it.’

  And there it is on the screen: Bim Bom. (The song was later released in Spain as Bingo.)

  Another of Luxembourg’s long line of Eurovision voice-for-hire mercenaries, the Franco-Russian Svetlana, comes and goes, followed by a brief film of a man handing his female companion a large salmon. Here, we sense, is a man apart from his fellow competitors, a man unwilling to kowtow to the convention that has persuaded other performers to do their patriotic duty beside an Edam. Here, once again, is the great Jahn Teigen.

  How sad, though, to see him mumble through that linguistic professor’s cravenly international reworking of Adieu, a thin and studiously uncontentious duet almost viciously shorn of novelty or character. No shades, no twangs, no leaps: in his V-neck and side parting, Jahn looks like Alan Partridge entertaining midweek diners at the Linton Travel Tavern. It’s awful to see, like watching the lobotomised Jack Nicholson’s vacant, wet-lipped smile spread across his face at the end of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Jahn leans obediently against the grand piano as his wife delicately tinkles away, gazing into her eyes with almost parodic sincerity; only his hands, which on occasion shake with alarming violence, show what this neutered performance is costing him. I want the big Cuckoo chief to come out and smother Jahn, then hurl the piano through the backdrop and lead Eurovision’s inmates to the freedom of a saner world outside.

  Performers come and go, all struggling in vain to find a way around or over the mighty wall of cheese erected by Ronnie Hazelhurst’s BBC orchestra. The Turks troop wanly off, wondering how their entry had been distilled to an imbecilic Co-Op jingle, and then here’s a blond man in a Nik Kershaw jacket, mugging with studied insincerity before a banner that with commendable Ronsealed brevity reads FINLAND FOR HOLIDAYS. I rewind and watch it again: there’s an unmistakable gleam of old-style Teigen-esque mischief in his eye, and for me that’s a very good sign.

  The film ends, we’re back live at the Conference Centre, and with a carefully enunciated, BBC-researched warble of ‘Ko-yo!’ Jan introduces the same man, now clad from head to toe in screaming red leather, to 300 million Europeans.

  Despite the distractions of his outfit and a lip curled in comic disdain, it’s difficult to imagine how he could look much more Finnish: he’s one part Billy Idol to nine parts rally driver. In a ragged semi-circle behind him slouch an already smirking band of Blues Brothers, ties all at half mast, and lank Scandi-rock hair that’s far too long for those trilbies. Ronnie H’s arrangement launches the song with a fantastically inappropriate salesman-of-the-year fanfare, and Nuku Pommiin is in trouble before it’s even started.

  By the time the big chords give way to a strangely tinkling middle eight, jurors across the continent are already nipping out for a bratwurst or an ouzo. Kojo’s triple-distilled rasp cracks and wanders; the percussionist batters a comically oversized marching-band bass drum with contrive
d imprecision. As the lead guitarist winds up a heartsinkingly insipid rent-a-solo, his red-suited leader does something I never thought to see on a Eurovision stage: he sweeps the mike stand up into his arms, and for ten fearful seconds strums it in energetic sympathy.

  He’s ticking every wrong box in the Eurovision catalogue. From the suit onwards there have already been more nul-points moments than I’d have imagined possible, and that’s before Kojo succumbs to obscure temptation and smacks himself, really quite hard, on the side of the head, as if the bad thoughts were coming back. Apparently quite pleased with this action or its effects, he immediately does it again. By the time the song reaches its climax, a repeated refrain of ‘Pom-miin’, he’s slapping his temples with the frenzy of a bereaved Iranian. On sofas from Dublin to Dubrovnik, awestruck Europeans watch in frozen silence. But twenty-three years later, upright in a London bed, I’m making an awful lot of noise. Whatever else you can say about this performance, its magnificently wayward interpreter plainly doesn’t give an elk’s arse.

  After a theatrical snore that no one outside Finland can know relates to Nuku Pommiin’s warning of an apathetic continent sleeping its way towards apocalypse, there’s a giant, discordant orchestral crash. Probably intended to signify a nuclear explosion, it more convincingly suggests that the conductor has just substituted his baton for a skinned ferret. The great fear that reared up at me on a dark island beach – that I might never again find Eurovision funny – is loudly laid to rest.

  A shellshocked Conference Centre audience stutters out a round of disjointed applause; the Austrian ORF commentator, after a long pause and in more than usually measured tones, can think of nothing to say beyond ‘Finland. Kojo’. But I’m still whooping my ebullient relief when a Swiss girl bounds onscreen behind an enormous pantomime St Bernard.