Fifty years on, the footage of Abba performing Waterloo at the 1974 Eurovision song contest is very familiar indeed: the conductor dressed as Napoleon, Agnetha’s blue satin knickerbockers, Björn’s star-shaped guitar. It’s been endlessly repeated on TV shows and documentaries: the moment that unexpectedly launched the career of one of the biggest bands of all time, pop history in the making. But it’s rarely, if ever, shown in context. Perhaps Abba’s success is so sui generis – Sweden had never produced an internationally successful pop artist before, and it’s never produced one anything like as successful since – that context seems besides the point. But this weekend, BBC Four is screening the entire 1974 grand final in full.
Immediately, the setting plunges you back into what feels like a very distant past indeed. Here is Eurovision from a time before anyone watched it for camp value – you can’t imagine any gay bar in 1974 clearing its schedules to screen this; a Eurovision that takes itself rather seriously, a brief appearance by the Wombles notwithstanding. It’s Eurovision that predates even Terry Wogan’s presence: in 1974, his famously sardonic remarks were still confined to radio coverage of the event. Viewers had to make do with sports commentator David Vine, ever-ready with a useful pen-portrait of the competing nations – “Norway! The place where they drink aquavit and do marvellous ski-jumping!” – and blessed with the ability to talk up the various artists in a way that makes you lose the will to live before they’ve even taken the stage: “Made his debut in his parents’ circus … used to do impressions of Maurice Chevalier,” he offers of Monaco’s Romuald.
Luxembourg’s entrant, he claims, has “just been voted the most important girl singer discovery of the year”, a curiously unverified fact – and judging by her limp performance, it might have been a straw poll of her close friends and relations. “Stand by for these boys, because anything could happen,” he says of Yugoslavia’s unpromisingly named Korni Group, making them sound like the Butthole Surfers in the days when they used to set fire to the stage and smash up their equipment before they’d actually started playing: the Korni Group come on and sing a cabaret number in Serbo-Croat.
In fact, cabaret was Eurovision 1974’s watchword. In 2024, we might occasionally raise an eyebrow at Eurovision’s galumphing attempts to keep pace with pop culture – a bit of awkward rapping here, a clumsily deployed trap beat there, a smattering of disco-influenced pop-house that Dua Lipa or even Kylie wouldn’t give houseroom to – but it’s as hip as Saturday night at Berghain compared with what was happening 50 years ago. Presented by Katie Boyle wearing a floor-length peach evening gown and Margaret Thatcher’s hair, it took place at the tail-end of one of mainstream pop’s all-time great eras: in the weeks immediately preceding its broadcast, the British Top 40 had played host to David Bowie’s Rebel Rebel, Aretha Franklin’s Until You Come Back To Me, Suzi Quatro’s Devil Gate Drive, Stevie Wonder’s Living for the City, the nascent disco of the Love Unlimited Orchestra’s Love’s Theme and Hot Chocolate’s gripping, eerie Emma among an embarrassment of riches.
But you’ll strain your ears trying to find even its vaguest reflection inside the Brighton Dome that year: closest is Finland’s entry, a piano ballad by Carita called Keep Me Warm that bore the influence of Carole King’s Tapestry, albeit a track from Tapestry that had been subjected to some kind of process that removed every last shred of its character. Twelve years after the Beatles, the beat boom and the British Invasion, the appearance of a “pop group” is still a novelty considered worthy of comment from Vine. Israel’s pop group is called Poogy: they have matching tank tops, nice harmonies and a quite extraordinarily weedy song.
Carita notwithstanding, the ballads invariably sound like something that Engelbert Humperdinck might have essayed five or six years previously, and there’s a lot of clompy oompah music, perhaps because the in-house orchestra turn virtually anything faster than that into cacophonous mush, including the efforts of Greece’s bouzouki-assisted Marinella and Spain’s Peret, who rocks up bearing a flamenco guitar and some off-colour lyrics: “If you stop for a blonde while driving on the road and she only wants a ride, it doesn’t work at all,” he is apparently singing, although it’s perhaps worth noting that this translation comes courtesy of David Vine, who, as we’ve already established, isn’t the most veracious source. Germany’s Cindy und Bert seem promising: get yourself to YouTube if you haven’t heard their 1970 single Der Hund von Baskerville, which is – and I’m not making this up – a cover of Black Sabbath’s Paranoid with Sherlock Holmes-themed German lyrics. But no: another cabaret ballad.
Britain’s entry is by Olivia Newton-John, who as Vine notes, looks a bit startled in the scene-setting pre-performance footage. Perhaps she’s thinking about her career. A couple of years before, she was releasing exceptionally well-made country-influenced pop – critics claimed her cover of If Not for You superior to both Bob Dylan’s original and the celebrated version on George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass – and now look at her: struggling manfully with Long Live Love, the hideous offspring of a secret tryst between Puppet on a String and Cliff Richard’s Congratulations. Under the circumstances, you too might be inclined to jolt at the thought of what had gone wrong.
The favourites were Dutch duo Mouth and MacNeal, who had a clompy singalong called I See a Star, a frightful bit of onstage business involving puppets of themselves, and, in Mouth, a man whose overconfident performance suggests he thinks he’s already won. With the benefit of hindsight, watching his array of gurns and knowing looks to camera is like watching a particularly smug goose that’s about to fly into a jet engine: he has literally no idea what’s about to happen.
But nor, it seems, does anyone else. Abba are the solitary entrants who have any real link to current pop music – Waterloo bears the distinct influence of glam, most specifically Roy Wood’s Wizzard – the solitary entrants who aren’t smothered by the orchestra and the solitary entrants who look like they belong on Top of the Pops rather than in Batley Variety Club, a riot of satin and silver platform boots. But they’re introduced by Vine’s dismissive commentary (“If all the judges were men, which they’re not, I’m sure they’d get a lot of votes,” he shrugs, not the last person to assume Abba had nothing going for them but the Nordic appeals of Agnetha and Anni-Frid), the audience respond no differently than they do to Pooky or Peret, and their victory isn’t the clean sweep you might expect. Italy’s Gigliola Cinquetti gives them a run for their money with the admittedly very pretty ballad Si; the British jury – there was no public vote in 1974 – gives them no points at all.
As if to underline how out of touch it all was, four weeks later, Waterloo was the UK No 1, and we all know how things played out for Abba thereafter. Mouth and MacNeal split up before the year was out: one does rather picture Mouth taking the results rather badly. For a mercy, Newton-John was three years away from accepting the role of Sandy in Grease and further rectifying her career with another string of exceptionally well-made singles: the yacht-rock glory of A Little More Love and Magic, the ELO-assisted disco of Xanadu, the world-eating Physical.
Poogy went on to become huge in Israel, before – and again, I’m not making this up – losing their audience with a heavily prog and jazz-influenced third album. But with the greatest of respect to Poogy, and indeed Peret, the Korni Group and Cindy und Bert, if it wasn’t for Abba’s presence, 1974’s Eurovision song contest would be long-confined to the dustbin of history. Watching it 50 years on is a chastening experience, that makes Abba – and indeed today’s Eurovision – shine a little bit brighter: three minutes of pop history and 103 minutes that remind you of what you haven’t been missing.
• The Eurovision 1974 grand final is shown on BBC Four at 8.10pm on Sunday
