Did Sam Ryder have any idea, when he got ready for his Eurovision performance, that he might be about to reverse the nation’s doldrums, the super-low scores that have dogged us for this entire century? Did he have a clue that he might come second?
“I had inklings,” Ryder says, sitting in Langham’s, a fancy hotel in central London, where he and his girlfriend, Lois Gaskin-Barber, have been holed up since they came back from Turin on Sunday. “It seemed like it was from the universe.” The 32-year-old, with a hat-trick of Jesus-like qualities (long hair, beard, good at carpentry), leans forward to paint the scene: “I was backstage, with clips in my hair, I looked like a little terrier. The atmosphere is like a school play, times a million. Everyone’s getting ready, fixing loose stitches, putting pearls back on with a glue gun, rollers in their hair, flapping.” When he stepped on stage to perform Space Man, an anthemic, Queen-tinged riot of a song, he had just been awarded Eurovision’s Press award for best song of the year. “The UK has never won that. So that gave me a real boost, a lot of adrenaline.”
