Eurovision 1965: Naples

The tenth contest was won by a seventeen-year-old who spent the week being whistled at by the orchestra, told by her boyfriend she was singing flat, and then dumped by him on the night. Her song changed what a Eurovision winner sounded like.

Naples

Italy hosted for the first time. RAI chose Naples, partly because its production centre there had the equipment, and partly as a nod to the city’s place in European music. The hall was the broadcaster’s concert auditorium in the Fuorigrotta district, which seated about a thousand and had a pipe organ of more than nine thousand pipes filling the wall behind the orchestra.

Renata Mauro presented. The orchestra, 48 players, sat in the middle of the stage on a transparent platform that could be lit from below.

Eighteen

Sweden returned after its strike-enforced year off, and Ireland entered for the first time. Eighteen countries was a new record.

Three singers had done this before: Spain’s Conchita Bautista, Yugoslavia’s Vice Vukov, and Austria’s Udo Jürgens, back for a second year running.

The host bends its own rule

No song was supposed to have been released commercially before 10 February. Italy’s entry, Bobby Solo’s “Se piangi, se ridi”, had won the Sanremo festival on 30 January, and by the cut-off date around 240,000 copies were already in Italian shops.

A few broadcasters objected. Nothing came of it. Disqualifying the host was thought impossible, and there was no time to find another song. Solo sang, and finished fifth.

Sweden sings in English

Nothing in the rules said which language a song had to be in. It was simply understood that countries sang in their own. Sweden’s Ingvar Wixell sang “Absent Friend” entirely in English.

Several broadcasters complained afterwards, and it worked: from 1966 the rules said, in writing, that every song had to be in one of its country’s official languages.

France Gall’s week

Luxembourg’s entry was “Poupée de cire, poupée de son”, written by Serge Gainsbourg and sung by the French teenager France Gall — at seventeen, the youngest performer that year.

In rehearsal the orchestra took against the song’s fast tempo, and let her know by booing and whistling. Gainsbourg lost his temper, insulted the musicians and walked out, threatening to go back to Paris, which left Gall to finish the rehearsal on her own in front of them. The row was patched up, but she said decades later that it had shaken her badly, and that she thought her performance on the night was nervous and unsteady.

She rang her boyfriend, the singer Claude François, for reassurance. By her account he told her she had sung out of key.

Then the votes came in. Gall led from the first jury and was never caught. Before she went back out to collect her prize she phoned François again. He ended the relationship during the call.

The result

Luxembourg won with 32 points, six clear of the United Kingdom’s Kathy Kirby, who had been the favourite. It was Britain’s fifth second place. France was third and Austria fourth, its best result so far.

Four countries scored nothing: Belgium, Finland, Germany and Spain.

The interval act was the tenor Mario Del Monaco singing “O sole mio” — or rather miming to his own recording of it. He presented the medallion too.

Why it mattered

Until Naples, the contest had mostly been won by ballads and chansons. “Poupée de cire, poupée de son” was a pop record, the first to win, and it sold like one: top ten across much of Europe, and in Argentina, Japan and Singapore as well. No winner before it had done anything like that.

Entries started to change in response. Within two years another pop single, Britain’s “Puppet on a String”, had won, and the old style never took the contest back.