Eurovision 1969: Madrid

Spain has hosted the contest once. It was in 1969, in Madrid’s Teatro Real — an opera house opened in 1850, shut in 1924 because of damage to the building, and reopened as a concert hall only three years before the contest arrived. Laurita Valenzuela presented.

The night ended in a way nobody had seen before, although the organisers had, oddly, rehearsed it.

One empty place

Sixteen countries came. The one missing from the year before was Austria. Officially its broadcaster could not find a suitable act. The rumour was that it did not want to take part in a contest staged in Franco’s Spain.

Five of the singers had been here before. Simone de Oliveira was back for Portugal, Louis Neefs for Belgium and Kirsti Sparboe, for the third time, for Norway. Two had changed flags: Siw Malmkvist, Sweden’s singer in 1960, now sang for Germany, and Romuald, Monaco’s in 1964, sang for Luxembourg.

Dalí, carnations and no nails

Salvador Dalí designed the poster.

The set was a bigger job. Spanish television’s designers drew up ten proposals and built a scale model of each before choosing one. It used what the hall already had — a 5,000-pipe organ across the back of the stage — and added a steel sculpture by Amadeo Gabino, a scoreboard to one side and fifteen thousand red and pink carnations.

There was a condition. Nothing about the stage could be altered: not one nail could be hammered into it. So the whole set was prefabricated in more than three hundred modules, brought from Prado del Rey and put together on site. The crew got the hall on the evening of 16 March, as soon as that night’s concert audience had gone home.

The budget was about five million pesetas. The press room held six hundred journalists and a hundred typewriters, with keyboards for different languages.

Colour that Spain could not see

This was the second contest in colour, and Spanish television did not own the equipment to make it. The cameras were rented from German television and brought from Cologne: five of them, three on cranes.

The picture left Madrid by two routes at once, in case one failed — over the relay network through France, and by satellite through Italy.

Spain itself watched in black and white. Its transmitters could not carry colour. The colour recording equipment did not reach Madrid in time either, so the only copy the host kept was black and white. A colour one turned up later, in the archives of Norwegian television.

The show

It opened with the Eurovision tune played on the Teatro Real’s organ, and then the orchestra — 52 players under Augusto Algueró — played “La, la, la”, the song that had brought everyone to Madrid.

The interval was a surrealist documentary, “La España diferente”, directed by Javier Aguirre with music by Luis de Pablo.

Eighteen, four times

The voting had not changed: ten jurors in each country, one vote each. The most any song took from one jury was six, and it went to the Netherlands.

The scrutineer, Clifford Brown, asked both Spain and Monaco to read their votes a second time. Neither had made a mistake, and nothing on the board changed.

Then the last jury finished, and four songs were level at the top on 18:

• Spain — Salomé, “Vivo cantando”
• United Kingdom — Lulu, “Boom Bang-a-Bang”
• Netherlands — Lenny Kuhr, “De troubadour”, which she co-wrote
• France — Frida Boccara, “Un jour, un enfant”

Nothing in the rules separated them. More than one winner was allowed, so there were four.

It should not have been a complete surprise. The dress rehearsal the night before had run through the voting with invented scores, and the invented scores ended in a tie for first place.

Not enough medals

Nobody had made medals for four winning teams. The singers got theirs on stage, from Massiel, the previous year’s winner. The songwriters had to wait until later. Then all four songs were sung again.

What the tie did to the record books

France had now won four times, more than anyone else. The Netherlands had won three. Spain and the United Kingdom had two each, and Spain had become the first country to win in consecutive years.

Switzerland, five votes behind the winners, was the best of the rest. Norway was last with a single vote.