Alaska's Choice 1964: Copenhagen

Back again with the next entry for the Alaska's Choice, this time for 1964.

First the basic facts--Denmark, the winner of the prior year's contest hosted and the show was presented from Copenhagen's Tivoli Koncertsal on March 21st, 1964.   Unfortunately, due to a fire at the Dutch broadcaster, no recording of the full contest exists to view, so like the 1956 contest, we had to use recordings.  Luckily this year an audio recording still survives--so our votes were taken from that recording.

For the first time in a number of years, there were a change in the countries that participated.  Sweden withdrew from the contest due to a boycott from their singers, while Portugal entered for the first time.  With Spain and Portugal in the contest, Eurovision became politicized and a protester stormed the stage after the Swiss entrant, holding a sign protesting the autocratic governments of the two countries on the Iberian Peninsula.

Unfortunately, the political climate may have had an affect on the results of Portugal's first entry:



António Calvário  "Oração"

 



Calvário's song received no points from any of the other juries, and came in dead last in the competition (along with the songs from Germany, Switzerland, and Yugoslavia).

I suppose the "nul points" results for four countries really is unsurprising, because the winner of the contest received a third of all the possible votes, marking Italy's first victory in Eurovision.

 

Gigliola Cinquetti  "Non ho l'età"

 



And, of course, nether of these songs fell in the same place in our voting.   Calvário landed in 10th place, while Cinquetti came in fifth.

To be honest, the voting for this year's Eurovision Song Contest surprised me--I had expected Cinquetti to do as well with our group as it had done with the voters in 1964, but she was beaten by a number of "also rans"/

Finland took fourth with this number about doing nothing on Sunday:



Lasse Mårtenson  "Lasikotellen"

 

 

And the Dutch moved up from tenth to second with Anneke Grönloh's upbeat song about a very forgiving girlfriend:

 



 

Anneke Grönloh "Jij bent mijn leven"

 

But the big shocker is the winner of our poll:

 

 



 

Udo Jürgens  "Warum nur warum"

 

Good old Udo kept coming back in the mid 60s trying again and again to win the contest, but for us, he won the first time out.  Had Europe been as sensible as we were, and voted for what I considered his best song, perhaps we wouldn't have been subjected to two more years of his sleep inducing music..

So there's 1964 in a nutshell and a surprising Austrian win.  Stay tuned for 1965...