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 Julia Zemiro’s love affair with Eurovision traces all the way back to ‘Waterloo’. She blames it all on ABBA.
Her first memories of Eurovision stem back to 1974, when two men and two women won glory with their infectious harmonies and a driving pop song referencing Napoleon. She’s been hooked on the big night ever since, and fittingly, SBS has her welcoming viewers to the BBC broadcast this weekend.
“ABBA was my first big obsession,” Zemiro says. “I bought all their albums as soon as they’d come out. You’d run down the shops and get your $6.99 album. It was a Europop sound, which was all about harmonies. I loved the accents.”
Borne of French derivation, the young Zemiro remembers seeing telecasts during visits to her relatives, but in France the night was always treated with respect.
“I knew of it as a serious competition. I never knew of it as anything cheesy. And then it’s become cheesy … a fun, camp kind of night.”
For the girl who has spirited fun with the grass-roots music of RocKwiz, there remain legitimate aspects to Eurovision that are sometimes lost by our tyranny of distance, and possibly translation.
“All music now is so over-produced, you rarely see anything raw and a bit weird. Eurovision provides that thing where it’s as if it was 20 years ago and people are still naïve about what they are showing in terms of music. If anything it can be under-produced. It can be very simple. It’s the rawness of it.”
Still, Zemiro is cheerfully guilty of celebrating the humour in Eurovision, and for that we can be grateful. As the former host of the stage parody, Eurobeat The Musical, her improvisational skills were brilliantly showcased in her Hungarian character ‘Bronya’ (a character she first developed in an early stint at Bobby McGee’s restaurant).
“It was just magnificent. To present those songs every night, it was really just one of the most enjoyable experiences of my life.”
As any aficionado knows, there is no surefire formula for winning Eurovision. An entry with a melodic hook can easily come unstuck by a dud performance.
“You can see the bands that are quite experienced that go ‘performing live is not an issue for me, I can do it every time’. But then the United Kingdom, which has [for] a couple of years [been] running with a boy-girl combo, has seen the girl start in the completely wrong key, completely wrong octave.
“It’s exciting to watch because it has that ‘will they, won’t they?’ It’s live; it has to work. It’s not just about the great song, it’s about can you pull out all the stops on the night and not be thrown by having all of Europe looking at you?”
This year we’ll have it all. Kitsch songs, bad choreography, new gay icons, Terry Wogan, and the Zemiro/Bronya ‘X’ factor.
Eurovision 2008 airs 7:30pm Friday, Saturday and Sunday on SBS.
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