Dec 29, 2015

90/917 François Deguelt: Dis rien (Monaco 1962)

The first years of Eurovision Song Contest is considered by many as an uninteresting cavalcade of dull French (or french sounding) ballads with really nothing else to remember them by than the winning entries. While I think this is partly true, I also once in a while try to highlight the great unsung and unremebered masterpieces from these early Eurovision years which I think there are plenty of. The 90th eurosong is not one of those. In fact the whole 1962 Eurovision song contest is one of the dullest and most unforgettable contests ever.


The french singing star François Deguelt had represented Monaco already two years previously with an excellent song Ce soir-là by Hubert Giraud (my review to this great song can be read here) resulting the third place in the final results list. In 1962 Deguelt managed to improve the rating with the 2nd place with 13 points. The winning song, Un premier amour by Isabelle Aubret (in my opinion one of the best songs ever in the Eurovision history) gathered twice the amount of points.

But unlike the result would suggest, Dis rien (penned by well known French singer Henri Salvador) is far inferior to François Deguelts earlier song. Lyrically the song consist mostly of cliches of a French love song and the melody is uninspired. The slightly jazzy arrangement does little to improve the overall impression, which makes me wonder what the juries saw and heard in this song that made them attribute their points to it. Even the singer himself looks like having trouble in keeping awake singins this dull ditty. Maybe the overall low quality of songs (except of the winner and one or two of the other songs) made the juries to follow the old formula. It is in french, it is a ballad, therefore it must be good. 

My points 2/5

613/917 Sarah Bray: Un baiser volé (Luxembourg 1991)

The 1991 is not one of my fondest Eurovision memories. Finland was at the wrong end of the score board again, the winner was far from my favourite and the contest itself was a big mess. That may be the reason that I don't recall many good songs from that year. When the random nuber generator draw me the Luxembourg entry from 1991 I was almost ready to award the song the all too common two points out of five. Well let's just listen to the song once I thought. I was surprised.


Luxembourg was one of my favourite Eurovision countries right until it decided to withdraw from the contest in 1993. The 613th Eurosong was an attempt by the Luxembourg tv to repeat their former successes that had combined a traditional French ballad with a young female singer. Although they didn't succees this year (either), their 1991 entry was much better than I remembered.

Un baiser volé was very formulaic French Eurovision ballad. In first decades there were usually 2-4 of those taking part every year. So in 1991 I very much dismissed this song for being not among the best of those ballads. Nowadays when one has to wait sometimes couple of years to hear a decent French ballad on Eurovision stage this song feels not bad at all.

Also Sarah Bray was much better singer than I remembered and her performance is actually nice to hear and watch. And unlike most of the songs that year, the live version works much better than the studio version shown in the previews.

I tried but found almost no information at all of this young singer, who apparently vanished into oblivion after the contest. If anything, Sarah Bray (real name being Mick Wersant) at least was Luxembourg citizen unlike most of the others that had represented the grand duchy. Where are you and what are you doing, Sarah?

My points 4/5.