Lesley setting her sights on Euro domination
LESLEY ROY TELLS KEN PHELAN HOW HER EUROVISION CHANCES GO UP IN SMOKE IN 2020 WHEN THE CONTEST WAS CANCELLED FOR THE FIRST TIME IN ITS HISTORY BUT YOU CAN NEVER KEEP A GOOD SONGWRITER DOWN AND SHE IS BACK IN 2021 WITH A NEW SONG TO MAKE ANOTHER TILT AT THE CONTEST IN ROTTERDAM
THE New Year is going to be that extra bit special for talented Balbriggan singer/songwriter Lesley Roy, who has just been selected by RTÉ to represent Ireland at Eurovision 2021 in Rotterdam next May. 2020 was the first time in Eurovision’s 65-year history that the contest has been cancelled, disappointing millions of fans worldwide and leaving Irish-born New York resident Lesley without the opportunity to compete with her uplifting song, ‘Story of My Life.’
Lesley has spent the past three months in studio working on a new song for Eurovision 2021; this song, chosen to represent Ireland at the contest next year, will be revealed in the New Year.
Speaking all the way from New York where she is now living and spoke about how honoured she will be to represent Ireland in Eurovision, and why she decided to follow the Eurovision dream.
Lesley explains: ‘It’s lovely, it was this time last year when I first started talking to Michael Kealy in RTE. He’s the head of delegation, so basically he is the frontrunner when it comes to anything Eurovision in Ireland.
‘He and I started talking this time last year and this has been kind of an ongoing journey and job for me this past year, so it’s lovely now to see this come into fruition and actually go ahead in May of next year. But it’s definitely been a long one!
The Balbriggan singer/songwriter went on: ‘‘I’ve been in talks since the Eurovision got cancelled last March, and we had our plans all ready to go for the song, that was ‘ Story of My Life’, that would have been for this year.
‘So myself and Michael, we wanted to see what was going to happen with the pandemic and then obviously a lot of that news started to trickle down and we devised a plan that whenever I could get back into the studio to start recording some new material, that I would do that.
‘ Then if we could agree on a song together that the whole team would get behind and it made sense for Ireland, then we would eventually announce it.
‘But a lot of things have been held up over the course of the last six months, obviously. It wasn’t too much of a shock but it was definitely a treat to let the Eurovision fans know that this was going to happen.’
Lesley explains that ‘Story of My Life’, her song for the cancelled Eurovision 2020, had to be replaced for next year’s competition due to new Eurovision rules.
For Lesley, it meant going back to the studio to write a brand new song, as she explains: ‘Because this is the first time that it’s ever happened in Eurovision history that the show has been cancelled in 65 years, they had to kind of figure out what their rules were going to be surrounding 2021.
‘So what they did stick with was that no song that has ever been released the year before the show can ever be entered, so myself and the other forty artists from around Europe could not use whatever song that country had already selected.
‘So my song, ‘ Story of My Life’ could not be used moving forward, so each country has to come up with a new song, not just Ireland, every single country has to come up with a new song and can use the same artist if they want or choose a different one.
‘So it was kind of a new version of an older rule that they implemented.’
She says: ‘With the new song, I wrote a bunch of new tracks for this one and it was something that I had been working on for a while, and I thought it would make sense lyrically and conceptually with where people are at right now, but I still wanted it to big a very big, anthemic thing so it was just one of many I worked on to pitch to RTE.’
Lesley’s Eurovision entry was written and produced by herself, along with Eurovision producer Lukas Hallgren (‘She Got Me’ - fourth place Eurovision Song Contest 2019), producer/songwriter Philip Strand, and Emelie Eriksson, a Stockholm-based songwriter at Baggpipe Studios.
Lesley remains tight-lipped when asked about her entry to Eurovision 2021, not even divulging so much as the song title. What she can reveal, however, is that the song is indeed ‘anthemic’, and that it is bound to capture the hearts of Europe.
Speaking of why she wanted to represent Ireland in Eurovision, Lesley says it’s always been something she wanted to tick off her
I DO LOVE WHAT IRELAND HAS CREATED IN THE PAST WITH EUROVISION... I’VE BEEN IN THIS KIND OF EXTENDED EUROVISION JOURNEY AND I’D LOVE TO SEE IT THROUGH TO THE END.
‘ bucket list.’ She says she is ‘ very lucky that I am from the era of Niamh Kavanagh, Paul Harringon, Eimear Quinn, Riverdance years’, and has very fond memories of Eurovision growing up. It was these memories, she says, that spurred her on to enter the contest herself, with her own Eurovision song.
‘I am a professional singer/songwriter and that’s why I’m over in the States.
‘I came over 12 years ago, I had a deal with Sony and I toured all over so I am in music, it’s not like I’m taking too much of a left turn. It was as an Irish person growing up, it was a very big historic moment every year to watch that, and obviously we had such a great run in the golden years, and we’ve still held the title as the most amount of wins out of any single country.
‘So I think it was something that did shape my views as well as a lot of other things around music as a kid, and once I had that song last year I thought, God this could maybe kill two birds so to speak, I have a great track, I do love what Ireland has created in the past with Eurovision, maybe I’ll just send this in and see what they say, and they loved it. I’ve been in this kind of extended Eurovision journey and I’d love to just see it through to the end.
‘As a kid Eurovision really did leave a big mark on me, it was like my God, there’s so much on this night on this show about a song, it felt very much like how my friends felt when they watched the World Cup or when the Olympics was on. I just thought this is so interesting that there’s so much focus on a song, and as I grew up and became a songwriter – and I’ve worked with some of the biggest songwriter in the world and I’ve been very lucky with who I’ve worked with - I do think the Eurovision gave me a bit of an early obsession with songwriting.’
More than anything, Lesley says she wants Ireland now to show its full support for Eurovision 2021, and perhaps to relive some of those glory years when we remained top of the leaderboard. In the meantime, she’s more than happy with the tangent her songwriting career has taken, and the chance she has been given of living the Eurovision dream.
‘I think during that period when it was back-to-back, I think we must have clicked on something good there for a long time. I think obviously the English-speaking countries they do better because more people can get behind that, but I think we really just got into it there for a period in the nineties and like what I said to RTE when we first started talking,
‘I’d really love for Ireland to get in behind it again, and I think with ‘Story of My Life’ we did create a massive buzz this year that might not have been there the past few years.
‘So I’d really love for Ireland to start to get behind it more than we have been. The Eurovision is just like a new chapter for me of songwriting and something I wanted to kind of tick off a very nice bucket list of things, so it’s really nice.’
These days, Leley lives Stateside and calls New York her home. She says: ‘I’m in the States now 12 years so I’ve gone on to do kind of a full circle, I was in New York first then I went down to Nashville for a couple of years, then I went to LA for a couple of years and now I’m back in New York.
‘I’m flying back into Dublin and I’ll be in Balbriggan for the next seven months, so I’ll be back home for a while to do this Eurovision stuff.
‘ There’s a lot of different things to film and shoot and with COVID and everything we just thought it would be easier and safer than flying back and forth and doing quarantine and there’s obviously going to be a few different hurdles to kind of get over when it comes to filming anything now because of COVID.
‘So we just thought it would be easier if I just had my feet on the ground there and to be honest I thought it would make more sense being an Irish representative to be back home living in Ireland.’
New York has been something of a hot spot for the pandemic so what has it been like living there during this chaotic year? Lesley says: ‘It’s pretty quiet to be honest, it’s obviously the sirens and things are sill going, it’s not completely dead, but it’s more quiet than it usually would be this time of year.
‘It’s a little bit eerie, we’re not in a full lockdown like a level five or anything like that, but it’s mandatory masks everywhere, the majority of restaurants and things like that are all closed except maybe a few of them are keeping the outdoor seating but it’s kind of like a middle lockdown, not like a level five.’
So what does Lesley think the chances of success are in Eurovision in Rotterdam in May: ‘I think the chances are of us doing really really welll and getting the right side of the scoreboard is very high. Obviously anyone who enters the Eurovision thinks about it, but my goal is to get Ireland much bigger within the show again and get the hype going with our country again.’
We’re sure everyone wishes Lesley all the best!