What to know about this year’s Eurovision
LONDON — Last week, Britain crowned a king. This week, it will help bestow Europe’s pop crown.
The Eurovision Song Contest is returning to the U.K. for the first time in 25 years, but the heart of the glitzy music competition will be in Ukraine.
Britain is hosting the event on behalf of the war-battered country, and organizers have vowed to make it a celebration of Ukrainian spirit and culture.
The contest will see musical acts from 37 countries perform original songs in the English city of Liverpool, with semifinals Tuesday and Thursday and a grand final on Saturday watched by an estimated 160 million people.
For fans and first-timers alike, here’s an essential Eurovision guide:
WHAT IS EUROVISION?
First staged in 1956, Eurovision was founded to help unite a shattered continent after World War II and to test nascent live-broadcasting technology.
Initially a sedate affair, it began to let its hair down during the swinging 60s and reached pop perfection in 1974 when ABBA won with “Waterloo,” propelling the band toward superstardom and jump-starting Sweden’s music industry.
Since then, the contest has expanded across Europe and beyond with ever-more elaborate staging and eye-popping costumes.
WHERE POP MEETS POLITICS
Eurovision is about much more than music. It’s diplomacy with a disco beat, a forum in which countries can boost their profiles and play out regional rivalries.
Organizers strive to keep pop and politics apart; overtly political symbols and lyrics are prohibited. But global tensions have often imposed themselves on the contest. Ukraine has several times used its entries to criticize Russia, winning in 2016 with a song about the expulsion of Crimea’s Tatars by Stalin in 1944.
Russia was banned from the contest last year after it invaded Ukraine. Belarus had been kicked out the previous year over its government’s clampdown on dissent.
Dean Vuletic, an academic expert on Eurovision, said by banning Russia, Eurovision lost one of its biggest national audiences and “one of its most enthusiastic participants.”
“But Eurovision is also a platform on which values are expressed, around which values are constructed,” Vuletic said.
A MUSICAL MELANGE
Eurovision was long associated with fluffy 3-minute pop songs — previous winners include the likes of “La, La, La” and “Boom Bang-a-Bang.”
But Vuletic says it’s no longer “the contest with silly songs, innocuous lyrics that it perhaps used to be.” He says a third of this year’s entries deal lyrically with “toxic relationships, anxiety” and other mental-health issues. Another batch of songs are about war.
UK—UKRAINE FUSION
The U.K. stepped in to host the contest for Ukraine after last year’s British entry, Sam Ryder, finished second. As Ryder put it: “It’s Ukraine’s party. We’re just (throwing) it at our house.”
The final will be co-hosted by Ukrainian singer Julia Sanina and will feature a performance by Kalush Orchestra and other representatives of Ukrainian culture. Several thousand Ukrainian refugees in Britain have received tickets to attend.
Ryder’s strong showing last year with “Spaceman” helped transform Eurovision’s image in the U.K. Long viewed as a guilty pleasure, it is now a source of pride and celebration.
Several U.K. cities competed to host the event, and winner Liverpool is in party mood. The port city that gave birth to The Beatles went through tough times as U.K. industry collapsed in the late 20th century. It has since reinvented itself as a hub for sports, culture and nightlife — a resilience that fits well with Ukraine, Jordan says.