The year the Eurovision ended in a four-way tie
With Eurovision 2024 in Sweden on the horizon, this week’s Retro Chart turns back the clock 55 years to a unique Eurovision Song Contest final where four joint winners were declared at the end of the voting.
20-year-old Scottish singer Lulu represented the UK. Her strangely titled “Boom Bang-A-Bang” tied first place with three other entries on 18 points: Salomé’s “Vivo cantando” for Spain, Lenny Kuhr’s “De troubadour” for the Netherlands, and Frida Boccara’s “Un jour, un enfant” for France.
Eurovision rules were subsequently altered to prevent such ties in future years, but partly in protest at the result, Austria, Portugal, Norway, Sweden and Finland did not enter the 1970 contest.
Lulu was already a major pop star by the time the 14 th Eurovision Song Contest took place in Madrid on March 29, 1969. She had enjoyed a string of hit singles, including million-seller “To Sir With Love”, the best selling single of 1967 in the US. She was also a very familiar face on TV, with several series of her own.
When it was suggested that she sing six shortlisted songs in a UK Eurovision special as part of her BBC variety series “Happening for Lulu”, she was initially reluctant.
She later recalled: “I went ‘Why? What do I want to do that for?’ Maybe I could have said no, but I felt I didn’t really have a choice in the matter. I was full of myself, thinking ratings isn’t what it’s all about. But, you know, Elton John and Bernie Taupin wrote a great song that didn’t go through. Every single one of us said ‘Which one is gonna win? Which one is gonna win?’ and we all laughed and went: ‘Bet you it’s that Boom boom bang a bang a bang a bang...’ But then it won. Somehow there was an intelligence working there... and it was a huge success.”
Lulu later told John Peel: “I know it’s a rotten song, but I won, so who cares? I’d have sung ‘Baa, Baa, Black Sheep’ standing on my head if that’s what it took to win.... I am just so glad I didn’t finish second like all the other Brits before me, that would have been awful.”
“Boom Bang-A-Bang” enjoyed big sales across Europe, topping the charts in Ireland and Norway and reaching number two in the UK. In a long career, it is Lulu’s second biggest-selling single.
Over two decades after its first release, the song was included on a blacklist of banned songs issued by the BBC during the 1991 Gulf War.
In 2006, “Boom Bang-A-Bang” was also the name of a BBC One hour-long programme, hosted by Terry Wogan and made to celebrate fifty years of the Eurovision Song Contest.
A year after Lulu’s Eurovision success, the contest was hosted in Amsterdam where Dana claimed the first of Ireland’s seven wins.