Eurovision: ‘What the Hell Just Happened’ to the UK entry?
Oh no, not again.
For the third year in a row, the UK has crashed out at Eurovision, taking 19th place out of a possible 26.
It feels particularly cruel this time because our contestants, Remember Monday, got a lot of things right with their song, What the Hell Just Happened.
Most notably, they could sing – and I mean, really, really sing.
Lauren, Holly and Charlotte hit every harmony in their song, What The Hell Just Happened, with pinpoint precision, drawing on a decade of West End experience that’s seen them star in everything from Matilda to Phantom Of The Opera.
After toe-curling performances from Olly Alexander in 2024 and Mae Muller in 2023, their vocals were as strong as a lion’s roar. So strong, in fact, that they caught the attention of former Eurovision winner Conchita Wurst.
“Harmonising on the Eurovision stage has hardly worked out in the past, but they’re spot on,” Conchita enthused before the final.
“Their confidence is incredible. You immediately trust them, because when you feel the artist is nervous, you get nervous as a viewer. But they are just so light and so sharp.”
So what went wrong?
The chief culprit, if I’m honest, was the song.
A manic mish-mash of musical styles, it sped up in the verses, and slowed down for the choruses, with all the consistency of a jelly in a heatwave.
That’s not to say it’s a bad piece of writing.
Indeed, all of the UK’s 88 points came from professional juries of songwriters, whose job it is to recognise compositional craft. Italy even gave us the top score of 12. Grazie mille!
They’ll have recognised all the clever British touches the band crammed in – Elton John-style piano crescendos, a Beatles-esque mellotron riff, and a vocal callback to George Michael’s Freedom ’90.
The lyrics were witty, too. Reminiscent of Katy Perry’s Last Friday Night (TGIF), or If I Were a Bell from Guys and Dolls, it was all about the drunken mistakes you make while trying to get over an ex.
“Broke a heel, lost my keys, scraped my knee / When I fell from the chandelier.“
In three short minutes, the trio rattled off half a dozen memorable hooks, all imbued with the unbreakable bond of their friendship.
But as seasoned Eurovision watcher Jonathan Vautrey noted, the song was simply too busy.
“It’s hard to latch on to exactly what they’re selling when you’re too busy reeling from the constant whiplash of hearing an almost brand new song every 30 seconds,” he wrote on the Wiwibloggs fansite last month..
“Although I’ve been able to settle into the entry overtime, and now appreciate the theatricality of it all, first impressions matter at Eurovision.”
That’s an opinion I heard more than once. But still, I had hope.
Catching a tram to Basel’s St Jackobshalle arena on Saturday, I was stopped by a Swedish woman who’d spotted my UK media pass.
She wanted to tell me how she’d dismissed Remember Monday’s song when auditioning this year’s Eurovision songs on Spotify. Then she saw their spirited performance in the semi-final “and I understood”.
Good enough for one vote, then. So why didn’t more people connect with it?
The staging was put together by Ace Bowerman, who is one of the UK’s most respected creative directors – responsible for Blackpink’s Born Pink world tour and Dua Lipa’s lockdown spectacular, Studio 2054.
Speaking before the final, she told me the performance deliberately made a virtue of the girls’ friendship.
“As soon as I met them, I was like, ‘Please be my friend!'” she told me,
“They are electric people, they have such a special bond. So the one thing I want everybody to take away from the performance is how much fun they are – because the audience will want to be their friends as well.”
It was camp and fun, but lacked the scale of Finland’s Erika Vikman, who soared above the audience on a giant phallic microphone, or the drama of Austrian winner JJ, who was tossed around the stage in the stormy sea of his own emotions.
“The UK’s staging wasn’t flat at all but, as with the song, it was maybe a bit too much,” says Alexander Beijar, Eurovision reporter at Finnish broadcaster Yle.
“It was like, we have three minutes, and we’ll show you everything we can do on this stage: We’ll start in bed, we’ll dance on a chandelier, we’ll strut down the catwalk, and we’ll end up in the bed again in the end.
“I think maybe tone it down just a nod for next year.
“Then again, as a Finn, with the biggest microphone you can find in the whole of Switzerland, maybe I shouldn’t give advice!”
Was it political?
And what about that wrinkly old Eurovision chestnut: Politics?
Vote trading is an age-old tradition at the contest. Since Sweden first took part in 1958, for example, more than one-fifth of its votes have come from Norway, Finland, Denmark and Iceland.
But the situation is complicated. Political tensions persist in the Balkans, “but the cultural connections seem to have trumped the political divisions”, Dean Vuletic, author of Postwar Europe and the Eurovision Song Contest, recently told the AFP news agency.
“I would say that this is because these countries do share a music industry.”
The UK’s music industry isn’t particularly well integrated with Europe, tending to ride roughshod over its less influential neighbours.
When it comes to friendly neighbours, our reputation took a hit after Brexit – although Luxembourg has always been a reliable source of votes, for reasons that aren’t 100% clear.
But here’s the thing: You can only vote for a country in Eurovision, not against it.
Remember Monday were good, but were they good enough to make your personal Top 10?
If so, then great – you’d have given them some points. Otherwise, it’s a struggle to accrue any momentum.
In the end, that was Remember Monday’s fate: Another zero-point disappointment.
So where does that leave the UK going into next year?
Well, we laid good foundations. Remember Monday didn’t come with a copycat Eurodance hit, or an insipid ballad. The vocals were strong. The staging conveyed personality.
Their energy was infectious and they made friends across Europe, becoming great ambassadors for the UK in the contest.
Their 88 jury points almost doubled last year’s score. We just have to find a way to get the public vote back on side.
In other words, we shouldn’t be too down on the band themselves, as Scott Mills and Graham Norton discussed on Radio 2 this weekend.
“I thought they were spectacular, so I don’t really mind where they place, because it’s not embarrassing,” said Mills.
“I’m with you,” Norton agreed. “They’re so likeable. Whatever happens, they walk away heads held high.”
Mills cautioned against the creeping allure of cynicism.
“There’s a section of fans [who] will complain every year, whatever the UK does: ‘Oh, the song’s too generic, the vocals aren’t great.’
“We could send Adele and they’d have something horrible to say.
“But the whole thing about Eurovision is that it’s fun and it’s joy through music… so please don’t spoil it. Go and be miserable somewhere else.”
And that’s exactly the attitude we need. The UK’s never going to attract world-class talent if all we do is look down on the contest and approach it with a defeatist attitude.
Luckily, three people have already put their names in the ring for next year.
“Listen,” said Remember Monday’s Lauren Byrne when I bumped into her backstage on Thursday.
“If we do really badly, we’re just gonna keep coming back until we win.”
We’ll remember, Remember Monday.
See you in Vienna next year.
