Kit Lovelace @ kitlovelace
Now I'm all caught up with the results from last night's contest, with the UK placing last, I'm going to wheel out the same musical analysis I do almost every year to offer up one possible explanation as to why the UK consistently does so poorly at Eurovision these days...
Since 2000, the majority of Eurovision winners have been written in a minor key. Not only have minor keys won 15 of the last 20 contests (major keys have only won five), major keys have placed rock bottom nearly twice as often as minor ones.
What happened last night?
– The song that won (The Netherlands; Arcade) = A minor
– The song that came dead last (UK; Bigger Than Us) = C Major
You could hardly ask for better example as A minor is what's called the 'relative minor' of C Major (i.e. C Major's moody, sullen cousin). In 1999, a C Major song might have been nailed on. In 2019? Darkness has taken hold. You need to switch it to minor...
Look at the entire Top 5 from last night:
The Netherlands = A minor
Italy = Eb minor
Russia = G minor
Switzerland = B minor
Norway = D minor
It's worth saying that 20 of last night's finalists were written in minor keys (which goes some way to explain why there's such a heavy concentration of them at the top) – but what happened to the major key entrants? Let's look at the bottom end of the table...
Half of this year's major key finalists ended up placing outside the Top 20.
UK: 26th of 26 = C Major
Germany: 24th = C Major
Greece: 21st = Eb Major
Other songs in C Major this year include:
Ireland (didn't qualify)
Lithuania (didn't qualify)
Austria (didn't qualify)
Sweden (which we'll return to...)
As for the UK, in the last 5 years:
– Michael Rice, SuRie, Joe & Jake and Electro Velvet have all sent songs in major keys. All came 24th/26th.
– Lucie Jones was sent with a song in D minor. She came 15th (which obviously isn't 'success', but a step in the right direction...)
THE LESSON HERE: If we want to have even the slightest chance of keeping step with the rest of the contest, we need to consider sending something with a moodier, minor sound.
NEXT: Key changes. The thing that everyone associates Eurovision with. ("It's a key change! Drink!") The last time a song with a key change actually won? 2007. The last time a song with a key change came bottom? 2019.
The idea that key changes do any real business at Eurovision is a myth and a mystery – yet it is so, so persistent in the British coverage and the British mindset ("That's got a key change, that'll do well..."). We need to shake ourselves free of this.
It's not that key changes are bad in and of themselves. It's more to do with what a key change is for; what a key change indicates...
Key changes can inject a bit of life into a song for its final chorus to help hoy it over the finish line. Trouble is, if your song can't hold people's attention for three minutes without relying on a gimmick like that – maybe it's a sign your composition has bigger problems?
Here you might find yourself saying "But Sweden won the jury vote! That song was in C Major and it had a key change!" And what did the public do when they heard it? Gave it 93 points – dropping it a full five places.
Writing specifically to please the juries is no bad thing, of course (the UK would declare a national holiday if we ever managed to place as high as 6th again) but there's other ways to play to jury without losing the public too.
For example: The Netherlands wrote the verses of its winning song in 6/4. The strange time signature is barely recognisable because of the sparse nature of the arrangement, so doesn't hit the audience's ear weirdly but juries feel smart voting for it...
Or take Portugal from 2017, who used some unusually complex jazz chord voicings and progressions in their arrangement. Playing with 13ths and flattened 5ths gives the juries something meaty to chew on, but keeps the public interested too...
Or Ukraine from 2016 – which is one of the moodiest minor key songs in recent memory, which had a middle eight that used unconventional scale patterns...
As Eurovision winners get more and more experimental, we send a song in C Major (the first key that anyone who takes a piano lesson learns) and chucked in the most well-worn compositional gimmick possible (the key change). The audience have heard that precisely one million times.
Now obviously, I'm not picturing the European public sitting in their living rooms saying "Is that C Major? And a key change of a semitone? No. That won't be getting my vote." It's a little less direct than that. It's more that these choices are indicative of a broader attitude.
Just so I'm not twisting on about basic keys and basic key changes, let's switch focus for a second to basic tempo. Tempo is the best example I can use to show how Eurovision audiences have an instinctive ear for the unadventurous. We need to look at 128 beats per minute.
I haven't had a chance to update this graphic because it's a fiddly little beast, but look at the section I've marked out around the 127/128bpm area. Five songs this decade that have come dead last have been set to that pace. Why is that pace so basic? Because of maths...
Eurovision songs have an upper limit of 3 minutes.
3 minutes of a 128bpm beat gives you exactly 96 bars.
96 is divisible by 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 12, 16 – all of which are the building blocks of pop music phrasing.
So you'd think it would provide a foolproof template for Eurovision...
Yet, for some spooky reason, audiences consistently pick up on it and nix the song's chances. Most entrants managed to avoid it this year – but Estonia fell into the trap and came 19th.
Even Sergey Lazarev's hot 2016 favourite wasn't immune from the poison on 128bpm..
Thread on Sergey 2016
You'll also note in the tempo graphic above that 84/85bpm has had terrible recent form. Guess what tempo marking the UK entry had? No, go on. Guess.
I'm not suggesting that there is a magic formula to crack Eurovision. Nor am I suggesting it's easy to compose, discover or convince the British public of the merits of a song that will do well. But we're missing something critical. We just aren't hearing it.