Silver Sandie Shaw

It was fifty years ago today…

Fans of the UK in Eurovision know that, when it comes to significant anniversaries, it’s mainly about the sevens.

We started in 1957 (a year late).

We last won in 1997.

We first won in 1967. Which means that today, 8 April 2017, is the fiftieth anniversary of our first win. It’s even a Saturday again!

After a faltering start in 1957, coming 7^th, the United Kingdom had been knock, knocking on the door of winning since the delayed return in 1959, with a run of frustrating results; 2^nd, 2^nd, 2^nd, 4^th, 4^th, 2^nd, 2^nd, followed by a ‘calm before the storm’ failure in 1966, coming a miserable 9^th out of eighteen songs.

By 1967, Sandie Shaw was already a substantial name in the UK. She had reached #1 with her second single (and debut chart hit), in 1964; the Bacharach and David song, ‘(There’s) Always Something There To Remind Me’. Shaw followed it up with five top six hits, including another chart-topper, with ‘Long Live Love’ in 1965.

She had cultivated a pan-European audience by recording some of her hits in French, German, Italian and Spanish, but the hits were declining by late 1966, when two consecutive Sandie singles both reached only #32, and her first single of 1967 just scraped #50. Shaw’s manager was steering her in the direction of cabaret, but the BBC approached her to do Eurovision and she reluctantly agreed, fearing that it would damage her credibility. (Some things haven’t changed in the UK in the intervening 50 years, where current acts and Eurovision are concerned.)

Sandie Shaw performed five songs for Europe on The Rolf Harris Show. (To think she was worried about HER credibility!) The public voted for ‘Puppet On A String’, the one that Shaw herself thought was least representative of her work.

“I hated ‘Puppet On A String’ from the start and I wish ‘Tell The Boys’ had won, but the songs were chosen by old people who watched The Rolf Harris Show and not my normal fans.” [1]

‘Tell The Boys’ appeared as the B-side of the ‘Puppet’ single, so fans were still able to buy it. It is indeed very good, but probably not distinctive enough to have won Eurovision, in the way that ‘Puppet’ was.

At one point in the Spring of 1967, the BBC were supposedly getting cold feet (geddit?) about Shaw representing the UK, because she was cited as the other woman in a couple’s divorce case. This may have been the height of the Swinging ‘60s, and shoeless Sandie may have been the epitome of that image, but the BBC was an inherently conservative organisation – just look at how old-fashioned all our Eurovision entries had been up to this point, defiantly ignoring the rock’n’roll era  – but somehow she was allowed to go to the Großer Festsaal der Wiener Hofburg in Vienna… and the rest is history.

Saturday 8 April 1967 had already been a strange day for TV viewers in the UK. The Aintree Grand National that afternoon had seen one of the most dramatic events in the race's  121 years up to that point. A loose horse ran in front of the 23rd fence, unseating another jockey, causing a pile-up of all the leading contenders, just before the final run-in. A horse which had been so far behind that it was able to avoid the confusion, the 100/1 shot Foinavon, jumped through a gap and went on to win, in a race that became so famous that the horse now has an Aintree fence named after it. Anyone who had a Foinavon/Sandie Shaw double bet on that day is probably still living off the winnings!

By the time the 12^th Eurovision Song Contest came around on 8 April 1967, ‘Puppet On A String’ was already a big hit back home, with the Pye release having entered the UK chart at #27 in mid-March, then climbed to #16, then #6 and #4 in the week of the contest. (The number onesingle on the day that Sandie Shaw won Eurovision was ‘Release Me’ by EngelbertHumperdinck, who would wait a whole 45 years before doing Eurovision himself, with a rather different outcome, finishing 25^th of 26 entries in 2012.)

‘Puppet On A String’ was written by Phil Coulter and Bill Martin. Coulter said that many of the songwriters competing to write the 1967 UK entry wrote their songs for Sandie Shaw, but he and Martin wrote ‘Puppet’ for Eurovision instead. They also contrived to grab the viewers’ attention from the first note. As Coulter noted;

"You have three minutes for a Eurovision song and the meter’s running. That long note at the beginning from Sandie is a rip-off from ‘Volare’.” [2]
(‘Volare (Nel blu dipinto di blu)’ was also a Eurovision entry, coming third for Italy in 1958.)

They were right about their target audience being the Eurovision jurors, but it nearly went horribly wrong on the night in Vienna. The attention-grabbing first note wasn’t heard by TV viewers as Sandie’s microphone didn’t seem to be on. She didn’t exactly have long to impress, as the song is a mere two minutes and 15 seconds long anyway! Thankfully, it didn’t matter and she stormed to victory, with the song she hated scoring more than double the points of the song in second, from Ireland (47 points versus 22).

The song was most popular with the juries from Norway, France and Switzerland, who all gave it seven points. It didn’t win over everyone though. The jurors from Franco’s Spain and Tito’s Yugoslavia, perhaps not keen on any references to puppets, or just not loving the UK’s swinging democracy at the time, gave it zero. Nul points. (Or they might just have disliked the song.)

Thankfully, the microphone worked for Shaw’s reprise, so we do have a live version with the first word and first note included (including a little laugh from Sandie near the end).

After winning the contest, Sandie had to bide her time while Nancy and Frank Sinatra’s ‘Somethin’ Stupid’ occupied the top slot in the UK singles chart, but she eventually completed her 4-3-2-1 ascent two weeks later, staying on top for three weeks. The single spent a significant 18 weeks in thetop 50.

The rejuvenation of Shaw’s chart career was shortlived though. Three top 30 hits followed, then the final chart fling of Euro-friendly ‘Monsieur Dupont’ making #6 in April 1969, and that was it… until her partial reanimation by B.E.F. in the early ‘80s and fully fledged reincarnation thanks to The Smiths in 1984. That period may have produced only one hit for Shaw; her #27 reworking of The Smiths’ own ‘Hand In Glove’, but it eventually led to the 1988 album, ‘Hello Angel’, which is one of my most played and most loved albums of all time. There’s not a duff track on it. Please feel free to check it out.

Shaw even got over her animosity towards her winning song and recorded a beautiful, slowed down version, retitled ‘Puppet (No Strings)’, with Howard Jones. She gave it away as a download for her 60^th birthday in February 2007. (Yes, she is now 70.)

Considering Shaw never really did live gigs after her initial fame in the sixties, I’ve been lucky enough to see her perform twice in the flesh, plus another ‘standing around in a TV studio’ encounter. She performed on an International Women’s Day gig at Birmingham’s Hummingbird around 1987(ish), on a diverse bill with Najma Akhtar and Billy Bragg. (Even then, he was not a woman.) It was a fantastic gig. More recently, she popped up in front of me at a B.E.F. gig I went to at the Roundhouse in Camden, with her old Sheffield mates, to recreate her contribution to their 'Music of Quality & Distinction' project. She joined in a song or two, along with Boy George, Green Gartside and a few other chums of Heaven 17. 

Much as my life has been soundtracked by Madonna and Kylie when it comes to women singers, it’s Sandie and Dusty who win the battle for my favourite female singers of all time. I just wish Sandie would make more music, but in the absence of that, I finally got around to purchasing an original 7" vinyl copy of the 1967 release of ‘Puppet On A String’ last week. It is currently on my record player, celebrating fifty years since that first UK Eurovision win. Will Lucie Jones continue our luck with the sevens and give us a win in Kyiv? We’ll see in 35 days’ time.

In the meantime, to Sandie Shaw and the BBC and UK at Eurovision, happy fiftieth anniversary of our first win!

[1] [2] Sandie Shaw and Phil Coulter quotes from ‘1000 UK Number One Hits’ book by Jon Kutner & Spencer Leigh, Omnibus Press, 2005.

Chart statistics and runs taken from Top 40 Charts book, Guinness, 1992 and officialcharts.com