Eurovision 2014

Ahh, the Eurovision. The only event in the world where Jessica Mauboy can get away with ‘representing Australia’ as an intermission act, singing away and getting lost amongst a sea of dancers dressed as kangaroos, koalas and beer cans (!!) – but that wasn’t even the highlight of this year’s competition.
Austria’s Conchita Wurst made headlines this month when she won 2014’s Eurovision Song Contest. For those out of the loop, established in 1956, the Eurovision Song Contest is an annual song competition held amongst member countries of the European Broadcasting Union. Perhaps its most famous winner came in 1974 when Swedish pop sensation ABBA took it home for their International mega-hit ‘Waterloo’, but other famed winners include Celine Dion (Switzerland, 1988), Bucks Fizz (United Kingdom, 1981) Katrina & The Waves (United Kingdom, 1997) and transgendered pop star Dana International (Israel, 1988).
In recent years – and regular, long-time Splinters readers will know exactly what I’m talking about – the competition has not lived up to its normally brilliant reputation, offering up piss-poor entrants and a few dire winners. There may have been enough entertainment value these past few years for those who watch the competition ironically, but Eurovision has always been a much-loved family tradition that my household and friends have taken very seriously for as long as I can remember. No room for irony here, please; we’re European, or, at the very least, appreciative of the perfect, EuroPop song.
2014’s competition was held in Denmark, and for the first time in years the majority of the songs and performances were 100 per cent legit enjoyable. So many great songs, brimful of talent and style, 2014 was a return to form for the competition – even more so due to its super-controversial winner.
Conchita Wurst, representing Austria, took the gong home for her mother country with a Bond-like romper of a ballad called ‘Rise like a Phoenix’. The controversy, if you missed it, lied with something as simple as a bit of facial hair. Conchita, a living, breathing, singing drag queen, ruffled feathers all over the world for the fact she was essentially a Bearded Lady.
Wurst (which – amazingly – translates into ‘Sausage’) was born Thomas Neuwirth and in 2006 took part in the Austrian talent search TV show Starmania, where he finished second place in the finals. A full year later, Wurst created a boyband by the name of Jetzt Anders! that split up only months after formation.
With all of that history in mind, Neuwirth introduced the drag persona of Conchita Wurst to Austria via the television reality competition Die Grobe Chance. By 2012, she had qualified in second place in Austria’s pre-selection competition for the Eurovision Song Contest. In 2013, national broadcaster ORF declared Wurst would, finally, be representing her home of Austria in 2014’s Eurovision where she would then go on to snatch every entrant’s weave at winning the grand prize. This marks the first Austrian Eurovision win since 1966.
The win hasn’t been an easy road for Wurst or her fans, with many people in Belarus attempting to get Wurst’s performance edited out of their eventual Eurovision broadcast. The petition hilariously claimed Wurst and her song would turn Eurovision into “a hotbed of sodomy” – which is hysterical seeing as it’s kinda already been that for a number of decades. On top of that, anti-Wurst pages flooded Facebook and members of the Russian community even took to online social media to post pictures and videos of them shaving their facial hair “in protest”.
Conchita’s response to all of this has been iconic, declaring she and the LGBT community were “Unstoppable. I said it! Unstoppable!” The fierce drag queen has since received public love and adoration from superstars such as Elton John, Jean Paul Gaultier, RuPaul and our very own Jessica Mauboy, proving that although there may be a pond of negativity toward Wurst, there is a sea of supporters rooting for her next move.
Some claim Wurst’s win was more a political or controversial move, rather than a win for a great song. Pish posh, I say. The song is fantastic and her performance of it was electrifying. Here at Splinters the Picks-To-Win before the final aired were between Conchita, Sweden’s Sanna Nielsen and the subdued Netherlands entry, all of which qualified in the Top 5 by competition’s end. Each was a worthy winner, but nobody sold their song quite as dramatically as Conchita Wurst.
Come 2015, we are off to Austria’s beautiful capital of Vienna for the song contest, where Wurst will perform and ‘hand the reins’ of the competition on to whoever is lucky enough to snatch the title. But what Splinters is most interested in is to see what Wurst does with her newfound global fame over the next 12 months. And – perhaps most importantly – when she will be releasing poppers o’clock ready dance remixes of her stunning, winner of a ballad.
Written by Anthony Morris