Songs of Europe (1981 concert)

Songs of Europe
Dates
Final 22 August 1981
Host
Venue Mysen, Norway
Presenter(s) Rolf Kirkvaag
Titten Tei
Host broadcaster EBU, NRK
Participants
Number of entries 21 songs from 1956 to 1981
Vote

Songs of Europe is a concert television programme commemorating the Eurovision Song Contest's twenty-fifth anniversary. The event was held in Mysen, Norway in 1981, featuring nearly all the winners of the Eurovision Song Contest from its first edition in 1956 to 1981, and broadcast to more than 100 million viewers all over Europe.

The concert, which was the largest ever in Norway at the time, and still the largest in Mysen, was hosted by Norwegian television personalities Rolf Kirkvaag and Titten Tei, who led the two-hour live broadcast in English, German, French, Norwegian and Spanish. In the United Kingdom, a highlights programme was broadcast by BBC Two on 25 September 1981 and presented by Terry Wogan. BBC Radio 2 transmitted the concert on 26 December 1981.

It is the biggest concert arranged to feature such an amount of Eurovision Song Contest artists and more specifically winners performing at once, with 21 out of a total 29 winners (four winners in the 1969 Contest) attending to perform their past winning songs; that is with the Eurovision Song Contest's fiftieth anniversary, Congratulations: 50 Years of the Eurovision Song Contest, featuring most of the artists as guests and not as performers, and the Contest's sixtieth anniversary, Eurovision Song Contest's Greatest Hits, featuring fifteen artists acts.

The show

The songs were performed and shown in videos, in accordance to the chronological order of the Eurovision Song Contest's winners from the first edition in 1956 up to and including the 1981 edition; although 1981 was the 26th edition, it was held a few months prior to the concert and thus included in it. Some snippets of earlier ESC performances intermingled into the show. 21 acts performed their winning songs live, including three out of the four winners of the 1969 Contest. The remaining eight winners, marked in light red, were shown in video footage of their performances in their respective editions of the Eurovision Song Contest, where available. Others were shown in still photographs or in clips taken from other broadcast where no clip from the contest was known to exist. Abba's performance of Waterloo was taken from a televised concert the group had performed in Mysen in 1975.

No. Country Artist Song Language
1956   Switzerland Lys Assia "Refrain" French
1957  Netherlands Corry Brokken "Net als toen" Dutch
1958  France André Claveau "Dors, mon amour" French
1959  Netherlands Teddy Scholten1 "Een beetje" Dutch
1960  France Jacqueline Boyer "Tom Pillibi" French
1961  Luxembourg Jean-Claude Pascal "Nous les amoureux" French
1962  France Isabelle Aubret "Un premier amour" French
1963  Denmark Grethe and Jørgen Ingmann "Dansevise" Danish
1964  Italy Gigliola Cinquetti "Non ho l'età" Italian
1965  Luxembourg France Gall "Poupée de cire, poupée de son" French
1966  Austria Udo Jürgens "Merci, Chérie" German2
1967  United Kingdom Sandie Shaw "Puppet on a String" English
1968  Spain Massiel "La, la, la" Spanish
1969  France Frida Boccara "Un jour, un enfant" French
 Netherlands Lenny Kuhr "De troubadour" Dutch
 Spain Salomé "Vivo cantando" Spanish
 United Kingdom Lulu "Boom Bang-a-Bang" English
1970  Ireland Dana "All Kinds of Everything" English
1971  Monaco Séverine "Un banc, un arbre, une rue" French
1972  Luxembourg Vicky Leandros "Après toi" French
1973  Luxembourg Anne-Marie David "Tu te reconnaîtras" French
1974  Sweden ABBA "Waterloo" English
1975  Netherlands Teach-In "Ding-a-dong" English
1976  United Kingdom Brotherhood of Man "Save Your Kisses for Me" English
1977  France Marie Myriam "L'oiseau et l'enfant" French
1978  Israel Izhar Cohen and the Alphabeta "A-Ba-Ni-Bi" (א-ב-ני-בי) Hebrew
1979  Israel Milk and Honey3 "Hallelujah" (הללויה) Hebrew
1980  Ireland Johnny Logan "What's Another Year?" English
1981  United Kingdom Bucks Fizz "Making Your Mind Up" English

Notes:

1.^ Attended the show as a guest in the audience.
2.^ The song also contains phrases in French.
3.^ Gali Atari who originally sung with Milk and Honey, didn't come to Norway and so Lea Lupatin replaced her.
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