[LMBTO] Marie Myriam - "L'oiseau et l'enfant" (Eurovision 1977)

As it is still so quiet on the Eurovision scene, I have decided to pick another classic past entry to focus on, my all-time favourite Eurovision vocal performance and one of my top overall picks, "L'oiseau et l'enfant" by Marie Myriam.  Regular readers will remember that I gave this my 12 points for my first Eurovision Top 250 vote in 2013, based on the song and vocal quality alone - what I said there still holds true...


I couldn't have put it better myself!  I just thought that I'd focus a bit more on Marie, the 1977 Contest and some other background, as that paragraph deserves expanding upon.  Ironically as a Brit, most of this happened in the UK after Brotherhood Of Man had won our third title the year before - before the big show itself in London, there was the small matter of whether this unassuming vocalist, christened Marie Lopes, born in Kananga, Democratic Republic Of Congo, would be the one representing her country there.  There were a SF and a Final to navigate through before getting to London - the first the world saw and heard of this classic song was the SF performance, with auburn haired Marie all decked out in a plain full length purple dress giving a solid and assured performance, all the more impressive as the orchestra and backing singers were playing and singing for every artist there, the singers having a lyric sheet clearly visible:



The public selection opted for by TF1 provided fourteen entries over the two SFs - Marie came first in a convincing manner in SF2, getting 22% of the votes:
The National Final provided an even more emphatic win for "L'oiseau et l'enfant", with 31% share and almost double the votes of second place:
So Marie was to be France's hope for Eurovision 1977 and she went through the stereotypical run-up to Eurovision - first up, the obligatory single cover:
Next, the preview video (remember that this is almost forty years ago and postcards at the show were still in their infancy), where Marie performed in a smart trouser suit in the Square René-Viviani in Paris and gendarmes had to hold the crowd back, trying to get a glimpse of their Eurovision representative:



And so "The Bird and The Child" moved onto London - a month later than scheduled due a BBC technician strike in April.  So May 7th 1977 became the date and the Wembley Conference Centre the venue for the 22nd Eurovision Song Contest:

Don't look for it next time you're up Wembley way, it's not there anymore!  1977 was still a Contest of fully seated auditoria, men in dickie bows and DJs, ladies in garden party attire, all supplying polite applause.  It was also a time where the songwriters and conductors got almost as much exposure as the artists themselves - Jean-Paul Cara/Joe Gracy and Raymond Donnez took the nod as far as those linked to the French entry were concerned.  1977 was also the year that the language rule returned to the Contest after a three year gap where any language could be used - this meant that the UK and Ireland should have been the only songs in English but Austria, Germany and Belgium were the last non-English language countries to sing that way due to the delayed reintroduction of the rule and their having already chosen their songs.  Angela Rippon was the host for the evening - here is the contest in full:



As a Brit who had only just started watching the Contest in 1975, these were halcyon times - the UK was still in its zenith as far as success at Eurovision was concerned and three wins in ten years had made the whole nation expectant that maybe a fourth win was possible, this time on home soil.  The pairing of Mike Moran and Lynsey de Paul with "Rock Bottom" were one of the favourites for the win, along with The Swarbriggs Plus Two for Ireland, Silver Convention for Germany and Dream Express for Belgium.  The French entry had not really appeared on bookmaker's radars at all prior to the show itself - if exchanges such as Betfair had been around in the 1970s, the 'in play' odds for "L'oiseau et l'enfant" would have come crashing down with every passing second of this wonderful performance, it being the last song of the night:



Marie in a floor-length orange gown, her backing singers (two of which, Georges and Michel Costa, had already sung with Anne-Marie David when she won in 1973 for Luxembourg) all clad in black, everyone simply staged to allow all the focus on the absolute strength of this number, the vocals.  This was an masterclass in how to deliver a French language ballad, how to sing without musical accompaniment and how to build slowly, steadily with the music and words, climaxing with a pause and then a final elongated chorus.  Marie provides one of the best vocal performances of any Eurovision entry and delivers a joyous enthusiasm in an era where the artists often did no more than sing and emote with their arms and facial expressions.  Her beauty provided an added layer to this song, where her eyes and her smile gave a mood of happiness and pleasure to the entry that might, with another singer, not have been there.  I have always loved the French language as a tool for delivering beautiful poetry and these words provide a superb example of that art:


I can listen to this song over and over again but on the night, Marie only had one chance to impress, the jurors around Europe and Israel only one chance to listen.  Did it help that Marie went last in a field of 18?  The previous two Contests had seen song number 1 triumph but this time Ireland came in third from that spot.  The UK didn't have the best draw, being smack bang in the middle of the running order, but still were ahead up to halfway through the voting.  What won the day for France was consistency in voting - Marie got points from every country and nothing less than a 3, which more than made up for the fact that her entry only got three maximums, compared to "Rock Bottom" having six and even Ireland getting four.  The points from around the juries were broken down like this (thanks to Eurovision World):
136 points was to prove a fairly convincing total, given that France finished fifteen marks clear of the UK - "L'oiseau et l'enfant" is considered to be a Eurovision classic now but it was an unexpected winner in 1977.  This was a fifth win for the French - Marie gave yet another flawless performance during her reprise, finishing the show and seemingly on time for the BBC credits:


And so that was it, France hit the Eurovision heights again and Marie ended up with an entry that sold five million copies across Europe, after being recorded in her native language, German, Spanish, Portuguese and of course English.  She almost broke into the UK Top 40 (peaking at number 42) but did get a gig on Top Of The Pops:



Watching all of this in 1977, I am sure that most fans of the Contest would not have imagined that "L'hexagone" would still be waiting for their sixth victory thirty-nine years later and that Marie Myriam would be pigeon-holed musically in the same way as Sir Geoff Hurst is when us English speak of winning the football World Cup.  The dominance of French as the language of choice for winning entries of the Eurovision Song Contest was coming to an end...
Jump to the present day and Marie is still asked to sing HER song and sing it she does beautifully, every single time.  One thing though is absolutely certain in my eyes...