All 69 Eurovision song contest winners – ranked!
69. The Herrey’s – Diggi-Loo Diggi-Ley (Sweden, 1984)
With respect to the Herrey’s – three clean-cut brothers and one rogue apostrophe – Diggi-Loo Diggi-Ley sounds like the result of an experiment to deliberately synthesise an abysmal Eurovision entry. Antiseptic sound, meaningless title, mind-boggling lyrics – some frightful old balls about magical golden shoes – and a chorus that brings about a complete collapse of the will to live.
68. The Olsen Brothers – Fly on the Wings of Love (Denmark, 2000)
The perennially demoralising sound of synthesised panpipes kicks off one of the most nondescript Eurovision winners of all: an amiable but entirely unmemorable acoustic guitar-fuelled pop-rock jog. Still, it was prescient in so far as it was an early adopter of slathering vocals in Auto-Tune, long before it became pop’s most ubiquitous gimmick.
67. Duncan Laurence – Arcade (Netherlands, 2019)
The kind of Eurovision winner that makes you wonder aloud what the other entries were like if something this boring came out on top. There is nothing wrong with Arcade as such, in that it is not an actively terrible song, but nor is there anything to distinguish it from umpteen other boilerplate weepy piano ballads.
66. Netta – Toy (Israel, 2018)
Perhaps it is kindest to say that there were evidently plenty of people who found Netta’s performance of the staccato Toy, replete with onomatopoeic vocalising, chicken noises, flapping arms and much self-consciously wacky gurning to camera, endearing rather than wildly infuriating and leave it at that.
65. Milk and Honey – Hallelujah (Israel, 1979)
A song so weedy that a light breeze would knock it flat, sung by an ineffably annoying cabaret turn in sequinned braces. Obviously, no one was expecting Eurovision to come up with a winner that reflected 1979’s cutting-edge pop – Gary Numan, the Specials etc – but there are limits.
64. Tanel Padar, Dave Benton and 2XL – Everybody (Estonia, 2001)
Middling disco-house, like a less impactful version of Phats and Small’s Turn Around, with a cheesy chorus and a lot of irksome vocal ad-libbing. It was hhistoric in some ways – Dave Benton was the first black performer to win Eurovision and it was the first entry from a former Soviet country to win – but not, alas, musically.
63. Paul Harrington and Charlie McGettigan – Rock ’n’ Roll Kids (Ireland, 1994)
The old Father Ted joke about Ireland deliberately entering a terrible song in Eurovision because it couldn’t afford to host the contest the following year had its basis in a persistent rumour about Rock ’n’ Roll Kids. It is startlingly pallid, although be thankful
