Today’s Eurovision song final brings countless countries together — this time, squarely behind Ukraine

LIVERPOOL—More than 60 years ago, four boys from Liverpool changed the music world forever. This Saturday, the music world returns to Liverpool to crown the winner of the 2023 Eurovision Song Contest, the longest-running televised music competition in the world, one even older than the Beatles.

How big is Eurovision? Big enough that railway unions have decided to go on strike on Saturday, the day of the final, putting it on a par with the other event that the unions have decided to disrupt: the FA Cup final next month between Manchester City and Manchester United.

Eurovision began in 1956 as an experiment in collaboration between several European national broadcasters. Countries across Europe submit a three-minute song, and then both viewers and a professional five-member jury from each country votes — but one cannot vote for one’s own country.

The top 10 vote-getters from each country receive points (the sought-after “douze points” gives, naturally, 12 points to the top vote-getter, followed by 10, and then eight down to 1). Each country’s votes, regardless of population, count equally in the overall tally.

The dissolution of the former Yugoslavia and Soviet Union led to a raft of new countries joining Eurovision; in fact, so many countries joined that it became unwieldy for them to all perform their three-minute songs in one evening, leading to the introduction of qualifying semifinals in 2004.

More than 160 million people watched Eurovision last year, and it’s not just European countries that take part. Despite the time-zone difference, Australians have long been fans of Eurovision and were invited to send their own contestants starting in 2015.

Eurovision gave ABBA their big break, when they won for Sweden in 1974 with “Waterloo.” Céline Dion’s international career also took off after she won for Switzerland in 1988 with “Ne partez pas sans moi” (“Don’t Leave Without Me”), a song that, though still unknown in English-speaking Canada, could still be heard at Eurovision parties all across Liverpool this week.

Ukraine has been very successful since it joined Eurovision in 2003, becoming the only country to have won the competition three times in the 21st century. Last year’s victory, with the Kalush Orchestra’s “Stefania” gave them the right to host this year’s contest. The war made that impossible — the pink bucket hat worn by the band’s lead singer has become a common sight at demonstrations worldwide — so the opportunity to host went to last year’s runner-up, the United Kingdom.

In contrast to Ukraine, the U.K. has had a run of mediocre results recently. It has finished in last place five times in the last 20 years, including twice when it failed to win any points at all. Eurovision was long seen in the U.K. as something to be slightly embarrassed about; Rita Ora recently said in an interview with a London newspaper that “it (her career) would probably have been all over for me” had she participated in Eurovision.

But after years of failure — a streak that even Bonnie Tyler couldn’t turn around when she represented her country in the early 2010s — the U.K.’s TikTok star Sam Ryder came close to winning it last year. A bidding process involving almost 20 cities around the U.K. culminated last October, when Liverpool triumphed over Glasgow, another city famed for its musical heritage, as Eurovision 2023’s host.

The U.K. government has contributed 10 million pounds ($17 million) and regional authorities four million pounds ($6.7 million) to the BBC, which will produce the contest. This comes during the cost-of-living crisis and as the BBC is facing its own financial crisis, yet there has been very little public discontent about the tab.

Much of that can be attributed to the British public’s strong support for Ukraine. The slogan for this year’s Eurovision is “United by Music,” a clear reference to the U.K. stepping up for Ukraine and to European solidarity — in fact, Russia and Belarus were both ejected from the competition after the invasion last year. Some also see the contest as a call to arms to reverse Brexit.

Peter Benson has been handing out stickers saying “REJOIN” outside the arena all week; he estimates he and his colleagues have also handed out more than 5,000 European Union (EU) flags before both the Tuesday and Thursday semifinals, and have more than 60,000 flags ready for the final.

Benson is a member of Thank EU for the Music (a pun on an old ABBA hit), and says that musicians have been hugely penalized by Brexit. Now that there is no longer free movement of labour, British musicians cannot easily tour the EU and vice versa. Indeed, the British contestant, Mae Muller, is applying for a German passport (her grandfather fled Nazi Germany).

“Eurovision symbolizes the togetherness of Europe,” says Benson. He cites surveys showing that more than three quarters of young people would like to rejoin the EU, and adds, “Wouldn’t it be brilliant if Ukraine and the U.K. joined (the EU)? It would take a few years, I know, but what a strong political statement it’d be to our ‘friend’ Putin.”

Many of this year’s songs are thinly veiled political statements. The deep baritone of Switzerland’s baby-faced Remo Forrer belts out “I don’t wanna have to play with real blood/ We ain’t playin’ now,” while the six women in Czechia’s Vesna sing in (amongst other languages) Czech, English and Ukrainian; the music video for their song, “My Sister’s Crown,” was banned in Russia and Belarus because of its allegory of Russia’s historical claims on Ukrainian territory.

Croatia’s Let 3, who have been mocking dictators since the days of the former Yugoslavia, lampooned Vladimir Putin in what has been described as “military drag,” and of course, Ukraine’s entrants have a message for Russia: “Sometimes you just gotta know/ When to stick your middle finger up in the air.”

The war is never far from the competition this year, no matter where one turns. Three of the presenters are British, including Hannah Waddingham from “Ted Lasso”), but they are joined by Ukrainian rocker Julia Sanina.

One of the acts during the interval between competitors was a performance of Duran Duran’s “Ordinary World” (lyrics include “But I won’t cry for yesterday/ There’s an ordinary world/ Somehow I have to find”) by a former Ukrainian Eurovision contestant, Alyosha, illustrated with messages between loved ones separated by war. This mirrored her own story: Alyosha’s husband, the lead singer of popular Ukrainian rock band Antylila (who performed in Liverpool on Monday), had to stay in Ukraine while his wife and children fled to America.

Liverpool has long-standing links to Ukraine: As a symbol of friendship after World War II and to reflect their common maritime heritage, Liverpool was twinned with Odesa, a port city in southern Ukraine, in 1957, when it was a part of the Soviet Union.

Ukrainian refugees were able to purchase subsidized tickets for the live shows and dress rehearsals; these accounted for roughly three per cent of the total tickets on sale, and cost 20 pounds per ticket. (Tickets for rehearsal shows started at 30 pounds, while tickets for the live final started at 160 pounds, or $270.) The colours of the Ukrainian flag are everywhere to be seen in the city — projected onto buildings at night, in the Eurovision logo, on clothes and on 12 large, inflatable Ukrainian nightingales dotting the city.

Ukraine’s Anna Pozdniakova, 40, moved with her daughter to Parkgate, a village of about 3,500 inhabitants an hour outside of Liverpool, a little more than a month ago, after spending a year in Turkey after the war started. She came on both Monday and Thursday to see the Ukrainian artists that had been invited to perform in the Eurovision Village, a fan centre not far from the arena where the competition was taking place.

Back home in Dnipro, a city in eastern Ukraine, Pozdniakova worked as a beautician; she’s still trying to find a job in the U.K., and says life hasn’t been easy.

“I never dreamt to change my country,” she said. “I never dreamt to change my life. I had a good job and earned a normal salary. I dreamed of travelling but never to leave.”

She ended up in Parkgate because she found a sponsor through the U.K.’s Homes for Ukraine scheme, which matches British households that have a spare room with Ukrainian families looking for a place to stay. But there are no other Ukrainians in Parkgate.

“I wanted to visit this place (Eurovision Village),” said Pozdniakova, “to see Ukrainian people. I miss speaking Ukrainian, to speak with people with the same mentality.”

She said the Eurovision Village was full of Ukrainians; indeed, there was a Ukrainian Village inside it, where stalls sold Ukrainian food (borscht with pears, for instance) and kids could create glow-in-the-dark art from a Ukrainian couple that had fled the war and set up an art school in the U.K.

On Thursday, Pozdniakova watched a play, “Maria,” based on a classic Ukrainian novel, that followed a woman from girlhood to being a grandmother during the Holodomor, the famine in the early 1930s where Ukrainians were deprived of the wheat grown on their land in order to meet Soviet production quotas. “British people can’t feel (this play),” said Pozdniakova. “Our grandmothers, they felt it.”

All of the performers in “Maria” were professional actors in Ukraine before coming to the U.K. as refugees. They were spread out all across Britain, many believing that their acting careers were over until this play was commissioned for Eurovision.

The Eurovision Village stage was also home to a performance of Crimean Tatar folk music by the woman who won Eurovision for Ukraine in 2016, Jamala, with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra; the largely non-Ukrainian audience was receptive to a language and to sounds that most had never heard before (and almost all of the Ukrainians present would themselves not be Crimean Tatars, a Muslim group from the peninsula that Russia annexed in 2014).

Amongst this year’s most attention-grabbing entrants are Teya and Salena from Austria, with their song “Who the Hell is Edgar?” and its refrain of “Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe.” It was written almost on a whim by the two young women, who wanted to talk about what it felt like when you wrote a good song (as if it had been written by a ghost invading one’s body — in this case, the ghost of Edgar Allan Poe) and to highlight the roughly per-stream royalty rate paid by Spotify to songwriters: roughly three-tenths of a cent.

Israel, Belgium and Norway have also been crowd favourites, and France is represented by La Zarra, a singer from Montreal who is also predicted to do well. But most commentators believe that the competition is really between Sweden and Finland. The former is represented this year by Loreen, who aims to be just the second artist to take Eurovision twice; she won in 2012 with “Euphoria,” one of Eurovision’s most decisive victories.

Finland is represented by Käärijä with “Cha Cha Cha.” Deciding to pursue music seriously after his large intestine was removed due to severe ulcerative colitis, this hopeful’s song combines rap, industrial metal and synthpop, all sung while mostly bare-chested with a neon green bolero jacket. His performance finishes in a centipedelike dance with his four dancers in bright fuchsia.

Until this year, only those countries that participated in Eurovision were able to vote and have a say in the winner, but now, in a nod to its increasing popularity worldwide, the rest of the world will get its say. Canadians who want to vote can go to www.esc.vote on Saturday (the show starts at 3 p.m. EDT); they can cast up to 20 votes, costing 0.999 euros each, as soon as the last song is performed.

Eurovision is known for its wackiness and kitsch, but this year’s version has a special poignancy. It can be summarized by a wall in a section of the Beatles Story, one of the museums celebrating the Fab Four, devoted to John Lennon. The words “War is over” (from Lennon’s song with Yoko Ono, “Happy Xmas [War is Over]”) are written in 20 languages in large, black, all-caps text. Underneath those words, in a much smaller size, are the next line in those lyrics, “If you want it.”

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