The Face: Eurovision Special
Page 1
At Studio 69 strip club the DJ has just dropped Sean Paul's 'Get Busy', and Tatu's Julia Volkova and Lena Katina are dancing in the middle of the underlit dancefloor. Julia's black hair is slicked back and her big eyes are shrouded in black eyeliner. Lena has her read hair in braids, wearing a leather jacket. They've been downing glasses of white wine for the last four hours, and they're now the focus of the club, laughing and smiling, hips gyrating. Sean Paul gives way to Panjabi MC, red-neon lightning bolts flash from the ceiling, and Tatu's producer Ivan Shapovalov joins us on the dancefloor. Even the lapdancers have got their hands in the air.
It's Friday, 3am, in Latvia's capital Riga, 44 hours before the start of the Eurovision Song Contest. Sitting in dalmation-print chairs around the dancefloor are Julia and Lena's bodyguards, their blonde manager Beata, and a bearded Australian songwriter called Mars Lasar, who wrote their Eurovision entry. Dancing with Ivan are Vassily and Jevgeny, two genial middle-aged Russian businessmen, whom Ivan had met on the train from Moscow and invited out. Also dancing, throwing a variety of Timberlake moves, is an Australian male masseur called Kurt. Kurt is out here with us because he wants to represent Britain at next year's Eurovision.
A stripper appears on stage in a floor-length black coat and PVC bondage corset. She sheds her clothes to a soundtrack of grinding industrial hardcore, and climaxes with a handspring off the stage, spinning high through the air before executing a perfect landing on the dancefloor below on her six-inch stiletto heels. Everyone - Lena, Julia, Ivan, us - is stunned into silence.
The Eurovision Song Contest is no longer a joke. Eager to exploit its 200 million TV audience, Scandinavian and Baltic countries have been entering some of their best popstars - and winning. Recent rule changes - the introduction of Europe-wide phone voting, relaxing the rules on singing in English, getting rid of the orchestra - have led to a surge in high-quality contemporary pop.
And then there's the gay thing: entries such as Israel's Dana Internation in 1998 and last year's trio of Slovenian transvestite air hostesses have helped Eurovision join the Oscars and Mardi Gras as one of the secular festivals for gay men. Inevitably, Elton John makes a cameo on this year's show, live from an Aids benefit in Vienna. All over Europe, and in Sydney and San Francisco, gay Eurovision parties are being prepared (there's even one in the Groucho Club in London). But the real fanatics are in Latvia for the week, with parties running every night and a huge nightclub, Club Voodoo, turned into an official Eurovision disco, packed every night with gay men, Latvian strippers and European pop stars.
Friday, 12pm. "We'be been shopping a bit... Hugo Boss and Mango," says Chris, the male member of UK entry Jemini. "Yeah, and we've been to the hotel's Skyline bar," his partner Gemma adds, weakly.
When we saw them at the BBC's pre-Eurovision party in London, Gemma Abbey (22) and Chris Cromby (20) had seemed like cocky, over-excited children. Having graduated from Liverpool's Starlight theatre school (where Chris was in the same year as Natasha Hamilton from Atomic Kitten), they'd lucked
Image Caption
Chris Cromby and Gemma Abbey - aka UK entrants Jemini. Earlier in the week they were posing in "Tatu - nil points" T-shirts, helping to whip up British anti-Tatu sentiment
Page 2
out with Song For Europe after three years of chasing a record deal, and were now being managed by the people behind Atomic Kitten. "We've got the best song and the best act," their manager Martin O'Shea told at the event. "We're going to win."
But during the six days of rehearsals in Riga, Gemma and Chris have hidden in their hotel room, avoiding the nightly delegation parties and the Riga club scene. "We're not nervous yet," says Chris. "But I keep thinking... should I be worried?"
Eurovision performers have to sing live to a hall containing 6,000 people, while simultaneously hitting the marks for cameras that are broadcasting to the millions of viewers around the world. Most of the other acts are seasoned performers. Sertab Erener, the Turkish entry, has sold 4 million albums, and duetted with the likes of Ricky Martin and Jose Carreras. Jemini's training has given them enough to lipsync on CD:UK, but the duo's live experience amounts to performing on the Northern pub circuit and a tour date supporting Darius. Gemma's solo CV consists of a stint singing at a hotel in Lanzarote. ("It was a five-star resort," she insists).
Gemma hasn't been watching the other competitors, and still thinks their chances are good. "We first thought 'Cry Baby' was a cheesy little number, but we love it now. It's a totally Eurovision song." Both admit they haven't actually watched Eurovision since they were kids.
Gemma's more concerned about her dress. It's by Scott Henshall, the man behind Jodie Kidd's spiderweb dress at Spiderman's London premiere. Henshall dresses are invariably composed of a few wisps of material, held in place by a tit-tape, and are designed with one thing in mind: to get a big photo of their wearer into the Daily Star.
"There's not much to it," sighs Gemma. "It's quite short." Her manager, who's been listening in, interjects firmly: "It looks stunning. She looks better than Kylie". Gemma just rolls her eyes. "Oh aye. I wish..."
Skonto Hall is a vast complex built specially for Eurovision. As well as its 6,000 capacity arena, with a stage the size of a football pitch, there is a cavernous press enclosure and afterparter space, capable of accomodating 1,500 journalists and delegations from the 26 participating countries. Access requires negotiating metal detectors and uniformed security guards. As back-up, an elite special force called the Omega Squad patrols the complex, toting the machine guns and dressed in black boilersuits and balaclavas.
In Skonto we meet Ojars Kalnins, the grey-bearded head of the Latvian Institute, which publicises Latvian culture to the rest of the world. Ojars is a perfect New European. Born in a refugee camp in Germany in 1949, he emigrated to America, where his involvement in Latvia's independence movement led to him becoming Latvia's ambassador to the US through the Nineties.
Ojars is a Bob Dylan obsessive, and now writes lyrics for Marie N, Latvia's biggest female popstar and co-host of the show. Before her Eurovision win last year, Marie used to sing at birthday parties.
Friday 4pm. Just before one of the endless dress rehearsals, the Latvian minister of broadcasting rushes up to Ivan Shapovalov outside of Skonto Hall. He's seeking reassurance that Tatu aren't planning to sabotage Eurovision. Julia has been refusing to appear
Image Caption
Julia Volkova (left) and Lena Katina pose with the policemen in the centre of Riga. Minutes later, Julia will storm off after being stepped on by her manager's drunken bodyguard.
Page 3
at rehearsals, claiming she has a sore throat, but the rehearsals are filmed as a back-up in case anythinggoes wrong on the night, and everyone - the organisers, the press, and a terrifying hardcore of hissy Eurovision fans - is convinced that Julia's refusal to appear is the precursor to a lesbian stunt on Saturday. After the minister has departed, we show Ivan a William Hill betting slip, which is giving odds of 4-1 that Tatu will be disqualified from Eurovision. He cracks up laughing, and asks where he can place a bet.
Ivan Shapovalov, the man at the centre of the storms surrounding Tatu, is a quietly spoken intellectual who loves psychology, marijuana and big ideas. Younger looking than his 36 years, and dressed like a hip college lecturer in jeans and a cream leather jacket, Ivan seems utterly unfazed by the fear and loathing which greets him and Tatu. "Eurovision is a good opportunity to tell the audience that we're not afraid," he says, as we head in a Mercedes back to his hotel room. "But we'd like to win for Russia."
Tatu have enjoyed healthy levels of controversy throughout the world, but the reaction in Britain has been unique, with the paedophile-obsessed Sun and News Of The World launching a sustained campaign against Ivan.
It's immediately obvious why Gemma was so worried: the dress stops just under her arse, like a Fifties swimsuit
"When I shot the video in London, I was smoking a joint," Ivan recalls, sitting back in a chair in his room, taking a pull on a spliff we rolled for him. "The News Of The World called me and said 'You smoked a joint!' I said, 'Sure, why ask me?' They replied, 'Our readers have families, and they worry about smoking joints. They have children.' So I said to them, 'If you worry about your readers, then don't tell them about it.'" He laughs, but it's clear that the British campaign against him has left him bemused.
The News Of The World didn't stop at exposing "dope-smoking animal Ivan Shapovalov." They also sent a young female reporter up to his hotel room in London to infiltrate a party, and then chat up Ivan. She emerged with unlikely claims that Ivan had sexually assaulted her, "nearly crushing my windpipe". They story ran on the front page, but no charges were brought.
Ivan trained as a child psychologist, and his concept for Tatu is based on the close relationships that occur among young teenage girls. Ivan has always dismissed the lesbian thing as "cheap PR" that glosses over a deeper truth: "I've always thought of it as a friendship that grew into love," he said last year. "That happens a lot between girls. It doesn't mean they're lesbians."
But in Britain the tabloids have managed to destroy Tatu's appeal. By spinning the story about Ivan, they've made teenage Tatu fans feel they're being manipulated by an old pervert. Sources at Universal acknowledge that Tatu sales in Britain have fallen off, compared with the rest of the world. The press campaign will affect Tatu this week, too.
Friday 8pm. "On doctor's orders, Julia from Tatu has been advised not to take part in the rehearsal..."
The MC's voice is almost lost in the booing and jeering coming from all areas of the Eurovision competition hall. The dress rehearsals have full-house audiences, with the same flag-waving frenzy that will feature at the event itself. Sitting in a hash-and-Valium hase halfway back in the crowd, we'd been swept along by the euphoria that accompanied the first 10 songs. But with Tatu the atmosphere suddenly goes sour. Lena appears on stage alone, as the band kick into the opening bars of 'Ne Ver, Ne Bojsia' ('Do not be afraid, do not despair').
"EUROVISION hopeful Gemma Abbey claims she is being stalked - by one of lesbian pop duo Tatu. Gemma, 22, says 18-year-old Julia Volkova has been following her around and will not leave her alone. A spokesman for Jemini said: 'It's really creepy. Every time Gemma comes out of her dressing room Julia's there waiting. She's like an obsessed fan.'" - The Sun
It's Saturday afternoon, the final dress rehearsal has just begun and we're hanging around the Skonto Hall press area, waiting to photograph Jemini. Jemini's PR and management, smirking at the tabloid story they've planted, are reluctant to let the duo appear because they claim they'll be mobbed by press and fans.
Gemma finally appears in her Scott Henshall dress. It's immediately obvious why she was so worried yesterday: the dress stops just under her arse, like a Fifties swimsuit. She's terrified of anyone taking a picture of her from behind, and makes Chris walk right behind her. The apprehension of Thursday has given way to twitching terror, and she constantly pulls at the bottom of the dress, saying how awkward it is that she can't sit down in it.
She claims she didn't know about the Sun
Image Caption
Tatu manager Ivan Shapovalov relaxes with a spliff, oblivious to political and media storms that surround Tatu all week
British Eurovision fans had to drink heavily to keep their minds off Jemini
The German entrant sang "Let's Get Happy, Let's Get Gay". This is one of her backing dancers
Page 4
story (even when she's quoted in it, or which of the Jemini team was behind it. She says her Dad even called her this morning demanding to know what was going on. "I was just told there would be a publicity stunt," she explains.
Do you mind being used in this way?
"No, It's all part of it," she says. "And it's all here-today gone-tomorrow anyway…"
No scrum of press or fans appears, and Jemini are duly shepherded back to the performer's area. As he leaves, Chris tells us that he'll be carrying the old bus-pass photo of his dad, who died three years ago, on stage with him.
One hour later, we're in the middle of a huge crowd in Riga with Tatu, Ivan, and an enourmous Latvian drunk called Yuri.
Yuri claims to be Ivan's bodyguard, trained in counter-terrorism by Israeli special forces. He seems completely off his head, eyes rolling opposite directions. He keeps pretending to shoot at imaginary people.
We were planning on taking pictures of Tatu in the hotel, but after sharing a spliff with Ivan in the lobby, he decides "natural light is better", so we head into Riga's shopping precinct.
The effect of the girls is instantaneous. Shoppers and tourists flock towards them, camaras raised. Yuri swats them away from Ivan, but pays no attention to the girls. We shoot pictures as fast as we can, with growing apprehension.
Ivan is enjoying himself. He's taken one of ours cameras and is beckoning the girls into the even more crowded market square. He interrupts an official music performance to take pictures of Tatu on the stage. Yuri attracts the attention of local police, but Ivan manages to persuade them to pose with Lena and Julia for another photo.
Then everything goes wrong. Yuri steps on Julia, who storms off alone. Lena stays to sign autographs, while we track Julia down to the hotel lobby, and witness her screaming at Ivan and a chastened Yuri. Feet rooted at the spot, and her body quite still, the tiny popstar delivers five minutes of high-decibel rage, before spinning on her heel and dissapearing into one of the lifts. Photoshoot over.
Yuri is heartbroken [ahem, ahem, what a great bodyguard, he's heartbroken because he stepped on someone ^-~ Darje], and apologizes with a series of emotional hugs that are only marginally more terrifying than his attack mode.
"What Yuri needs is love," says Ivan. "He is surrounded by fear. He is lonely."
Gradually the truth emerges: Ivan had only met Yuri ten minutes before the photoshoot when he blundered into the lobby, while being pursued by police. Ivan got talking to him, whereupon Yuri offered himself as a bodyguard, winning the job with immortal words, "I will die for you."
"So much love," muses Ivan. "So much love."
Page 5
With just three hours left before the contest, we return to our hotel, a refurbished Soviet block set in a giant park. The madness of Eurovision, combined with the effect of endless joints with Ivan, has left us confused and yet elated. We head for the room, and try to calm our headaches down with lager and a previously untried prescription painkiller called Mertazapine.
Kurt decides that it's time for us to hear his Eurovision entry, and produces a CD of backing music. "This song is about abortion," he says. "It samples Maddona's 'Papa Don't Preach', but it's about a boy asking a girl not to abort her baby."
We set up a video camera, and Kurt launches into a fully coreographed performance, throwing shapes while simultaneously hitting the impassioned chorus: "I want my baby to breathe…" [Oh dear, if he is entering Eurovision next year I'll just hafta see that ~Darje] We immediately book him to perform at a forthcoming FACE party, and he departs for Skonto Hall.
We're about to follow, when suddenly the Mertazapine takes effect. Neil the photographer starts to slur his words. Then, one by one, we drift into unconsciousness.
Boom! Gigantic explosions shiver the windows of the hotel. We struggle to wake up. The evening sunshine has given way to pitch darkness. More explosions. It's a huge firework display, being launched from the park. The truth slowly becomes apparent - Mertazapine is a super-strenght sedative, not a painkiller, and this are the fireworks that mark the end of the contest. We've been sabotaged by prescription drugs… and totally missed Eurovision.
Twenty minutes later, a taxi drops us at the after-party. As we head for the entrance, we run into Kurt, who has pulled a bandana-wearing member of a Latvian boy-band. Kurt explains that Tatu have lost, beaten third place by just three points - in what has been one of the closest contests ever. Suddenly a huge scrum of paparazzi and bouncers push past us, surrounding a tiny figure. It's Turkey's Sertab Erener [Grr. ~darje], and she's the winner. Gradually the facts emerge: Tatu's performance was an anticlimax. After all the political pressure, they avoided any stunts or kissing. But the Latvian broadcasters took no chances anyway, and pulled their cameras way back from the girls, dramatically reducing their impact on TV. Nonetheless, every country gave Tatu points, apart from Britain and Ireland. The anti-Tatu campaign run in the British tabloids has cost Russia the competition.
But there is some poetic justice. As we enter the after-party, a corporate rave held in a huge hangar near Skonto Hall, we hear about the British entry. After spending a week hyping themselves at the expense of Tatu, the pressure had been too much for Jemini. Paralysed with fear, Gemma had sung the first verse and chorus in the wrong key. Chris meanwhile had abandoned their coreography and run around the stage shouting "Come on Latvia!" The people of Europe were not impressed. For the first time ever, Britain received nil points.
We run into Marie N, the presenter of the show. "We heard the two British singers were just taken off the street," she says. "Is it true that they're not real singers?"
We assure her that they're about par for the course of the British pop industry. More than the inept performance, Marie is amazed by the tackiness of Gemma's Scott Henshall
Page 6
dress. "Surely it was better to go nude!" she says, shaking her head in bewilderment. "For Britain, there were just no ideas…"
We've fallen in love with Tatu during this week, and so pick up Kurt and head over to Ivan's hotel room to commiserate. Ivan is sitting in an armchair, opposite to a sofa that contains Julia, Beata and the lyricist Valery. Songwriter Mars sits in a corner. Lena has gone to bed. "I am very happy," Ivan proclaims. "It has been a very interesting experience." He picks up one of our cameras and takes a picture of Julia smoking a spliff. "That will be a good photo, I think!"
But Julia is despondent, slumped against Beata in the sofa. She has been the focus of the whole contest - whether refusing to appear at rehearsals or holding court in the nightclubs - and always gave the impression that she thought she was bigger than Eurovision. But after seeing the other performances, she was suddenly greeting every 12 points for Russia with giddy excitement. Like Britain, Julia found out too late that this supposedly joke contest actually contains serious competitors.
Still in her stage T-shirt with hair back-combed and laquered, she now looks younger and more vulnerable than she has all week, a far cry from the slick diva that was sweeping imperiously in and out of the Studio 69 toilet cublicles with her bodyguard in tow. We head to the bar to buy champagne, and run into executives from Tatu's label and Russia Channel One broadcasters. Talking to them, it emerges that Tatu received political pressure to enter the contest.
Back in the room, Kurt is hunched over Ivan, dangling a cristal in front of his face. He is trying to read his mind. As ever, Ivan remains utterly unruffled. The only times he becomes a little agitated is when we show him the video we have made of Kurt, dancing in the hotel room and singing his anti-abortion song. Julia, who is about to find herself the subject of an alleged abortion in the British press, ignores the video and snuggles up to Beata.
Ivan has also lost his bodyguard. "Yuri turned himself to the Latvian police," he explains. "For treatment. For alcohol. At first they didn't want to take him. They were scared."
So they did arrest him in the end?
Ivan nods firmly. "They will have," he insists. "He will have done something that will make them arrest him."
Down at Club Voodoo, the after-after-party is climaxing at 5 am. We sprawl drunkenly in a leather booth and finish the night off with a round of vodka and tonics from the bikini-clad bartender. Sitting in the next booth with her dancers is Sertab Erener [GRR. ~darje], the tiny Turkish star who's just won the contest. She's watching a replay of her performance on a TV screen. The DJ spots her, and when he drops the winning song 'Every Way That I Can', she jumps up and we all dance round, withe bikini girls joining in.
A nervous figure comes to stand by the bar and watch. It's Gemma from Jemini, clad in an acid lime top and three-quarter-lenght green combats that catch the UV lights. She glows like an envious green ghost from the shadows at the edge of the dancefloor. We'd heard about her running backstage after the judging, tears streaming down her cheeks. Now she just looks like she's in shock.
All those years at stage school, the agony of that hideously revealing dress flashing her cellulite to 200 million people - all for nothing. Even when she's back singing at Lazarote, she'll still be the Nil Points girl.
Gemma has something to tell us: she claims her dressing room has been vandalized, and clothes stolen. Remembering the CIA-level security backstage, it's hard to believe. Our sympathy evaporates as we sense more spin from her management. The British entry, much like British pop, has been consumed by cynism: having failed with the creativity and talent, all that's left is PR.
The Turkish song kicks in again. Sertab is still on the dance floor, celebrating amid a flurry of raised hands, strobes and lapdancers. This is where the party is: a celebration that Turkey is now another country that's cracked the international pop music market. The Anglo-Saxon, British-American dominance is a thing of the past. All of Europe now had MTV to follow trends, cheap PCs to make music on, and mp3s to distribute it. Anyone can be sucessful, as long as they have a good idea, just like Ivan with Tatu. European pop is undergoing a revolution, and Eurovision's ascent is a reflection of that. No wonder why the contest has become such a cult for gay men: from Seventies disco to Eighties house music, they're always there when something new and fabulous is happening to pop culture. We head over to dance again. Tonight, Riga feels like the most exciting place on earth.
Gemma's stuff was back at her hotel, and althought there was damage to the dressing room, the culprit was one of the British delegation drunkenly kicking in a wall. Despite this, the tabloids ran both stories as examples of anti-British racism.
The BBC, meanwhile, have promised a shake-up of the system that led to Jemini's entry. They tell us that both Radiohead and Trevor Horn have been in touch offering to help Britain avoid further humilliation.
The following weekend, Tatu got their shit together and stormed the MTV movie awards in LA, filling the hall with Tatu clones in underwear. A couple of days before this, Ivan called us and said he wants to do a Music Olympic Games.
Transcription by darje. In association with the TatySite.Net Team. |
