The Eurovision Song Contest might seem like an unlikely subject for a gnarly punk rocker to write about, but Roy D Hacksaw has surprising form in this field. Being a bit of an old fart, he grew up in a time where his main access to music on TV came as part of the many variety shows that littered the three available channels in the back end of the sixties and early seventies. All the cool music shows were on way after his bedtime, and his old man really couldn’t stomach Top Of The Pops. So it was always a treat when on a Spring Saturday night every year his Dad would go out to play snooker and he could sit and watch Eurovision with his Mum. As the decades passed by and he got more involved in punk rock the old contest lost a little of its shine and he found himself watching it less frequently. But he still always kept an eye on the results. That was until in the early nineties when he found himself in Sweden on Eurovision night and he could see how differently the locals viewed the contest. It was more of a popular national passion than the mildly entertaining embarrassment that we Brits viewed it as, and this instantly rekindled his passion for the show.
A few years later, when Katrina & The Waves won the thing for the UK, he realised that he could finally achieve his long-held ambition to attend one Eurovision in his life, so when the next year’s contest was held in Birmingham in 1998 he blagged his way in on a press ticket, and unbeknownst to him his life was never going to be quite the same again.
Since then he’s travelled all over the continent covering the contest for an array of magazines and websites, including heat, BBC Online and Popbitch. In that time he’s partied in palaces, shaken hands with Presidents, and been to places that he’d only previously dreamed of visiting. From bobbing about in the Dead Sea with a gaggle of sunburned Estonians to being jostled by Vladimir Putin’s security in Moscow, and most unlikely of all, spending an incredibly strange afternoon with Engelbert Humperdinck and Jedward in a hotel room in Baku, the contest always has always offered way more than just a gaggle of silly songs if you know where to look, and shown him things he could never have imagined when he was sitting watching the contest with his Mum back in the mists of time.
Roy's new story, 'Worst. Eurovision. Ever.' the follow up to his hilarious 'Bugger Banksy', takes place in an alternative timeline where Lys Assia didn’t win the first Eurovision Song Contest in 1956. This set off a completely different chain of events where the only two things that still exist from the Eurovision canon that we know and love today are the contest itself, and the bloke with the inflatable hammer who always gets in the way of the cameras in the crowd shots.
The book is at the printers now and the Eurovision Top Trump cards to go with it are just being finished. We'll set up a pre-order for it soon and keep you up too date with all the wacky going ons. Prepare yourselves for some eurovision ridiculousness!
The Eurovision Song Contest 2022 will be the 66th edition of the competition. It is set to take place in Turin, Italy, following the country's victory at the 2021 contest in Rotterdam, Netherlands, with the song 'Zitti e buoni' by Måneskin.
Organised by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) and this years host broadcaster Radiotelevisione italiana (RAI), the contest will be held at the PalaOlimpico, and will consist of two semi-finals on 10 and 12 May, and a final on 14 May 2022. The three live shows will be hosted by Italian television presenter Alessandro Cattelan, singer Laura Pausini and British-Lebanese singer Mika.
Forty countries will take part in the contest, with Armenia and Montenegro returning after their absences from the previous edition. Russia has been excluded due to its invasion of Ukraine.
Who needs punk rock when you have the drama of this nonsense? This could be the Worst. Eurovision. Ever.
Roy Delaney Hacksaw, travelling the world in style and listening to music.
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