Although this song could easily have featured in “Eurovision Hell”, there are enough bad songs to go around after several decades of that competition and I don’t think I’ll have any trouble finding a replacement for it when the time comes to once more dip into that bargain-basement bin of banality. Yes, I do love my alliteration. But since we haven’t looked at this section for a while, and since the other song I was originally going to feature has, through my research, turned out not to be what I thought it was, we’re going to dig into this well-known Eurovision winner and see what the Hook behind it was that made it so popular.
Save your kisses for me --- Brotherhood of Man --- 1976
A perfect Eurovision song; bouncy, boppy, inoffensive and using the model which would later be championed by Bucks Fizz, ABBA and others of two men two women, there was never any real doubt that this was going to be the winner that year. Gaining the top marks possible from seven of the countries that voted (I doubt, though I don’t know, that that included us, as back in the seventies and eighties things were still very tense between the UK and Ireland) it kicked its nearest opposition, France, in the head and took the top prize. I was thirteen at the time and can remember the song, though not the others that took part, but I must now imagine that the rest were pretty awful if this won.
At its heart it’s an annoying --- very annoying --- and twee love song, as the man heads off to work and advises his sweetheart to wait for him (“Save your kisses for me”) and it’s performed in a very boring, cabaret fashion that borders on making you want to go looking for a shotgun but the Hook comes in the final line, producing the wry smile and knowing wink that surely must have secured them the win. For you see (but of course don’t care) it turns out that the singer is not singing to his girlfriend or wife, but to his daughter, as the closing line tells us: “Won’t you save them for me, even though you’re only three?” With an accompanying wah-wah ending, it’s cheese taken to the nth level, but sure they loved that sort of thing back then, and it sailed to victory.
Which only proves once again that a really good Hook can save a song from obscurity, even elevate it to heights it has no business occupying. Without the last line this is just another annoying love song, sung in a sort of New Seekers/Platters style that just makes you grind your teeth, but with the addition of the final line the whole premise changes, and you’re forced to look at the song with new eyes. After you’ve been sick, of course. But that’s what a good Hook can be: a clever little device that makes what could have been (and is) a mediocre song into something memorable and successful.
And now, if you’ll excuse me, I think I can feel my dinner coming back up…