It’s the early hours of 12 February 2017, and those who have stayed up long enough to find out the winner of Sanremo are heralding a new favourite to win the Eurovision Song Contest. ‘Occidentali’s Karma’ has it all: a catchy chorus, a charismatic frontman and a dancing gorilla called Gerald. However, there is one big question mark hanging over Italy’s entry.
It’s not how are they going to cut an extremely tight 3 minutes 30 seconds down to Eurovision’s fixed 180 seconds. Nor are we asking how international viewers will comprehend a set of Italian lyrics that take in Hamlet, the philosophy of Heraclitus and a seminal work on anthropology by Desmond Morris.
It seems strange now, but there was a lot of discussion about who would sing “alé!”?
One of the most joyful elements of Francesco Gabbani’s 2017 Sanremo performance came when the normally reserved and professional orchestra all raised their instruments aloft and shouted “Alé!” It was the song’s big moment.
With no orchestra in Kyiv, how would Francesco cope? Could, maybe, the audience be allowed to sing along? Is that legal?
A Little Bit Of Participation History
The live Eurovision audience had come a long way since the days of invited dignitaries clapping politely. The contest moved into arenas in the late 90s, with 6,000 attending in Oslo and 4,000 in Birmingham. The latter of the two saw the first venture into the crowd as Guildo Horn met his public and clambered on the set. The crowds got bigger and livelier in the 2000s. Artists started to invite the crowd to cheer along. Sylvia Night fronted up to boos in 2006. Alexander Rybak guided the audience to applaud his dancer’s backflips in 2009. Then, in 2010 the audience was asked to actively participate in the flashmob interval.
In 2013, we had the advent of a standing section on the floor, and PeR from Latvia took immediate advantage of it by doing the first ever Eurovision stagedive (coolness slightly undermined by shouting that statistic as they surfed the crowd). Then in 2014, Greece spent their 3 minutes getting the crowd to jump.
By 2017, the crowd was getting more involved in the show, but they had never been encouraged to get actively involved in the vocals. Only two years prior to Occidentali’s Karma, the audience noise was muted from the broadcast in case people were rude to Russia. Getting them all to shout “Alé” on cue was going to be a big departure. It turned out that the audience in Ukraine were allowed to join in and Italy weren’t disqualified for having 11,006 people on stage. A precedent had been set and the crowd was now fully in play at Eurovision.
Participation Is Go!
Gradually, the idea started to catch on. It’s questionable how successful Lea Sirk’s attempt at audience participation was at the 2018 contest. Stopping the music before the second chorus and forcing the crowd to clap and cheer ruined the performance for many. Similarly, Alexander Rybak wanted people to join in with his scooby-dooby-bap-baps in Lisbon, but to no avail.
However, 2019 brought another great moment of audience participation. Again, it was from Italy, as Mahmood double-handclapped his way to second place. As in 2017, the crowd took on the job of Sanremo’s orchestra. The slightly looser format of Il Festival Della Canzone Italiana was making its mark on its big cousin.
Post Pandemic Participation
It was when crowds came back from the pandemic that the trend really took off.
In 2022 the Pala Alpitour was still limited to a seated audience, but there were sufficient fans in attendance to shout “pussy!!!” loud enough to be heard during Latvia’s entry. Konstrakta also used that crowd as she took Mahmood’s clapping trick to the next level.
Liverpool 2023 got even noisier with loud chants of “Poe Poe Poe,” “ŠČ!” and, of course “Cha Cha Cha”. Cha Cha Cha was a game changer. After Liverpool, Eurovision fans talked about a “Käärijä effect”. This is meant to refer to a trend for sending loud, alternative, crazy entries, but what marked Käärijä out more than anything was his connection with the crowd. The whole chorus of Cha Cha Cha is a call and response with the audience. No one had ever done that before.
The Mark Of Malmö
I don’t believe anyone was directly trying to copy Käärijä in Malmö. Still, several of the 2024 acts who were considered Käärijä-style artists involved the crowd in their acts, and together they made Malmö the most interactive Eurovision ever.
5MIINUST x Puuluup started their performance physically in the crowd and then led a chant of “hey”. Nebulossa also got in on the act, pointing the microphone to the crowd, confident that the Spanish contingent would belt out their words for them. Joost Klein almost acted as the audience’s conductor in his performance and demanded they get involved. Their noise made a mockery of his shouts of “I cannot hear you”. ‘Europapa’ felt more like a live festival performance than a TV one.
However, the best use of the Malmö crowd came from Croatia. Rim Tim Tagi Dim didn’t just delegate the shouts of “whoa-oa” to the fans in the arena. It was also filmed in such a way as to put the viewer in and amongst the crowd.
Go back and watch the live performance and count how many sweeping shots of the audience there are. The majority of the time you see Baby Lasagna and his band, they are shot from below – from the fans’ perspective. And when you get those last few whoa-oas, they show the fans singing along. Also, in a remarkable piece of good fortune, Eurovision brought back the audience light-up wristbands just as Croatia included a dance routine based on moving your hand up and down. You can see each and every person in attendance joining in with the dance break. They’re lit up more than Marko. The whole thing is a masterclass in involving the audience in the arena while also involving the audience at home.
What Now For Participation?
This is all quite a big change from some of the closely focused, intimate stagings of the 2010s. Where has this trend come from? Maybe COVID-19 played a part? Everyone missed live crowds during the pandemic, including the artists. Coming back, there’s a desire to have that interaction, and maybe that will prompt performers to use the Eurovision crowd in a different way than before.
We are also getting artists who are different from the ones we used to. In 2017, it was rare for acts to launch a European tour off the back of Eurovision participation, but thanks to the more significant connection with fans through social media and streaming, it’s now familiar. These opportunities mean we are getting fewer competing artists fresh out of reality TV and more established live acts. This event is the shop window for their tour, and of course, they want to show their fans what a great time they will have.
There’s also probably a more technical explanation. Since 2021, Eurovision songs have allowed recorded backing vocals. It’s now much easier to get the sound mix right to hear the crowd while also supplementing that noise with the backing track. The last two contest stages have also placed the artists in the middle of the arena, with Basel set to continue the trend. The connection between singers and fans has never been stronger.
There is a question mark of whether this phenomenon is here to stay. There is a chance that the powers at the EBU will decide that the crowd got too involved at Eurovision 2024 and try to restrict it in Basel. However, the uproar from artists over the potential muting of Israel’s crowd reaction in Malmö shows audience involvement is something performers really value, and it will be a brave supervisor who restricts it now.
There’s no doubt that the interactive approach is successful. The last two televote winners have used the crowd in their performance. It’s bound to be something that other countries are going to want to tap into for 2025.
Look out for those heys and whoa-oas as the songs come out. If you’re lucky enough to get tickets, you’ll need to learn your part.