Eurovision 2023: Liverpool’s Imperfect Pitch

Jon Egan

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Amidst the near-universal jubilation at Liverpool’s successful bid to stage Eurovision, I struggled to suppress an almost inchoate feeling of dissident cynicism. Is the European Capital of Culture now pitching its future identity on an ambition to be the European Capital of Light Entertainment?

Liverpool is a perfect fit for Eurovision we are told by the bid’s architects and cheerleaders, though this natural synergy with an event that was until very recently derided as a festival of musical mediocrity is at the very least an arguable proposition. No disrespect to Sonia (creditable second) and Jemini (nul points), but they are rarely name-checked when the city intones the sacred litany of its popular music icons. As travel writer and destination expert, Chris Moss opined in his recent Daily Telegraph article; “From Echo and the Bunnymen to The Farm, from The Mighty Wah to The Lightning Seeds, pop and rock culture in Liverpool has always been anti-establishment, iconoclastic and often disdainful of national media-driven circuses."

I’m old enough to associate the Eurovision Song Contest (as it was called once upon a time) with Katie Boyle, a BBC stalwart and actress whose deft professionalism and elegant gentility made her a perfect fit as TV host for an earlier incarnation of the continent’s festival of song.

I’m not quite old enough, however, to remember, what is now my favourite ever Eurovision-winning performance, France Gall’s weirdly off-key rendition of Serge Gainsbourg’s ironic masterpiece, Poupee de Cire, Poupee de Son. Yes, there was irony at Eurovision long before Conchita Wurst or the knock-about stage-Irish buffoonery of the late Sir Terry Wogan.

Eurovision’s durability is doubtless its capacity to adapt to the changing mores of social convention and popular culture, not to mention the seismic disruptions to the boundaries and very identities of its competing nations. Which of course, takes us to 2023 and a Eurovision overshadowed by the tragedy of war in Ukraine. So it’s time for me to swallow my cynicism and recognise that this Eurovision is more than a celebration of blissful superficiality. Eurovision, which was conceived as an event to help bring a war-ravaged continent back together, has rediscovered a higher purpose and it’s up to us to deliver it.

There are already some encouraging signs. Claire McColgan and her team are planning an events programme that will celebrate Ukrainian culture in its many guises and remind the watching millions why this is happening here and not there. Liverpool’s Cabinet Member for Culture, Councillor Harry Doyle, told a gathering of stakeholders that he’s open to ideas about how the city can derive the maximum benefit and the most enduring legacy from next year’s Eurovision. So, if Harry wants my two penn’orth worth, here goes.

Whilst researching an article for the Daily Post sometime in the run-up to the European Capital of Culture, I asked David Chapple, a former Saatchi & Saatchi creative and regular visitor to the city, how he would market Liverpool. His answer was stark and challenging -“Stop telling people what they already know, surprise them!”  I’m not sure that we have ever managed to live up to David’s exhortation. As Chris Moss warns, there is a danger that by claiming a perfect fit with an event that “mistakes kitsch for cool” we may simply be reinforcing a narrow and trivialised perception of Liverpool’s cultural brand. Moss, born and bred in neighbouring St Helens, believes that a city that should be the UK's foremost cultural destination is committing another branding "blunder" (having tossed away its World Heritage Status) by claiming an almost umbilical affinity with what he provocatively dismisses as a "naff, brainless extravaganza."

Moss's rhetoric may be extravagant, but there is more than a kernel of truth in the proposition that we have consistently failed to articulate and market the breadth and quality of our cultural offer. Ensuring Eurovision simply doesn't serve to reinforce a constraining stereotype, has to be a guiding imperative.

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“There is a danger that by claiming a perfect fit with an event that “mistakes kitsch for cool” we may simply be reinforcing a narrow and trivialised perception of Liverpool’s cultural brand.”

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So rather than being the perfect fit, let’s set out to design an imperfect fit. Let’s confound expectations, stretch the envelope and deliver a gathering that offers more than the “glitter and sparkle” that Doyle describes as the essence of Eurovision, but also explores what he terms (somewhat vaguely) “the added layer of Europe.”

I’m certain that Harry, Claire and their team are sincerely committed to ensuring Liverpool’s Eurovision acknowledges the wider European and specific Ukrainian context, although the confectionary metaphor suggests an application of icing rather than an especially bespoke cake mix. Surely now more than ever the “added layer” is the essence.

Returning to David Chapple and his urgings to surprise, the challenge to Liverpool would be how do we stage and wrap Eurovision in a way that confounds stereotypical perceptions of the city, that expands and subverts expectations while revealing a facet of unsuspected seriousness and cultural depth? Given the unique circumstances of this gathering, it seems like an appropriate juxtaposition to pitch the exuberant excess of Eurovision with a broader conversation and cultural exploration of the event's unsettling backdrop.

Notwithstanding Joanne Anderson’s excusable hyperbole that “the eyes of the world will be on Liverpool,” Eurovision 2023 will attract enormous numbers of visitors and serious levels of media attention. Liverpool needs to embrace the opportunity, and the responsibility, to do more than simply host Europe’s ultimate carnival of camp.

Are there media partners with whom we could convene a Eurovision of Ideas - a virtual or even physical gathering of thinkers, policy-makers and artists from Ukraine, the UK and Europe to explore how the shattering reality of yet another European war can help us to forge a deeper and more durable sense of solidarity and a shared future?

Is there space to stage an expo for Ukrainian businesses including their burgeoning technology sector, to help them forge new contacts and explore new markets?

For Ukraine, Eurovision has become a symbolic staging post in a journey from isolation and the cultural suffocation of the Soviet era. This war is a painful and bloody episode within the struggle for a new cultural and economic relationship with its estranged continent. So, how do we ensure that the celebration of Ukrainian culture proposed by Claire McColgan is sufficiently resourced to be immersive and integral and not merely a quaint window dressing for the main event? Culture Liverpool is bidding for funds to deliver a European-themed cultural programme, but an email to cultural organisations inviting bids was hastily withdrawn in the absence of any definite funding commitment from Arts Council England. These are early days, but this is not a positive omen.

In a recent conversation with me, journalist and commentator, Liam Fogarty speculated that if Manchester or Glasgow were staging this Eurovision, the scale of ambition might be greater and the prospecting for partners, funders and co-creators more lateral and imaginative. He is perhaps not alone in that thought. For the first time in nearly two decades, we have been successful in a major bidding competition, but what happens when the circus leaves town? What's our pitch to ensure a positive legacy and how do we create this event in a way that shows a previously unsuspected vista of a more interesting and multi-faceted city?

This is a huge opportunity to redress the imbalance of cultural investment towards London (and even Manchester) by demanding the resources to give a platform to the diversity of a resurgent Ukrainian culture, emerging from what contemporary poet, Lyuba Yakimchuk has described as a “war of decolonisation.” At the end of the day, we’re standing in for the place that would, but for the obscene brutality of Putin’s invasion, be hosting this event. So, let’s stretch every sinew and apply every creative impulse to celebrate the identity of a nation that a deranged tyrant is seeking to wipe off the face of the map.    

And of course, we already have a connection and relationship with a Ukrainian city dating back to the early 1950s when Odesa was in the Soviet Union. In truth, Liverpool’s twinning relationship with the Black Sea port had become a largely hollow civic anachronism - a relationship long since packed away in the lumber room of municipal memorabilia. Until now, the cultural highlight of the twinning relationship was an impromptu concert by Gerry Marsden on the Potemkin Steps when the Merseybeat legend led an aid convoy after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.

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“For the first time in nearly two decades, we have been successful in a major bidding competition, but what happens when the circus leaves town?”

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For Odesa, threatened with invasion and subject to merciless missile strikes, friendship and solidarity have acquired a new and vivid resonance. Steve Rotheram's ambition to make Eurovision Odesa’s “event as much as our own” is generous and laudable but it will only be honoured by a substantial financial and imaginative investment and genuinely collaborative curation.

Without prescribing what a co-created cultural programme might look like, there is massive scope for stunning and surprising collaborations. One of the many intriguing (and sadly unrealised) ideas championed by the much-maligned Robyn Archer, whose brief tenure as Creative Director for Capital of Culture 2008 marginally exceeded Liz Truss’s occupancy of 10 Downing Street, was to stage performances by the Dutch National Opera in the semi-dilapidated grandeur of Liverpool Olympia. Notwithstanding Liverpool’s uncharacteristic failure to extend our famed hospitality to the soon-to-be homeless English National Opera, we could perhaps invite Odesa’s renowned opera company to be part of our Eurovision cultural celebration in their sister city. Whether at the Empire, Olympia (or even my long cherished dream to stage opera in the epic setting of St Andrews Gardens aka the Bullring), we could at the very least promise them a performance that would not be interrupted by air raid sirens or the rumble of distant explosions.

Sharing the Eurovision limelight with Odesa must be the beginning of a longer-term commitment to work with a city still under daily Russian bombardment. Beyond cultural and humanitarian co-operation, there may be a myriad of ways in which we can assist with trade and reconstruction. Even before the damage inflicted by Russian missile and bombing strikes, Odesa's Soviet-era port infrastructure was in dire need of investment and modernisation. Through a concordat for economic co-operation between the two cities, Liverpool should be using the exposure of Eurovision to gather together and broker the expertise and potential investment partners to help Odesa recover from the trauma and devastation of the present conflict.

All this may seem too ambitious, unrealistic or even unnecessary. At the end of the day, all that’s expected of us is that we put on a show, manage the organisation with reasonable efficiency and make an appropriate gesture to recognise the special circumstances of this Eurovision.

Maximising the opportunity and legacy is an undertaking that would require a massive collaborative effort with support from the UK Government, broadcasters, and cultural institutions here and in Ukraine. But without an initiative and impulse from Liverpool it will simply not happen. The unprecedented context surrounding the hosting of Eurovision 2023 demands exceptional effort and imagination, and we will never have a more morally compelling case for partners to match rhetoric with tangible resources.

For Liverpool, to quote Liam Fogarty, we should view Eurovision as “the starting block, not the finishing line” in the process of repositioning the city, building our cultural brand and answering the fundamental question posed in Chris Moss’s Telegraph article - what does Liverpool want to be? 

Are we content to be the perfect fit, and use the Eurovision stage to repeat what the world already knows - that we’re a place that can deliver a great night out? Or will we use it to express the depth of our generosity and hospitality, the breadth of our imagination and the magnitude of our ambition?

Jon Egan is a former electoral strategist for the Labour Party and has worked as a public affairs and policy consultant in Liverpool for over 30 years. He helped design the communication strategy for Liverpool’s Capital of Culture bid and advised the city on its post-2008 marketing strategy. He is an associate researcher with think tank, ResPublica.

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