Because It's My Chance, To Dance!

I have a dream.

Ok, I have a bunch of dreams. And last week I was freaking out because one of my biggest dreams, is sort of coming to the end... of its beginning. You get me? That dream was my arrival in Canada — something I had been sighing/crying/dying over for about eight years (yep, eight years — here’s the recap for those of you who missed it: parts one, two and three), and now, I’m coming to the end of my first year here.

Even though I am telling everyone who asks that, yes, I’m gonna come back in 2015, I’m still not 100% sure that that’s what's going to happen. And if you were to ask me why I still wasn’t sure, I’d be telling you that I’m not even quite sure about that.

So there we have it. In a panic, late at night, I grabbed my trusty black notebook and started writing down a list of all the things I want to accomplish ever ever ever (and some things there were extremely ambitious, like, pretty damn ambitious). A few things included a record deal, a successful freelance writing career, and also…

To write a song that would be used as the UK’s entry in the Eurovision song contest. Not just that, but have it be the song that wins the competition.

It’s funny because over here in Canada, if I mention Eurovision, almost everyone has absolutely no idea what I’m talking about. And when I explain it to them — that it’s this continent-wide song competition with costume changes and glitter and political undertones to the voting process — they smirk in disbelief. It sounds ridiculous, but it’s real, and I love it.

Over the past years, however, the UK has just not been up to scratch with its mainland counterparts, at all. And I can literally see the thought processes of the execs who have selected the singers and songs to be performed… they’ve had hideously saccharine melodies about how much we love Europe and stand united with them, we’ve had bloody Andrew Lloyd Webber write a terrible song and even supergroup of years-gone-by Blue couldn’t save us from the icy apathy of the rest of the continent… I just feel, and have been feeling for a long time, that we’re due a genuine pop song, written and performed by a genuine person with a personality that hasn’t been moulded by out-of-touch creepy men in suits up at the BBC. They need some of that Cook Kid factor!

The rest of Europe, in the meantime, has been killing it, and for years, my sister Harriet and I would laugh at all the tropes of the competition: men with open, billowing white shirts, formulaic pop songs with extreeeeeeme senses of urgency, talk about “partying” and “dancing” in broken English, wind machines, costume changes, synchronised dance moves, all in all, super-super Euro Euro EURO stuff. Back in 2009, we decided to create our own supergroup called Starmen, who hailed from a very, very, very small country, somewhere in the far corners of the Eastern Meditteranean: Darbrainia.

We dressed up all in white, drew ourselves moustaches, stuffed our trousers, wrote the cheesiest, catchiest, most mindless pop song we could put together and stood in front of a hanging sheet in our living room, taking turns to hold a hairdryer to each other’s face. And honestly? I still know people who are singing it to this day.

I kill myself every time I look back on this. You can see our living room, we are performing under only one light, the camera isn't even in focus about 90% of the time and I am definitely laughing in one of these takes.

We then took a year and, when away on holiday in Iceland, wrote another number, this time a ballad with a terribly amazing mixture of French phrases (borrowed from our Standard Grade classrooms at school, such as, “ou est la gare?”) and brooding looks off into the distance. Because, this is what you do when you go on holiday to the geographical wonder that is Iceland.

Finally, the Starmen had a final hurrah with a accident-and-emergency themed song called LOVEMERGENCY, which was our most ridiculous to date (I think? I don’t know if I can ever top sitting on the edge of a chicken coop in Iceland with a freshly-laid egg in my hand and a moustache drawn on my face with eyeliner).

(maybe I can)

All of these songs would have totally flown at Eurovision. I swear. But it just went to show, that writing a really catchy pop song comes sort-of naturally to me, and if I could make earworms just as a joke, then why couldn’t I write the real deal?

As if the Great Gods of the Universe were looking down at me that dark night as I wrote my wishlist of ambitions and hopes for the future, I woke up the next morning to see that the BBC were going to be taking submissions from the public for their Eurovision entry selection. I had to look again — I had literally written this down the night previous — now, I’m not a big believer in destiny — ahah! almost got you there! I’m a MASSIVE believer in destiny, you can add up the rest. This Eurovision thing was MADE FOR ME. I am going to spend my next month writing and producing something right up to the deadline, and it’s going to be real and catchy and it will make you happy and it won’t be sycophantic or try-hard or anything that the BBC’s been scrambling to churn out year after year.

I haven’t written the song yet. I tried about a dozen different melody threads yesterday, FaceTimed my sister to go over ideas, but I’m still not sure. I actually woke up and, like a woman possessed, ran to get my guitar and banged out a fully-formed succession of verse, bridge and chorus. But even that is still pending the approval of fully-awake Olivia. We shall see.

Anyway, enjoy your day, and don’t forget to take all your chances to dance and feel alii-ee-yii-ii-iiive!