“Do you curse where you come from?” sang Nick Drake in 1970. It’s highly likely that he wasn’t singing about Britain’s inability to field a winner in the Eurovision song contest. After all, back then, when we ruled pop on a worldwide scale, the Eurovision was a cinch to us Brits. We would make sure our charts were full of world-beating singers and songwriters. Whatever was left over, we would throw into a big pot called Song For Europe and, in all likelihood, it would still be ace enough to come in the Top Three: Mary Hopkin’s Knock Knock Who’s There; Sandie Shaw’s Puppet On A String; Lulu’s Boom-Bang-A-Bang. When Cliff came second to Spain’s La La La with Congratulations, the ensuing furore tore across Europe, with several newspapers suggesting that Spanish state television had rigged the vote on behalf of General Franco’s fascist regime – withholding from Britain the points necessary to nudge Cliff ahead of the victorious Massiel.

When exactly, then, did we lose the knack of fielding a strong Eurovision entry? A chart of final placings over the years would plot the co-ordinates of our demise – from the string of close-calls that bridged winning songs by Brotherhood of Man and Bucks Fizz to the uniformly pungent entries of the past ten years. We have turned into one of those countries we used to laugh at. We look and sound like a nation in the throes of a pop confidence crisis. Cast your mind’s eye over our recent failures – Scooch! Andy Abrahams! Englebert Humperdinck – and tell me that seems any other way. It remains to be seen whether Bonnie Tyler will arrest the slide tonight, but looking ahead to future contests, behold a checklist of strategies that have served many a past winner well.

1. Write a decent song
Set aside your snobbery. The fact is that the majority of Eurovision winners – from Waterloo to Lordi’s “monster rock” call-to-arms Hard Rock Hallelujah – are fundamentally strong compositions. You need to write one too. If inspiration fails to strike, choose a million seller, write down the chord sequence in reverse and put a new melody over it.

2. Earn your place
For reasons knowable to the Eurovision Illuminati, Britain is one of a small number of Euro “superpowers” who get to skip the ignominious qualifying stages. Our showing has been far worse in the years since this system was introduced, suggesting that our business class status has cause ill-feeling among other competing nations.

3. The comprehensibility of the title is inversely proportionate to its chances of winning
It’s all about spreading the likelihood. By tapping into some sort of mystical Eurovision Esperanto that few speak but all understand, Herreys (Diggi-Loo-Diggi-Ley, 1984); Izhar Cohen & The Alphabeta (A-ba-ni-bi, 1978) and Teach-In (Ding-A-Dong) all rode to Euroglory. Universally understandable terms – Boom-Bang-A-Bang (Britain, 1969), Hallelujah (Israel, 1979) and Genghis Khan (second for Germany in 1978) have also fared well.

4. Leave the door of postmodernism ajar
You double your chances of success if you get the unreconstructed Eurovision fans and the ironic watchers on board. In recent years, songs that have done just that – Lordi and Dana International spring to mind – have performed strongly. However, Lithuania’s We’re The Winners (Of The Eurovision) was a different matter altogether. Its smug, irksome knowingness saw them crash out.

5. Love Thy Neighbour
The Scandinavians give eachother douze points; so do Greece and Cyprus. Now that the old Soviet Republic has broken up like a meringue, recent years have seen the East accrue a monopoly of Euroglory. We need to follow their lead by ceding independence to Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, Cornwall, The Isle Of Man, The Isle Of Wight, Guernsey, Jersey and Alderney. Then we can all vote for each other.

6. Get a gimmick
With more songs than ever competing in the Contest, you need something to make people remember you. Would Lordi have won if they hadn’t used prosthetics to make them look undead? Would Ukraine’s Dima Bilan have emerged victorious had he not brought a tiny ice rink that appeared to have been unpacked from a specially-made briefcase?

7. If at first you don’t succeed, try again.
Abba returned looking stronger and slightly sillier after failing to win their domestic qualifiers with 1973’s Ring Ring. Members of Bobbysocks (1985) and Bucks Fizz (1981) all foundered on previous occasions only to finally emerge victorious. Perhaps the most well-known serial trier is Norway’s Jahn Teigen, the first ever nul points recipient in 1978. Teigen has sang in two subsequent contests and competed in fourteen domestic qualifiers.

8. If at first you do succeed, try again.
Of course, if you do win, then you run the risk of becoming typecast as a Eurovision winner. Seven years after winning in 1980 with What’s Another Year, Johnny Logan return to his metaphorical captor, winning again with Hold Me Now. That showed them.

9. Avoid controversy. This isn’t speakers corner, you know.
Some people use Eurovision as a platform to make a wider political point. Icelandic new waver Kojo was a case in point. The lyrics of his song Bomb Out railed against the proliferation of “nuclear shit” on the global political agenda. When German teenager Nicole won with A Little Peace, he called her a “stupid virgin.” In 2005, Ukraine’s Greenjolly adapted their song from the rallying call used by protesters to bring Viktor Yushchenko to power. Eurovision organizers disqualified them.

10. Make sure you like your song (because you’ll have to sing it for the rest of your life)
I once interviewed Mike Nolan from Bucks Fizz. Imagine if Terry Waite found himself released by his Libyan captors only to be told he had to carry his cell around with him at all times. That’s Mike Nolan from Bucks Fizz, that is.

1. Just because it’s not the record you were expecting, it doesn’t make it a bad record.

2. Streaming Random Access Memories on iTunes probably wasn’t the best way to unveil it to the world. It meant that the most hugely anticipated album of the year received its first listen on millions of shitty little computer speakers.

3a. Streaming the most hugely anticipated album of the year anywhere probably isn’t a good idea. The amount you pay for something shapes your perception of it. Sitting at your desk with your arms (figuratively) folded, waiting to be impressed is no way to listen to a record.

3b. Sorry. I know I keep banging on about this, but in a world of infinite opportunities to listen to free music, you really try harder to understand a record when you pay for it.

4. At no point did Daft Punk tell you to expect an entire album of Get Luckys. You might realise this, but quite a lot of people seem not to.

5. If the old VHS tape found by Wall-E contained not Hello Dolly but Thank God It’s Friday or Saturday Night Fever and subsequently inspired him to make his own disco album, it might sound like Random Access Memories – especially Giorgio By Moroder, Within, Instant Crush and Touch.

6. Which is to say that it’s a love letter to the disco era, a sometimes poignant memorial to the unquenchable optimism of pre-Aids dance music – but not actually a disco album per se. Its closest companion is Madonna’s Confessions On A Dancefloor.

7. Dear People Who Seem Convinced That It’s All Been Done Before. Listen to Get Lucky. Then go back to your record collection and try and find a song that really sounds like it. I tried it the other week. I pulled out all of my Chic records. I pulled out Diana Ross’s Upside Down. I pulled out Sheila B. Devotion. None of them scratched the itch that Get Lucky scratched. The deep, foetal bass of Get Lucky couldn’t have been laid down in a pre-techno era. The gradual mutation of the vocal melody into robot-ecstasy – I haven’t heard that on any other record of the era. Ditto the absolute perfection of Omar Hakim’s prolonged drum climax on Georgio By Moroder (Omar Hakim’s drumming is 70 per cent of the reason I own Sting’s Bring On The Night album); the postcoitally ecstatic lack of BPMs on Lose Yourself To Dance (which will be beyond incredible when 200,000 people join in with the handclaps en masse at next year’s intevitable Glastonbury set); and the digitised intergalactic freakout at the end of Contact. I’ve got LOADS of old records. I spent ALL OF THE 80s buying up cheap disco 12-inches. I don’t have ANYTHING that truly sounds like this.

8. Dear Columbia: A much better way to disseminate Random Access Memories would have been a vinyl release, a week ahead of the official release. By and large, people who buy records on vinyl tend to devote more time getting to them. If you buy a record on vinyl, you can’t listen to it on shitty computer speakers (see point 2). And Random Access Memories needs to be heard either on good speakers or decent headphones to be really enjoyed. If the first fans hearing it this way had then gone onto social networking sites and relayed their reactions, all those first-reaction blogs might have been a bit more positive (by the way, you might want to keep this in mind for any other “event” releases you may be planning).

Hats off to Michael Hann of The Guardian for uploading his painful Q&A with Ginger Baker at the screening of Beware Of Mr Baker. I’m not sure if I would have been so brave. That said, Michael doesn’t come off badly. Baker’s deliberate obtuseness faced with the simplest of questions is a tactic deployed by countless musicians – musicians too cocooned in their own vainglory to realise that, for their interlocutors, this might be no less a job than it is for them. At one point, Michael Hann refers to the “drum battle” with him and Art Blakey, only to have Baker take exception to the notion of a “battle” – the implication being that Michael is doing the same thing that countless meddling journalists have done before him, leeching off the music and impairing its spirituality with his pesky words. This a favourite device of the bullying musician. Ray Davies tried something similar when I interviewed him last year for Q. He told me he might be writing an opera “in two years time… It’s just finding the time to do it.” I asked him if he had always felt comfortable jumping from one discipline to another. “There is no discipline,” came his response (one of the more cordial responses of the afternoon). What discipline? It’s all music.”

This sort of default uncomprehending contempt also happens to be Lou Reed’s standard interview mode. Usually, it’s possible to get away with it for one of two reasons: (i) the journalist can’t call them up on it because they need the subject to stay on the room for long enough for them to get a feature’s worth of material out of it; (ii) music writers are usually fans and the last thing that fans want to do is incur the disapproval of their idols. As a young writer, it’s all too easy to be intimidated by the person you’re interviewing. Less so in your 40s. When Sylvie Simmons interviewed Lou Reed for Mojo, Reed attempted to steer the interview into more esoteric territory, thinking that his interrogator would find herself hopelessly adrift when talk turned to James Joyce and Chopin. “If you want to understand music, you have to play,” declared Reed, “To find out that the songwriter actually beat his wife, sodomised his dog and is in jail for fucking 99 years doesn’t help you appreciate the song. Doesn’t! That applies to somebody trying to figure out Ulysses.”
Sylvie Simmons: “The book you mean?”
Lou Reed: “The book. And Finnegans Wake. Almost out of the question. Are you going to tell me you read Finnegan’s Wake?”
Sylvie Simmons: “Yes.”
Lou Reed: “From beginning to end?”
Sylvie Simmons: “Yes.”
Lou Reed: “And you understood it?”
Sylvie Simmons: “I wouldn’t say that, but I try to, and when I don’t I love the sound of it.”
Everything Lou Reed wants you to believe about the elevated spiritual plane inhabited by musicians is actually true of Sylvie Simmons in this passage. Lou sounds petty and devious, using his knowledge as a stick with which to keep his questioner down. He tries it again a little later. Lou Reed: “I just discovered this English classical musician named [Alex] Solomon. His Chopin is a revelation of how to play Chopin.”
Sylvie Simmons: “Wow, better than Rubinstein?”
Seemingly affronted by the immediacy of her response, Reed had to find something else at which to take umbrage: “Well I’m not a critic. That’s a typical journalist question. ‘Is it better than Rubinstein?’ Immediately grading.”

Of course, what most people would recognise in Simmons’ “better than Rubinstein?” response is the excited reaction of someone who thought they’d never hear Chopin played better than Arthur Rubinstein. If you take discourse away from the enjoyment of music, you take away a lot of the fun. Most music writing is just part of a big conversation, and a lot of the time, you seek it out much as you would a friend who is just as excited about the new record by David Bowie/Daft Punk/Radiohead/[insert any other recent example that has had you making noise about it]. The human urge to talk about something enjoyable has existed for as long as people have been talking and enjoying stuff.

Lou Reed knows this. In the privacy of his own home, I’m sure he and Laurie Anderson speak about their favourite artists by making reference to other artists. If Ginger Baker has any friends, I’m sure he does the same. But what he does in the Michael Hann interview is a disingenuous blend of tyranny and cowardice, gazing complicitly to his fans in order to get them to side with him against Hann. It’s a measure of his obnoxiousness that a mere handful take the bait.

As long as I never have to interview them, the outlook favoured by the likes of Baker and Reed doesn’t impinge on my world beyond the occasional cringe at other people’s interviews. Lou Reed isn’t wrong when he tells Sylvie Simmons that the work of the author shouldn’t be coloured by the knowledge that he beat his wife and sodomised his dog. It’s a point serially proved over the years by Van Morrison, whose worst songs are always, always, always the ones where he makes no attempt to conceal what a mollycoddled old primadonna he is. Over the years, he’s written enough songs about what a soul-sapping grind promotion is (this in spite of the fact that he hardly ever does any) and what a wearying distraction it presents from the rarefied business of making records. On 2003’s Goldfish Bowl, he sings, “Don’t they know I’m just a guy who sings songs?” The album that paid host to those songs, What’s Wrong With This Picture?, also features Too Many Myths and Fame. In both, Morrison surmises that celebrity isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Whilst that may be true, any bystanders may have felt compelled to point out that, without a certain level of celebrity, no major label would have touched this sort of generic hotel lobby dreck with a bargepole.

Perhaps the bottom line is that in music as in life, some people are just nicer than others. For every Van Morrison left damaged by success, there’s a Terry Reid who appears to be just as damaged by the lack of it. A few years ago, when Reid announced a series of UK shows, his publicist asked me if I might be able to drum up a few ticket sales by interviewing him for The Times. I love Terry Reid’s music. River, released in 1975, remains one of the great underrated albums of its era. Hotwired to a scorching pop tune, his primal blueswail on 1969‘s Speak Now Or Forever Hold Your Peace is one of my favourite vocal performances of all time. The problem was that I’d already interviewed Reid for The Times about eight months previously – and, to be honest, I had to persuade them the first time around. Purely out of love for Reid’s music, I arranged to interview him for the newspaper’s podcast slot. Once again, my employers were wholly indifferent to the entire enterprise. He turned up to the studio in Marylebone and, just as we were about to record, he glared at me and laid down an ultimatum. “Listen. I read the piece you wrote about me last time and I wanted to slash my wrists by the end of it. Just the same shit that everyone always turns out. I don’t want any of that Led Zeppelin [before Robert Plant joined Led Zeppelin, the job was apparently offered to Reid] bollocks; none of that shit that everyone always mentions every time they do a fucking interview, ok?”

Of course, the problem is that when you’re writing about Terry Reid for The Times, maybe about five per cent of the people reading have any clue who they’re reading about and why they should be reading about him. There was no new album to promote. Just a bunch of undersold shows and one fan at a newspaper trying to help him out by drumming up some publicity for them.

“It’s just a job, you know,” sings Van Morrison on 1991‘s Why Must I Always Explain. Sometimes it’s a great job; other times less so. But even when it’s at its worse, it’s hardly torture. That applies to both my job and theirs. We’re all just trying to get through the day. In December 2005, I interviewed Julian Casablancas of The Strokes in the Metropolitan Hotel, next to Hyde Park. Perhaps Casablancas had an frantic day. Certainly mine had been – a whirl of childcare and long features with short deadlines. The difference between us was that only one of us was unprofessional enough to show it. A few days before, I’d seen The Strokes play a secret show at ULU. Casablancas had been impassive all the way through it – his emotions partly obscured by the ever-present cop shades. I told him I could see the appeal of the dark glasses in that situation. Nice for focusing on individual audience members without the burden of communicating. It was really just the small talk at the beginning of the interview. But his response suggested that someone had just spooned salt into his tea. In the affronted pause, I attempted to retreat from any unintended analytic slight by suggesting to him that it was purely a cosmetic choice. Which prompted the retort, “Why are you wearing your sweater? I dunno… It’s as cosmetic as your sweater is.” From hereon in, the interview merely deteriorated further.

Interviews can be tedious, of course. But record labels are pretty lenient parents. You can choose not to do them if you don’t mind selling a few less records or play smaller venues. If you do, however, interviews will promote your record or gig by helping sate that need for discourse. And even though some artists would hate to admit it, sometimes that discourse can infer purpose and poetry from the dumbest motives. Early records by The Verve and The Killers aren’t really saying much more than “Everybody look at me!” – but they do so with a conviction and ambiguity that makes the first people to hear them (usually music writers) want to fight their corner and make a case for them. When Brandon Flowers sang, “You know you’ve gotta help me out/Yeah, oh don’t you put me on the backburner,” we were Gregory in Gregory’s Girl wanting to stand near to Dorothy, simply because she was the thing and we wanted to be near it. We could help create the excitement that helped him sell the records he needed to sell so that people could keep looking at him. Most musicians understand this. Even the ones who pretend not to.

It could have been Elvis Costello’s Tramp The Dirt Down, written when Margaret Thatcher’s premiership still had two years to run. Or it could have been a number of other songs which imagine scenes of very un-British jubilation greeting the news of her expiry. With his euphoric 2010 postscript to his 1983 hit The Story Of The Blues, Pete Wylie must have fancied his chances with The Day That Margaret Thatcher Dies. Over a bracing racket that sits square between Wild Thing and Get Off My Cloud, Wylie sings that the only reason he’ll go to her funeral is “to make sure she’s dead.” As Twitter hosted a battle between different factions to establish the national mood, Wylie tweeted that he wanted her to die “all over again.” For all of that, wasn’t it wise to exercise some taste and restraint? Surely the greater the zeal expressed in the reactions of Thatcher’s detractors, the greater the danger of ceding moral high ground to the present virulent superstrain of neocons who see 1979 as their year zero.

In the end though, it wasn’t up to me, any more than it was up to Louise Mensch, Gerald Howarth, John Redwood or the other hardline Thatcherites who descended upon newsrooms to try and help shape posterity’s view of her. What became clear at this stage was that, whatever song was decreed by common consensus to reflect the emotional mood, it probably wouldn’t be a Candle In The Wind. It was all a bit more complicated than that.
Every time anyone expressed anything other than sad-eyed sobriety at her passing, they were urged to “show a bit of respect.” But in South Wales and Tyneside, in communities all but flattened by the closure of mines, steelworks and shipyards they were celebrating before the sun even went down. Who would have dared to show up at those places and tell them to “show a bit of respect”?

At this early stage, it seemed that other songs that were surely in with a chance of becoming the unanimously decreed Thatcher requiem. Perhaps The Blow Monkeys’ Celebrate (The Day After You), initially written to mark the 1987 election defeat that never happened; or maybe Morrissey’s Margaret On The Guillotine. But the former was, if anything, too tasteful, whilst the latter – a listless dirge sung by one tyrant about another – is simply not up to the job. There’s a great playlist to be made out of all the songs that described how Margaret Thatcher’s government made much of Britain feel at the time: UB40’s Madam Medusa; The Beat’s Stand Down Margaret and The Specials’ Ghost Town – all written in the first two years of her first term – illustrate the lightning speed at which the Conservatives left a generation feeling utterly adrift. In 1984, The Icicle Works’ weary excoriation Up Here In The North Of England voiced suspicions since confirmed by the 2011 release of government documents which included a letter from Geoffrey Howe effectively dismissing Liverpool as a lost cause, advocating a “managed decline” of the city.

The problem faced by present day Conservatives is that most of that disenfranchised generation – many of whom were too young to vote – is still out there, while much of the demograph that kept the Tories in power for four terms has long joined Margaret Thatcher in death. In 2011, most of the British electorate voted against the Conservatives. Peruse the newspaper leader columns on any given day and that’s an easy thing to forget. But in a month which has already seen both The Daily Mail and George Osborne use the Mick Philpott verdict to declare class war, it suddenly feels like the Conservatives are speaking only for the minority who voted them to power. And that’s the problem with the “show a bit of respect” lobby. Many people have found their resentment not ameliorated by her passing, but inadvertently reignited as rolling news bulletins have invited them to remember what she had presided over: not just the decimation of aforementioned communities, but smaller, no less telling details: her description of the ANC as a “typical terrorist organisation”; her friendship with General Pinochet and her apparent belief that he “brought democracy to Chile”; the tears that she only ever seemed to shed for her missing son or – when betrayed by her own party – herself.

All of which, then, helps explain why one tune is trouncing the competition in the race to find a song that represents the national mood in the wake of her death. Margaret Thatcher was only 14 when Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead made its first appearance in The Wizard Of Oz – and at 51 seconds long, a 99p download hardly represents great value for money – but neither fact has impeded its showing (at the time of writing) at number one in the Amazon downloads chart and number two in the iTunes chart. In fact, some were lining it up for just such an occasion over two decades previously. On the evening of her departure from Number 10, Frank Skinner presided over a singalong of the Wizard Of Oz number at a Birmingham show. A few months later, at a Hammersmith, Elvis Costello augmented his own bilious Maggie memorial in favour of the same song. In The Day That Thatcher Died, Hefner’s rousing 2000 memoir of teenage politicisation in the 80s, Darren Hayman sang, “We will laugh the day that Thatcher dies/Even though we know it’s not right/We will dance and sing all night.” The last minute of the song gives way to the sound of children in a playground singing – yes, that’s right – Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead.

From the right, there continues a sense of shocked bewilderment that a country whose collective psyche has the notion of fair play hardwired into it has jettisoned the usual protocol when greeted with the death of a national icon. In Between The Wars – a song as synonymous with Thatcherism as any other record during her time in Number 10 – Billy Bragg sang, “sweet moderation, the heart of this nation/Desert us not.” So far though, the inner search for moderation has yet to yield very much at all. And so, come Sunday, the chart rundown will be no less a document of how Britain feels than all the lovingly fashioned colour supplements long since put together in anticipation of this eventuality. It’s this generation’s God Save The Queen moment, with Judy Garland stepping in to take the place of the Sex Pistols. To polarise Britain in life is no mean achievement. To do it in death is more remarkable still. It’s probably what she would have wanted.

(Thanks to @37filmsltd and @leftolightwater)