Engelbert Humperdinck's Eurovision genius

Just as the shock news that Engelbert Humperdinck is not only alive and well but representing Britain in this year’s Eurovision song contest is just about sinking in, today the 75-year-old crooner has unleashed his competition entry, a song entitled ‘Love Will Set you Free.’ And it confirms my suspicions that there are some seriously shrewd, musically Machiavellian minds behind this piece of left-field casting. On the one hand, thematically Humperdinck is ‘doing an Adele.’ In the vein of Someone Like You, Love Will Set you Free, written by Martin Terefe, belongs to the noble (and popular) category of magnanimous break-up songs. From Leonard Cohen’s Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye to Dolly Parton’s I Will Always Love You the magnanimous break-up song is the Liberal Democrat of the pop world, allowing the listener to sit on the emotional fence and be both sad and happy at the same time. ‘It is so sad that you’re jumping into bed with someone new, but I am such a kind, philosophical person that I let you go with my blessing, not by cutting your clothes up into tiny shreds and microwaving your mobile phone.’ Given that Adele might have declined an offer to turn around the UK’s fortunes in the Eurovision, it is a shrewd move to evoke a song that went top five in nearly every European country last year. On the other hand, this is a song so radically retro, it could have been dreamed-up by Peter Kay as part of a Eurovision satirical comedy. This doesn’t just nod to the early Seventies, it lovingly recreates the feel of 1972 Saturday night light-entertainment in all its orange-tinted, besuited blandness. Rather than Adele’s glottal stops and minor chord elisions, this is a waltz in the old-fashioned, oompah style, complete with twiddly Spanish guitars, polite strings and a hysterical key change and overblown orchestral sweep in the chorus’s final refrain. Even if you’ve had a hip-replacement you could sway to this and as Russia’s team of ‘OAP babushkas’ suggest, the 57th Eurovision in Baku, Azerbaijan might be swung by the grey vote. Humperdinck performs heartbreak in the old-style dignified way, saving his tears for his pillow, delivering lines about watching his beloved kiss another with a gigantic smile on his face. And so he should be grinning. Not only is his voice and hair in fine form for a man of his vintage, but he seems to know he is on to something. Either he is part of some fantastic ironic wheeze or he might be on to a winner. Either way there is a kind of genius at work. This is the sort of music you can only hear on Brian Matthew’s Radio 2 Sound of the Sixties show on a Saturday morning, or crucially, all over Europe, all the time. It is so anachronistic, so redolent of holiday evenings eating in a grease-stained taverna, Engelbert might as well be singing it in Portuguese. So Azerbaijani grannies will love it and Belgian Adele fans. The only people who will hate it are the people who mistake the Eurovision for a competition to find Europe’s best modern music. And they don’t even watch it, let alone vote. Like I said, genius.