The Brief Existence of Madeleine Pascal

There was an unusual number of young female singers born in Paris in the 1940s who competed in Eurovision in the 1960s. Despite their Parisian roots, most of them did not represent France in the contest:

  • Françoise Hardy (Monaco 1963)
  • France Gall (Luxembourg 1965)
  • Marjorie Noël (Monaco 1965)
  • Madeleine Pascal (Switzerland 1966)
  • Géraldine Gaulier (Switzerland 1967)
  • Minouche Barelli (Monaco 1967)

Some of them became well-known in the Francophone countries and enjoyed success becoming music icons, while others were less fortunate and only had brief careers in music before fading into obscurity.

Madeleine Pascal Picture
Madeleine Pascal had a brief career in music before fading into obscurity.

Who is Madeleine Pascal?

Madeleine Pascal (I doubt that’s her real name) was born somewhere between 1945 and 1946 in Paris, France. Before entering the contest, she had been singing since she was 13 years old:

When I was a child, whenever I found myself alone, I would sing to fill that loneliness; in this way, time would pass quickly for me, and even the fear.

Source: Car Magazine

The first time she recorded a song was in October 1965 and it was titled “Ma chanson d’amour“.

Eurovision Song Contest 1966

Four months later, on February 5th, 1966, Madeleine Pascal was chosen to represent Switzerland in Eurovision after winning the national selection. In the contest, she finished in 6th place with 12 points. That’s quite an achievement!

At that time, she was 20 years old and had been working in a necklace shop for the past two years. In addition to music, she had a passion for fashion, and her dream was to sing and own a country house!

According to Dutch newspaper Algemeen Dagblad, she was terrified of snakes, had a dog named Nana, and also a pitch-black cat.

Without heels, she stood at 160 cm tall!

Madeleine Pascal by the lake
Madeleine Pascal standing next to Lake Geneva.

Disappearance

The post-Eurovision fame provided Madeleine Pascal with the opportunity to appear on national television for several countries, including Belgium, Austria, and the Netherlands. She also released a single titled “J’aime les oignons” which became her last known released song.

The most recent information I could find about Madeleine Pascal, whether through television, music records, or newspapers, was her appearance on the television show Au risque de vous plaire on January 28, 1967, where she performed “J’aime les oignons.”

For some reason, Madeleine Pascal’s music career came to an end. After years of chasing her dream of singing and finally starting to record songs, it lasted just a little over a year.

Nobody really knows what happened to Madeleine Pascal after her brief moment in the spotlight. It’s possible that the music industry was not what she had hoped for and perhaps she moved on to a regular job where she doesn’t have to sing about loving onions.
Leave a comment down below if you know more about Madeleine Pascal.

Evropesma: The Good, The Bad, and the… Beer Bottles?

From 2004 to 2006, Serbia and Montenegro used Evropesma as their national final for Eurovision. Twice, the winning song went to Eurovision, and to this day, Serbia and Montenegro is the only country in Eurovision history to have never placed out of the top ten. The third edition, however, is a far different story. Although a result was allegedly reached and a winning song chosen, the winner of Evropesma 2006 never ended up going to Eurovision.

The winning song of a national final not going to Eurovision is hardly a new concept. Whether because the winning artist did not want to participate in the contest or because the song was found out to have been previously released, it has happened more times than expected. There was nothing expected about Evropesma 2006, or, it could be argued, about Evropesma. All three editions were rife with controversy (and full of artists who would eventually represent former Yugoslav nations at Eurovision). This is a look at Evropesma and the drama that would soon become synonymous with it.

Continue reading “Evropesma: The Good, The Bad, and the… Beer Bottles?”

Uncovering the 1956 Grand Prix

The very first Eurovision Song Contest, held in Lugano in 1956, holds many mysteries to the modern Eurofan. As it was the inaugural edition, it is possible that the organisers did not bother to keep a recording of the show, as they were unaware of what the contest would become. Even the voting results are unknown, and the placings of each entry (bar the winner) have become lost to time. Other than an audiotape of the contest, the only recording we have is a two-minute video clip of the show.

Until now. Recently, a five-minute clip of the full winner’s reprise has begun to circulate on the internet, uncovering a previously unknown incident that occurred. Delving further, we have also been able to find photographs from the live show as well as rehearsals for the big night. These pictures give us a glimpse of what television viewers may have seen when the contest aired in 1956.

We share our findings below.

Continue reading “Uncovering the 1956 Grand Prix”

Introducing All Kinds of ESC!

For those of you following us on Twitter, you may be familiar with our now-frequent posts in which we present bits of trivia regarding all that has to do with the Eurovision Song Contest, including behind-the-scenes moments and tidbits from the national finals.

It has received a lot of positive interaction and we’d like to continue doing this. Therefore, this month, we are formalizing this by launching All Kinds of ESC! This project will be a space to capture the myriad of bite-sized Eurovision-related trivia.

Our tweeting activity will continue as usual, but periodically (we are aiming for once a month), we will post a compilation of our trivia tweets here on the blog, as an archive.

Thank you for being part of our journey and we look forward to sharing more of these fun facts with you!

P.S. In case you were curious, here are all the references made in the cover art:

Continue reading “Introducing All Kinds of ESC!”

Congratulations and celebrations! The story of a match made at Eurovision

Love is in the air, and at the Eurovision Song Contest, love songs have always had their presence in the contest. Throughout the years, we have heard various entries discuss virtually every aspect of romantic love that one can imagine, from love at first sight to the end of a relationship.

But perhaps what’s more interesting than the songs themselves are the stories behind them. As far as we know, Eurovision has been an integral element of the love stories of quite a few couples throughout the years. The 2008 hosts, Željko Joksimović and Jovana Janković, began dating shortly after the contest and married a few years later. Prominent songwriter Borislav Milanov met his future wife Tamara Gachechiladze at the 2017 contest, where she was competing for Georgia.

In this article, we will look at the love story of another match made at Eurovision: Phil Coulter and Geraldine Brannigan.

Continue reading “Congratulations and celebrations! The story of a match made at Eurovision”

A Song for Everyone: Most popular entries by year

This is an instalment of the A Song for Everyone series.

In our most recent post, we got to see the most popular and least popular Eurovision entries as indicated by fans. But with the large amount of data we have, the project does not stop there.

Here’s a reminder of the format of the project:

We launched A Song for Everyone, a project in which we aimed to find out whether every single Eurovision entry in history has its fans. To achieve this, we opened a form that listed every single Eurovision entry (including entries from 1993, 1996, and 2020 that never saw the ESC stage). Respondents were asked to select each entry that they liked. Unlike other projects that aim to measure the popularity of entries, a points system was not in place and respondents were free to select as many entries as they wanted.

Below, we will look at what the most-liked songs from each year are, as voted by the 56 participants in the project.

Continue reading “A Song for Everyone: Most popular entries by year”

A Song for Everyone: Which songs have the most fans? Which songs have no fans?

Last month, we launched A Song for Everyone, a project in which we aimed to find out whether every single Eurovision entry in history has its fans. To achieve this, we opened a form that listed every single Eurovision entry (including entries from 1993, 1996, and 2020 that never saw the ESC stage). Respondents were asked to select each entry that they liked. Unlike other projects that aim to measure the popularity of entries, a points system was not in place and respondents were free to select as many entries as they wanted.

By the time the form closed on December 12th, we received 56 respondents. In the weeks that passed, we took the time to look at the data. We will share our findings over the course of a few articles, since there is so much data. Consider this the first article of the series.

After 56 respondents, we have found a fan for every single Eurovision entry… except for two. We also found that some entries get much more love than others, and we will look at that below.

Anyway, here are the results.

Continue reading “A Song for Everyone: Which songs have the most fans? Which songs have no fans?”

Is there a Eurovision song that no one likes? Introducing: A Song for Everyone

Recently, I saw someone ask whether there was a Eurovision entry that is genuinely disliked by everyone within the Eurovision community. Some people put forth suggestions, but others came out to say that they, in fact, liked those entries.

When you think of it, in order to make it to the contest in the first place, a broadcaster needs to approve of the song before giving it the ticket. That is the bare minimum, particularly in the case of an internal selection. When a national final is held, the national final organisers need to approve of the song, and then voters decide that it is qualified. Thus, it might be hard to imagine that such a song exists.

Yet at the same time, there are many songs that don’t seem to get much love within ESC fan circles. They are hardly ever talked about, and often fail to score any votes in the annual ESC250 countdown.

So here’s a project that asks an inverse question: Is every Eurovision entry liked by at least one person?

Continue reading “Is there a Eurovision song that no one likes? Introducing: A Song for Everyone”