In 2016, Petra Mede and Mans Zelmerlow, the Swedish hosts of that year’s Eurovision Song Contest, performed an interval number that was part satire, part formalist analysis. Musically, they argued, a winning Eurovision entry should begin with ‘a battle horn of some kind’, add a cohort of bare-chested drummers, bring in the plaintive sound of an obscure indigenous folk instrument, then leap into an ambitious upward key-change.
For visual spectacle, they prescribed a burning piano, a trio of baking babushkas, or a man running in a giant hamster wheel. The title of their song was Love, Love, Peace, Peace – an expression of the wide-eyed, full-throated, internationalist optimism that the competition has tried to cultivate, and sometimes enforce since it began in 1956.
