Like Abba eight years previously, Nicole Hohloch from Saarbrücken (representing West Germany) had won Eurovision in the UK, this time hosted by Jan Leeming in the Harrogate Conference Centre. Like Abba, Nicole also took her winner to Number 1 in the UK, the third consecutive year that the Eurovision winner had achieved this.
She had won Eurovision by a mile with ‘Ein Bißchen Frieden’ in German, gaining the maximum ‘douze points’ from nine of the seventeen other juries. Performing last, a 17 year-old girl seated on a stool, with a white guitar, singing a simple song about world peace, had cleaned up at a time when Europe was gripped by nuclear arms build-up, Reagan, Thatcher and fear of the cold war getting out of hand. Chig had been getting into trouble at school by going on CND marches and forming human chains around Greenham Common. Against this backdrop, when cunning linguist Nicole took us all by surprise and sang her winning reprise in French, Dutch and English too, it was all too much and 15 year-old Chig had to pretend not to be crying as he made his family keep quiet while he held the microphone of his tiny cassette recorder to the TV set. (That Summer, on a school trip to Holland, Chig bought the Dutch version of the 7” single. Even now, he can sing along to it in Dutch without having much idea what the actual words are!)
Nicole went on to save herself from the ‘one hit wonder’ category by the narrowest margin possible when her follow-up single scraped one week in the chart, at #75, giving her a chart career composed entirely of singles which peaked at either end of the UK chart. She’s still well-known in Germany. Nicole was Germany’s first Eurovision winner. They’re still waiting for their second.
"A little loving, a little giving, to build a dream for the world we live in, a little patience and understanding for our tomorrow, a little peace."
Number One number 500
