On 6 April 1974, at the Brighton Dome on England’s south coast, the Eurovision Song Contest staged the most consequential evening in its history. Sweden’s entry, a glittering glam-rock stomper called Waterloo, launched ABBA on the world. Singing second that night, in a flowing dress, with the host nation’s hopes on her shoulders, was twenty-five-year-old Olivia Newton-John. She finished fourth — respectably, even honourably — performing a song she had never much liked, chosen over the song she actually wanted by a postal vote of British television viewers. Long Live Love is the story of a singer conscripted into somebody else’s battle, on the night pop history changed regiments.
The Songwriters Who Would Not Give Up
The song was written by Valerie Avon and Harold Spiro, staff writers at Belwin Mills Publishing since 1970, and Eurovision was their obsession. They had entered Britain’s national selection twice before: Can I Believe finished fourth of six in 1970, and In My World of Beautiful Things finished last of six in 1971. Newton-John already knew their work — in 1971 she had recorded their Don’t Move Away as a duet with Cliff Richard, issued as the B-side of his hit Sunny Honey Girl. Third time around, their luck turned, because the BBC changed the equation: instead of an open field of singers, the corporation internally selected Newton-John, then riding high with Let Me Be There, as Britain’s performer, and let the public choose only the song.
The stakes felt high because Britain took Eurovision seriously in those years, and with reason: Sandie Shaw had won the contest in 1967, Lulu had shared a four-way win in 1969, and British songs were expected to contend. The BBC’s decision to hand the job to a single proven singer — a strategy other countries had used to great effect — signalled that this was to be a professional operation. And Newton-John arrived in 1974 with fresh credentials of her own: only weeks before, in March, she had won the Grammy Award for Best Female Country Vocal Performance for Let Me Be There. Britain’s Eurovision entry would be sung by a reigning Grammy winner. What could go wrong was not the singer. It was the song the public picked for her.
A Postal Vote Against Her Own Favourite
The format was pure 1974. Newton-John performed all six candidate songs on Jimmy Savile’s BBC One show Clunk Click, and viewers voted by postcard. On 23 February 1974, the special A Song for Europe 1974 announced the tally: Long Live Love was the clear winner with 27,387 votes. The runner-up, Angel Eyes, received 18,018 — and Angel Eyes was Newton-John’s own favourite of the six. She recorded all six songs anyway; they made up half of her album Long Live Love, released in December 1974, with Angel Eyes consoled as the B-side of the single. She even cut a German-language version of the winner for the continental market, ever the professional, whatever her doubts.
Those doubts were real. Looking back, she admitted plainly: “I was never really happy with the song I had to sing.” Long Live Love is a brisk, brassy, big-chorus anthem — love treated as a cause to march for — and it pulled against everything that made her distinctive: the softness, the country shading, the intimacy that had taken If Not for You and Banks of the Ohio up the charts. The song asked her to be a cheerleader; her gift was to be a confidante.
The episode also exposed the flaw in the BBC’s borrowed strategy. Handing one singer all six songs guaranteed a polished performer but surrendered the songwriter contest to the unpredictability of a postcard vote, and the corporation quietly abandoned the single-singer format the following year, when the Shadows — a group, and coincidentally the very band that had backed Cliff Richard throughout Newton-John’s apprenticeship — represented Britain instead. The six songs she had sung on Clunk Click were left to make their own way on her December album, where Angel Eyes, the public’s runner-up and the singer’s favourite, has been winning the argument in retrospect ever since: it is the track fans of her early work consistently single out, the road not taken preserved on the B-side of history.
Brighton, 6 April 1974
The contest had landed in Brighton by accident of history — Luxembourg, winners in 1973, declined to host twice running, and the BBC stepped in, with veteran presenter Katie Boyle hosting her fourth contest. Newton-John was considered a strong contender. She performed second on the night, after Finland’s Carita Holmström and before Spain’s Peret, with Nick Ingman conducting and a five-woman backing chorale that included the Ladybirds, who had sung behind Sandie Shaw’s winning Puppet on a String in 1967. It was not enough. Long Live Love collected 14 points and finished in a three-way tie for fourth in a field of seventeen, level with Luxembourg’s Ireen Sheer and Monaco’s Romuald — while ABBA, in platform boots, took Waterloo to a victory, with 24 points, that rewired European pop. Italy’s Gigliola Cinquetti, a previous winner, came second with Sì, and the Netherlands third.
The 1974 contest has since acquired a mythology all its own: Greece made its debut that night, and Portugal’s entry, Paulo de Carvalho’s E depois do adeus, finished near the bottom — then, nineteen days later, was played on Portuguese radio as the first signal for the Carnation Revolution that ended Europe’s oldest dictatorship. One stage held ABBA’s coronation, a revolution’s starting pistol, and, second in the running order, Britain’s Grammy-winning representative gamely performing a song she had voted against with her own heart. Fourth place was no disgrace; context made it a triumph of sorts. She would prove to be the last solo performer to represent the United Kingdom at Eurovision until 1985, the contest drifting toward groups, and she remains one of the most famous artists ever to sing for Britain. But the night belonged, decisively, to the Swedes.
A Hit in Waterloo’s Shadow
The single did solid business on its own terms: number 11 in the UK, number 9 in Ireland, number 11 in her adopted homeland of Australia. Its most telling chart story unfolded in Norway, where Long Live Love spent three weeks at number 3 — held off the top, inevitably, by Waterloo itself, with Suzi Quatro and Terry Jacks filling the slot between. It reached the top ten in Belgium and Finland too, and it lingered respectably on the year-end lists in Australia and Belgium, but Britain’s anticipated Eurovision boost never quite became a continental breakthrough. Her breakthrough was being saved for a different continent entirely: within months, If You Love Me (Let Me Know) and then I Honestly Love You were carrying her to the top of the American charts, and the country-pop singer the BBC had borrowed became a Nashville Grammy winner instead.
The contrast between her two 1974 competitions tells the whole story of her career in miniature. In Brighton, chosen by committee and saddled with a public’s pick, she placed fourth and forgot the song as fast as dignity allowed. In Nashville that same October, she was voted Female Vocalist of the Year by the Country Music Association — an honour so controversial, for a singer born in England and raised in Australia, that disgruntled traditionalists formed a breakaway organisation in protest. One establishment had handed her a song she disliked; the other handed her a trophy it half-regretted. In both cases the talent was never the question.
There is a final irony in the paperwork. The Long Live Love album she recorded around the contest — half of it the six Song for Europe candidates — barely registered in Britain, but in America its material was folded into the compilation If You Love Me, Let Me Know, which climbed to number 1 on the Billboard 200 and made her, for a season, the biggest female singer in the United States. The Eurovision chapter thereby vanished inside its own successor: American buyers owned the songs without the story, and the story — Brighton, the postcards, the ABBA coronation — remained a piece of British and European television history, waiting for the contest’s own nostalgia industry to reclaim it.
The Song That Outlived the Snub
Time has been kind to the episode. After Newton-John’s death in August 2022, Eurovision’s official channel, with the BBC’s permission, uploaded her Brighton performance as a tribute — the contest honouring the star it once watched lose. Long Live Love itself survives in covers — Anthony Newley released it as a single in America in 1974, and singers in Norway and Finland recorded it in their own languages — and in the permanent trivia of pop: before there was Grease, before Physical, there was a young singer in Brighton gamely waving the flag for a song she didn’t choose, on the one night in Eurovision history when even winning might have made her only the second-biggest story in the room.