Eurovision Song Contest – Why I am a fan

As the Eurovision Song Contest has finished about a month ago now, I want to mention the story of why I became a fan of the show which becomes one part of my interest in travel today.

It all happened when I was 15 years old. I was switching channels on the front room TV one day and I saw images of musicians performing with country names on the TV screen. I had later identified the images coming from a TV show called the Eurovision Song Contest. I watched the rest of the show and the country who had won at that time was Turkey. Ever since then, things have changed quite a bit thanks to that one moment.

In the following year, this was the first time I had saw the contest in full and I had even betted some money on it for the winner. The winner at that time was Ukraine who was a well-deserved winner which was a woman singer who resembled Xena the Warrior Princess. When the contest was over, I started to research on the artists that had participated that year on the internet, even though I didn’t even have my own PC at that time at home, thus my online time was limited. I mainly relied on internet cafes and college libraries for my research at that time and I felt extremely limited to what I could do. I had also joined various internet forums as well to get my fixes as I had increasingly went off domestic music by the day.

By the new year, I had managed to obtain a brand-new PC of my own. With this new arsenal, I had managed to research all the stuff I had wanted, particularly the most recent participants of that year and the older participants. Some of the very first artists I had got to know thanks to my PC were Tose Proeski of FYR Macedonia and Sakis Rouvas of Greece, both of whom participated that previous year. Unfortunately, over 2 years later, Tose had died in a sudden car accident at the young age of 26 and this had put an impact on me greatly because of several reasons. One, he was a very talented young artist who had a bright future infront of him, two, I related myself to him quite a lot because of my background coming from the same geographical region as him and three, it was thanks to him that I had discovered quite a lot of artists from the Eurovision Song Contest, some of which I still follow today. As well as those two artists, I have also followed other artists from the year I got my PC as well, particularly Helena Paparizou, that year’s winner who I am still a fan of even to this day.

The moment I turned 18, I was legally old enough to obtain a debit card and with that, one of my very first purchases came from one of the artists I still follow now. As well as that, regular visits up London’s Oxford Street to shop in the HMV and Virgin Megastore shops added to this because they sold imported CDs from those artists which can only be found up there. Even though the CDs were expensive at the time because of the import tax imposed on them, I went up there once a month to do my CD benders. The CDs that were on sale there were Greek, Israeli, Latino, French, Italian, Turkish and so many others. Many of the artists have been in Eurovision on at least one occasion so many of them are top stars in their own countries and I have also got to know other non-Eurovision artists as well because of collaborations, both musically and in live performances.

I also joined many internet forums and online fangroups during that period as well. It was from there was when I made a lot of online friends and had started to travel to concerts. There were occasions where I felt very isolated at college and relied on much more online when it came to making friends and turning to people for support. My first concert abroad was in Corfu in Greece when I saw Sakis Rouvas back in 2007 and ever since then, I have been to Greece five times in total, all for concerts apart from the one occasion where I visited Rhodes for a few hours via Marmaris in Turkey back in 2011. Unfortunately, the Greek economic crisis had severely impacted the music scene in Greece for many years which meant that for myself, it was only last year was when I had started to travel to Greece for concerts again after an absence of over 8 years.

Another reason I am into Eurovision is because of the inclusivity this brings out. As I have Asperger’s myself, this is seen as a way for me to be accepted better into the community. Over the years I have been a member of several fan groups relating to the competition and most of the people I have spoken to or got to know have at least one thing in common in that respect. Whether they are LGBT, disabled, from a different ethnic background or nationality, Eurovision is a way to bring those people together. After so much stigmatisation and ignorance from people in the real world on a personal basis, I had started to eventually meet up with some people I knew in real life as well as continuing to meet new people online as well. Travelling as well has made me want to get to know people from all over the world and I hope one day I will meet all my online friends no matter where they live.  

Eurovision is also one reason why I had an interest of travelling to Europe since I was a teenager to the point of hoping to travel to every country on the continent at least once in my lifetime I will mention more in depth later in a separate post. This was born when I had travelled to Milan when I was 17 and I flew over the Swiss Alps on the plane. This had formulated into something more serious one year later when I went to Gibraltar during a trip to the Algarve in Portugal for my 18^th birthday. When I went to Corfu in 2007, I even went to Albania because it was opposite the island, about less than an hour away. All of these had formulated into a lifetime goal of travelling to every European country. Depending on my time, money and other factors including work, I wasn’t sure when I could do this nor know how long I would take to do this. It didn’t matter if I was 35, 40 or even 60 when I do complete this challenge, but I personally prefer to do this when I am young and able. Eurovision was the main motivation for this because of myself being a fan for so long and I felt doing this was like collecting Pokémon to them in terms of travelling to those countries that have participated in the competition.

I totally understand that in an Asperger’s point of view, their obsessions in Anime, Pokemon and other similar things are used to deal with their personal struggles on a daily basis. For me the Eurovision Song Contest is my way out of my struggles growing up as a teenager and I can even relate this to the most recent phenomenon in the Far East, the popularity of K Pop. There is a lot of reports around especially on social media of record collecting from fans and travelling around the world to attend concerts were all parallel to what I did in Greece all those years ago and before that when I went shopping for CDs up Oxford Street. All of this most certainly shows that travel and Asperger’s do have a connection as far as fanclubs are concerned and I would most certainly would like to hear your stories regarding a similar thing you are interested in.