Latest news with #Eurovision
Telegraph
4 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Life after Agadoo: The curse of the ‘Worst Song of All Time'
In the crepuscular gloom of a barely lit stage, a bearded man of pensionable age and with a 52-inch chest is swaying in the barrel-shaped costume of a tropical fruit. Audible, just, is the ghost of Eighties parties past. 'Ah…' chant monk-like voices. 'Ga…' they continue over funereal beats as the portly pineapple approaches a microphone stand. 'Dooo…' Altogether now: 'Agadoo doo doo, push pineapple shake the tree / Agadoo doo doo push pineapple grind coffee / To the left to the right jump up and down and to the knees / Come and dance every night sing with a hula melody!' (Daft dance, carnival whistles, rinky-dink keyboards, frolicking bananas and lurid Hawaiian shirts not pictured. Not yet, anyway.) With what will transpire is a typical mix of the haunting, the humbling and the hilarious, so begins Still Pushing Pineapples: with an image of its subject trapped in the metaphorical comedy clobber that characterises a 40-year novelty pop career that, against the odds, continues. Just about. Premiering at this month's Sheffield DocFest, it tells, in part, the story of Black Lace and their deathless – you might say death-conjuring – 1984 song Agadoo. But really it's the story of Dene Michael. The Yorkshire musician is the sole surviving core member of a group who, having come seventh for Britain at Eurovision 1979 with the song Mary Ann, bestrode the Eighties like a cheesy colossus. Black Lace enjoyed a run of gimmicky hits that also included Superman, I Am the Music Man, Do the Conga and the tinny disco reboot we didn't know we needed, of Hokey Cokey. I've re-listened to these so you don't have to. For the best part of two years, documentarian Kim Hopkins followed Michael as he plied his archaic Black Lace trade for the ageing and expiring holidaymakers of Blackpool, Whitby, Skegness and Minehead, his mobile disco machine, colourful shirts and ego-free pluck rattling in the back of his VW hatchback. The result is a film that – counter-intuitively given the profoundly naff musical subject matter – manages to be tender, empathetic and heartfelt. The 65-year-old director's last film was the Bafta-longlisted A Bunch of Amateurs. About the embattled Bradford Movie Makers, one of the oldest amateur filmmaking clubs in the world, it won the Audience Award at Sheffield DocFest 2022. She then began casting around for a subject for her next project. 'I was seeing lots of these IP – intellectual property – films.' By which she means proprietorial, self-authored films such as Taylor Swift's The Eras Tour. 'And I thought: 'I can't get to Taylor Swift or Madonna. What IP can I get to?'' Then a song this former punk dimly remembered from the mid-Eighties bobbed into her mind like a tiny paper brolly floating in a Sex on the Beach. 'I asked Alexa to play Agadoo. First time I'd heard it for 30 years. I thought: 'What happened to these people? Who are they?'' A quick Google revealed that these people, like her, had their roots in Yorkshire ('I didn't even know they were Brits!'). She duly contacted Michael and invited him to the Bradford premiere of A Bunch of Amateurs, 'to see the type of work that we do. Dean really enjoyed it and agreed for us to film, warts and all.' How does her subject feel about being, in Hopkins' filmmaking terms, the closest Britain has to Swift or Madonna? 'I'll tell you what, Craig, I'm very honoured that Kim did think about us!' replies the doughtily jovial Michael as he and the director share a video call from their respective corners of Yorkshire (she's in York, he's in the Dales). 'It's an honour, really,' he adds, comfy on a couch that's overhung by a Black Lace photograph and a poster from another totem of Yorkshire culture, Kes. 'Not many people get to tell their life story in a movie. So, hard work but very exciting.' Four decades on Michael, now 68, has a career he owes mostly to Agadoo. Written by a group of Frenchmen in the 1970s, Black Lace's cover reached Number Two, spent 30 weeks in the Top 75 and was voted The Worst Song of All Time in a 2003 poll in music magazine Q. The one-time staple of nightclub, holiday cabaret and wedding party is, then, both talisman and albatross – a song the singer dreads performing but has no option otherwise. Because, as great archive footage from Top of the Pops shows, Black Lace had quite the ride. They even enjoyed a new lease of life when, this century, Eighties nostalgia firmly kicked in. Michael recalls one 2015 celebrity booking thus: 'We'd done all these [retro] festivals with 30,000 people there. But the one that stood out for me was playing Ant and Dec's birthday party. It was their joint 40th, and it was in London [at Kensington Roof Gardens]. Everybody that was there was famous, and they were conga-ing around the room. There was Keith Lemon, Belinda Carlisle, Cheryl Cole – she actually got up on stage to sing Agadoo with us. Cheryl was doing the dance beside us!' And they were enjoying the music fully and un-ironically? 'They loved it! And funnily enough, after we come off stage, we was chatting with everybody, and they were all coming up and saying: 'Can we have a selfie with you?' All these famous people!' he marvels. There was markedly less good humour at Leeds Crown Court the following year, when Michael – under his full name Dene Michael Betteridge – was sentenced to six months in jail for fraudulently claiming £25,000 in disability benefits, despite his ability to perform what were described as 'vigorous' dance moves on stage with Black Lace. None of which is featured in Still Pushing Pineapples. Why? 'It's a film set in the present,' says Hopkins, 'with only the first five minutes showing Black Lace's heyday. It's not meant to be a comprehensive story covering Dene's entire life. He had many highs and lows, divorces, wives, children – and on a practical level, there's no archive material aside from some newspaper headlines. It's not relevant to the story I was trying to tell. The defining element of his life is the song.' Now, a decade on, the days of conga-ing in Kensington with Cheryl seem even more distant. As Hopkins' embedded cameras reveal, Michael is imprisoned in a different way. He now performs in notably reduced circumstances, often accompanied by his disabled mother and biggest fan, 91-year-old Anne, with whom he lives in a modest house in Bradford. In one of the few nightclubs left open to entertainers like him, we see the singer do his cheerful best to grab the grannies of Blackpool with his bag of party tunes and well-worn dance routines. At Southport Pontins, this long-term singleton divorcé reconnects with an old pal, single mum Hayley; within two months they're so loved up she's having his name and face tattooed on her arm. (Spoiler alert: reader, he didn't marry her, but they are still together.) Shortly after that, the trio embark on a road-trip. 'One of mum's dying [sic] wishes was to go back to Benidorm,' says Michael, 'because that was one of her favourite holiday places when my dad was alive.' So the new couple buy a Ford Transit Camper Van, plaster it with pineapple-based stickers and head off. Without narration, talking-head interviews or, notably, judgement or condescension, Hopkins crafts a gem of end-of-the-pier cinema verité. Those lows include some floor-clearing gigs when Michael sings his Motown medley and him enduring on-camera cryolipolysis (having his fat frozen), the better to impress his new girlfriend. The highs, meanwhile, are Black Lace turning on the Christmas lights in Wythenshawe town centre. Even the circumstances surrounding Michael's role as the sole torch-carrying hold-out from the good old days fall into Hopkins 'warts and all' category. His original partner in Black Lace, Barnsley native Alan Barton, died in 1995 when the tour bus carrying Smokie, the band Barton had joined after Black Lace, crashed in Germany during a storm. Michael's Black Lace origin story, too, is, to say the least, tricky. At Christmas 1985 he was promoted from backing singer to full-time member of the band, alongside Barton. He took the place of Colin Routh, fired due to, as the newspaper headlines had it, his 'underage sex shame' – a relationship with a 15-year-old (Routh said at the time he thought 'she was in her late teens or early twenties'). 'It's quite a difficult area,' acknowledges Hopkins with some understatement. 'I thought long and hard how to play that. That was also one of the reasons why I wasn't interested in a full history lesson on Black Lace. That would have been a different film. 'What I was really interested in was the fleeting nature of stardom,' she continues. 'In what happens to people when they've committed their entire lives to avoiding that nine-to-five job. Being a filmmaker, I'm in the same position. Dene and I are both from Yorkshire, we're of a similar age, we're both committed to what we do. And when you get to our age, you're left going: 'What was all that about?' That was the thing that really interested me.' Because, against all the odds and, you might say, all common sense, 'Dene is still on the road.' Hence, she says, the film's opening image of Michael dressed in – trapped in – the fruity costume. 'That's the metaphor… and the metamorphosis. There's no escaping the pineapple.' For Michael that remains the case, even when, towards the end of the film, after 40 years' service to the Black Lace 'brand', he's sacked – by text – by the longstanding manager and owner of said brand. He's duly reduced to billing himself as Dene Michael, 'former member of Black Lace'. It leaves only three gigs in the diary, climaxing at that booking in Wythenshawe, 50 miles from his home. It's the loneliness of the short-distance tribute act, with Michael a tribute to himself. But that pineapple must still be pushed. That point was further driven home to Hopkins last summer. Routh died, aged 70, and she filmed Michael watching a video of his old bandmate's Tenerife funeral. We hear the vicar saying that Routh was happy with Agadoo being regularly described as the worst song ever written. 'And of course,' says Hopkins, 'Agadoo was played as his coffin was taken out. 'I thought: 'You can't escape this. You have become part of this. It's one and the same thing.' That was a eureka moment for me. Dean is not going to escape Agadoo. He has to embrace it.' Yet Michael remains as hopeful as he is defiant as he is deluded. As he says at one point, considering the possibility of one more novelty hit and cranking up ChatGPT to have a go at writing one, 'I've still got that ambition, still got that hope'. Which is why, as it says on stickers on his motorhome and VW's bumpers, he's 'still pushing pineapples'. The result is affectionate social realism – or, given the room-emptying qualities that many ascribe to Agadoo and Black Lace, anti-social realism. So much so that the film opens with an on-screen warning: 'This film features scenes from the 1980s that portray attitudes of the time which may or may not align with today's values. Viewer discretion is advised.' Is that, I wonder, a reference to another of Black Lace's, er, bangers, Gang Bang ('a gang bang is the thing to do, we'd like to give you one')? ' Pretty much, yes,' replies Hopkins. 'Wig Wam Bam is also probably pretty difficult these days,' she adds of another of their iffy hits. 'It's basically cultural appropriation – it's about Native Americans.' Michael and Barton famously appeared as themselves in Alan Clarke's classic, Bradford-set, kitchen-sink comedy Rita, Sue and Bob Too (1987), performing Gang Bang. Does he still play it now? 'I do to audiences over 18,' the musician replies. 'Obviously, when there's children in there, I wouldn't perform it. But in nightclubs, when they've all had a drink and everything, I do. And obviously people recognise me from the film, although I've changed my image a little bit. So people still know the song and still want to hear it performed.' You'd be hard pushed to describe Still Pushing Pineapples as anything like a typical music documentary, as hagiographic or as even celebratory. It's downbeat, melancholic, but also strangely warming. It's a measured, thoughtful, pathos-rich, slow TV-style elegy for a lost time, a lost culture, a lost Britain. None of which are adjectives or ideas you'd normally connect with a band whose ear-maggot music was very much of its era. Hopkins admits she 'started off with a film featuring party anthems'. But as she followed Michael back and forth along the A64, 'what I saw and felt was something else. Without making too grandiose claims, there's some allegorical feeling about that lie about Britain that we constantly try and [hide].' She mentions Adam Curtis's new iPlayer documentary series Shifty, which digs deep into that very idea (the UK is in 'a hazy, dream-like flux in which no one can predict what is coming next'), and the comparison is valid. 'Dene's fanbase is in Blackpool and Skegness and Minehead, these places that are really struggling. And that fanbase is dwindling. They're getting older. They're dying off. The club circuit's disappearing. So the feeling I had by the end is: the party's over.' On one level, Dene Michael would go along with that. 'I've got spondylitis in the back, and I've just found out I've got prostate cancer. But they've caught it in time. So I'm OK. I'm going to be fine.' But on another level, tickled by his close-up moment at Sheffield DocFest, he's as driven as ever. As Hopkins, radiating affection for her subject, puts it: 'Mum and Dene don't have a glass-half-full philosophy. They're glass-is-completely-full.' So, even though the film draws to a close with Michael concerned about sparse bookings, an empty diary and fears about how he's going to support himself and his mum, the man talking to me now speaks of more gigs – and more hope. 'I choose the venues that I like to perform at now, because I'm sort of semi-retired. But who knows – after this film, I'll probably be back on tour again!' 'I hope so, Dene,' says Hopkins.
Irish Daily Mirror
5 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Daily Mirror
Former Eurovision star considered taking his own life after song contest
Former Eurovision star Joe McCaul has revealed he considered taking his own life after the song contest. Joe was part of brother and sister duo, Donna and Joe McCaul, who represented Ireland at the Eurovision in 2005 in Ukraine with their song Love while Joe was still just 17. After failing to qualify, Joe revealed he faced months of ridicule and only got a holiday to Crete out of it. Speaking to Brenda Dennehy on The Comeback podcast, he said: 'I remember when we didn't get in, the devastating effect that had on me. "I went back to my room, I was only 17, and I struggled very hard because that was more shame, more embarrassment, more rejection. Everyone was going out, and they (Donna and the crew) went to the finals on Saturday night, I didn't go, I just stayed in my hotel room.' He said when he returned to Ireland, he was ridiculed regularly. The Irish Mirror's Crime Writers Michael O'Toole and Paul Healy are writing a new weekly newsletter called Crime Ireland. Click here to sign up and get it delivered to your inbox every week 'I think over the years, I was nearly taken advantage of. I was made an eejit out of by people, people in the media. That was hard because I was saying, 'Where is my self-worth, why can't I be assertive?' 'I found it very hard to be assertive because I didn't like conflict, and then because I didn't like conflict, if I reacted a certain way, some people would say 'Oh that was very aggressive'. So I couldn't even stand up for myself.' Joe said he thought they'd be 'millionaires' but all he got after Eurovision was 'a holiday in Crete'. 'I thought we were going to be millionaires. I thought I was going to be able to buy my mother out of the council estate. I got a holiday to Crete, that's what I got.' Joe is the youngest of six siblings and his mother raised them on her own. 'My dad, unfortunately, passed away a couple of years ago, but I had no kind of relationship with him. Alcoholism, unfortunately, took over his life and then he moved to London.' Joe said when a media outlet discovered his father's issue with drink it caused massive stress on the family. 'Once or twice I thought of taking my own life.' He said he had suffered recurrent intrusive thoughts about suicide from an early age. 'The intensity of it then would probably get a little more if I was under any increased stress or anything significant was happening in my life or something bad was happening… I was always terrified of the thought… I would always be going, 'f**k, I need to see a psychiatrist'.' After a stint on X Factor in 2015, where Simon Cowell called him an 'awful performer', Joe suffered at the hands of social media trolls again. 'And then there was the shame, the embarrassment, the rejection, and I just wanted it to be over there. 'The s**t that was put online, I remember my friends used to be sending them to me and the horrible stuff that people were saying. I used to have to say 'please do not send me this, I don't want to be looking at it'.' Joe revealed in 2014 that he had been diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis at the end of 2013. 'I literally just lost the plot then. I think I went on a self-destruct button that was hit. I went off the rails for months.' He said he was on medication that didn't suit him at the time but has since changed medication and is currently symptom free and in remission. 'Fitness, running, doing kind of high-intensity interval based kind of training has been my saviour. Not just for my physical health because that's quite good but for my mental health, which is an ongoing struggle that some days I'm really, really shit. 'But I have really good coping tools and I have a really solid support group around me,' he added.
Sunday World
11 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Sunday World
Eurovision star says he considered taking his own life after mental health turmoil
'I thought we were going to be millionaires. I thought I was going to be able to buy my mother out of the council estate. I got a holiday to Crete, that's what I got.' Former Eurovision singer Joe McCaul has told how he has struggled with mental health for years and even thought of taking his own life – but is coping much better now and is engaged to his partner Mark. The brother and sister double act Donna and Joe McCaul were selected to represent Ireland at the Eurovision in 2005 in Ukraine with their song 'Love' while Joe was still just 17. However, they failed to qualify for the finals – coming 14 out of 22 in the semi-final – and Joe has told how he was ridiculed and trolled in the aftermath. 'I thought we were going to be millionaires. I thought I was going to be able to buy my mother out of the council estate. I got a holiday to Crete, that's what I got.' The Athlone man revealed his lifelong struggle with his mental health and negative side of becoming a household namewhen he spoke to Brenda Dennehy on The Comeback podcast. Donna and Joseph McCaul News in 90 Seconds - June 18th 'Remember when we didn't get in, the devastating effect that had on me. I went back to my room, I was only 17, and I struggled very hard because that was more shame, more embarrassment, more rejection. Everyone was going out, and they (Donna and the crew) went to the finals on Saturday night, I didn't go, I just stayed in my hotel room.' He said when he returned to Ireland he was ridiculed regularly. 'I think over the years, I was nearly taken advantage of. I was made an eejit out of by people, people in the media. That was hard because I was saying, 'Where is my self-worth, why can't I be assertive?' 'I found it very hard to be assertive because I didn't like conflict, and then because I didn't like conflict, if I reacted a certain way, some people would say 'Oh that was very aggressive,' So I couldn't even stand up for myself.' Joe is the youngest of six siblings and his mother raised them on her own. 'My dad, unfortunately, he's passed away a couple of years ago, but I had no kind of relationship with him. Alcoholism, unfortunately, took over his life and then he moved to London.' Joe said when a media outlet discovered his father's issue with drink it caused massive stress on the family. 'Once or twice I thought of taking my own life.' He said he had suffered recurrent intrusive thoughts about suicide from an early age. 'The intensity of it then would probably get a little more if I was under any increased stress or anything significant was happening in my life or something bad was happening… I was always terrified of the thought…I would always be going, f**k, I need to see a psychiatrist.' In 2015, X Factor producers asked him to audition for the UK show in front of Simon Cowell. He agreed, hoping it would go okay. 'I thought maybe I could have a little breakthrough here.' However, Cowell described him as an awful performer and stopped him halfway through. 'And then there was the shame, the embarrassment, the rejection, and I just wanted it to be over there.' They asked him to perform another song. He took solace from the empathy of presenter Caroline Flack, who died by suicide in 2020, after he was given another chance to perform in front of the judges. 'Caroline Flack, God love her, was with Olly Murs back then, and she was so kind to me and so nice and help me pick a song. She was even singing with me… Caroline Flack had an energy about her. She had her hand over me and it was like a way of apologising for the way I was treated. She had empathy.' Joe said it was one of the lowest moments of his life. Joe was trolled online in the aftermath. 'The s**t that was put online, I remember my friends used to be sending them to me and the horrible stuff that people were saying. I used to have to say please do not send me this, I don't want to be looking at it.' He said on the plus side he did a bit of media again in the aftermath and got a few gigs but he still 'really just wanted to forget that whole moment ever existed'. Joe revealed in 2014 that he had been diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis at the end of 2013, 'I literally just lost the plot then. I think I went on a self-destruct button that was hit. I went off the rails for months.' He said he was on medication that didn't suit him at the time but has since changed medication and is currently symptom free and in remission. He said he got back into running that has helped a lot as well as support from his partner Mark and his therapist and family and friends. 'Fitness, running, doing kind of high-intensity interval based kind of training has been my saviour. Not just for my physical heath because that's quite good but for my mental health which is an ongoing struggle that some days I'm really, really shit. But I have really good coping tools and I have a really solid support group around me.' His sister came out as gay years ago and Joe said when he told his family he was gay as well, it didn't surprise any of them. 'It was like they all kind of new. Donna was more of a shock. He said he went back studying in recent years doing a business course and a course on mental health before starting teaching in stage schools doing vocals. "...I met Mark. Mark is already a teacher. He said why don't you go back and do your teaching degree – so I went back and did my degree and I have that nearly four years now. So I am secondary school music and special educational teacher now.' If you have been affected by issues in this article, call Samaritans free on 116 123 or email jo@ or call Pieta on Freephone 1800 247 247 or text HELP to 51444.
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Eurovision Drama and ‘The Nameless': Movistar Plus+ Exec Touts Focus on Event Programming
Ambition, emotion and event programming — those are some of the key factors that Spanish pay-TV and streaming giant Movistar Plus+ is looking for in its originals, including its Eurovision Song Contest drama miniseries La Canción (The Song). Susana Herreras, manager of original fiction content production at the company, which is part of Telefónica, touted several examples of such content at the Conecta Fiction & Entertainment industry gathering in Cuenca, Spain, on Tuesday. More from The Hollywood Reporter In Spain, Warner Exec Explains the HBO Max Rebrand Richard E. Grant, Ruth Jones to Star in 'The Other Bennet Sister' for BBC, BritBox European Box Office Revenue Rises (Barely) Despite Softer Admissions She showed a teaser for the recent series La Canción, which tells the story of how Spain under General Franco in 1968 upset the U.K. frontrunner Cliff Richard and his 'Congratulations' to win the Eurovision Song Contest with Massiel's 'La la la.' Created by Pepe Coira and Fran Araújo, and directed by Alejandro Marín, the series stars Carolina Yuste, Patrick Criado, Àlex Brendemühl, and Marcel Borràs. Movistar Plus+ Internacional is distributing the show outside of Spain. Herreras also teased the psychological thriller series Los Sin Nombre (The Nameless), which is set to debut in June. Created by Pau Freixas and Pol Cortecans, written by the latter and directed by the former, the series stars Miren Ibarguren, Rodrigo de la Serna, and Milena Smit. 'It is key for us to manage to make projects into events,' the Movistar Plus+ executive told Conecta. 'We need to have an emotional connection.' One of the most important keys for the Spanish player is ambition, Herreras concluded. 'This is how we want to be defined.' At a time when more and more industry players look for co-productions to put together the budgets needed for the kind of ambition that audiences expect these days, Movistar Plus+ is always open for co-producers where it makes sense. 'We have the will to keep looking for partners,' Herreras explained. Earlier in the Conecta conference day, executives from the likes of Gaumont Television and Warner Bros. Discovery discussed their original programming plans and the state of the TV industry. Best of The Hollywood Reporter 'The Studio': 30 Famous Faces Who Play (a Version of) Themselves in the Hollywood-Based Series 22 of the Most Shocking Character Deaths in Television History A 'Star Wars' Timeline: All the Movies and TV Shows in the Franchise
The Irish Sun
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Irish Sun
‘I had so much fear before releasing this post', says Ireland AM star as she reveals major career move
IRELAND AM star Brooke Scullion has revealed her major career move and admitted she was nervous to share the news with fans. The Advertisement 3 Brooke has been announced as a support act for Ella Henderson 3 The singer will perform in Derry this August Credit: Andres Poveda LTD 3 Brooke shared the 'amazing' news with fans Brooke has now been announced as a support act for Ella Henderson at her upcoming gig in Derry this August. The Eurovision star told how she's "so proud" to be joining the Ghost hitmaker on stage in her hometown and can't wait to showcase some of her new music. She took to In a heartfelt post, she wrote: "Hey everyone, it's been a minute… Advertisement READ MORE ON BROOKE SCULLION "First of all, Ella Henderson has been a massive inspiration and idol to me from the beginning of my career so it's an absolute honour to be able to support her in my home city." The Derry singer also admitted that the announcement felt like a huge step for her. She confessed: "Now, real talk. Had so much fear before releasing this post because it's the first gig that I'll have done in a while." Brooke also revealed that she's been working hard behind the scenes, writing and recording new music. Advertisement most read in the irish sun She said: "I've been writing new music for the last three years and I finally have an album that I'm so proud of." Although she said the release journey "won't be immediate", Brooke explained that this gig "will be the first time anyone gets to hear this new music and new direction". Brooke Scullion slips up on live TV Brooke then thanked her supporters, saying: "Thanks for all your love and support always it means the world. Brooke x." Fans and friends flocked to the comment section to congratulate her and share their excitement. Advertisement Kerry Anne wrote: "OMG wow huge congratulations Brooke." Amy gushed: "Yesss Brooke! This is amazing." 'AMAZING' Siobhan added: "Yes girl! You are amazing." Advertisement Brooke was recently left cringing after she made a The star was on air with and for some hilarious TV laughs. And Brooke ended up making a grave error while presenting on the show. The Derry native was told to "stand by for rehearsals" but then was quickly told there was "no time". Advertisement However, she didn't hear that they were actually live on TV and still thought she practicing her lines off air. The 25-year-old made some mistakes while reading out the auto cue.
