Welcome to edition 89 of the ESC Insight Newsletter. This week we’ve got news from selections across the continent from Lisadell to Latvia in both JESC and ESC, as well as the best bits we’ve read around the interweb. Read that newsletter in full on this link.
In Robertson’s Reflection this week we focus on the career of Richard Herrey, who serenaded the crowd at the Annual Meeting of Melodifestivalklubben last week. Richard stumbled into Melodifestivalen through good fortune, and hasn’t looked back since.
It was Richard Herrey, the front man of the Herreys, who was in Gothenburg for one evening. This man is now schlager legend, having worked with Christer Björkman on a TV show in the 90’s, starting up a schlager tour around Sweden and for previously been manager of Golden Hits – the place to go for middle aged people to pretend to be Carola or Lena Ph for a night. He proves that Eurovision is more than one night in this country.
What was fascinating was that Richard was very lucky to get through to Melodifestivalen, and that big break, at all. He told the story on stage last week of how he was working in LA as a dancer in the early 80’s, and it just so happened that a Swedish TV crew stopped by. This got picked up by a coming-of-age Bert Karlsson, the man who was schlager in Sweden. Between 1978 and 2005 over 100 songs came to Melodifestivalen through this man’s record company, and it was him who spotted the young Carola and the dashing Herreys. The modern day equivalent is far less flamboyant than the former Swedish Member of Parliament, and that would be Robert Skowronski, the Warner Music hotshot who Fred Bronson from Billboard was writing about last week.
To read more about Richard’s career now, and the rest of Robertson’s Reflection, make sure to read the whole newsletter on the link above. If you want to get the ESC Insight Newsletter first then join our growing list of subscribers to get it delivered straight to your inbox.