Puppet on a String: Barefoot Winner in Vienna

MAY 15 1967 · 12:00

Sandie Shaw · "Puppet on a String" · United Kingdom · 1967 Placement: 1st · Language: English · Composers: Bill Martin, Phil Coulter · Venue: Hofburg Palace · Host: Vienna, Austria · Type: winner · Broadcast: pre color On April 8, 1967, inside the Hofburg Palace in Vienna, a 20-year-old British singer named Sandie Shaw — already famous in the UK for a string of mid-1960s hits and for performing, as she had since her earliest TV appearances, barefoot — delivered 'Puppet on a String,' a bouncy fairground-waltz of a song written for her by Bill Martin and Phil Coulter. She performed it in a short mod dress, in English, barefoot, with the kind of breezy detachment that would later become her public signature. The United Kingdom had entered Eurovision since 1957 without a win. Shaw's performance changed that. 'Puppet on a String' won decisively, giving the UK its first-ever Eurovision crown and launching the Martin-Coulter songwriting partnership into a decade of subsequent Eurovision entries and pop productions. Shaw herself famously disliked the song — she has described it in later interviews as twee, beneath her artistic sensibilities, and a career obligation she performed because it was assigned. The record-breaking commercial success of her Eurovision victory did not reconcile her to it. Context Eurovision 1967 was held in Vienna following Udo Jürgens's 1966 win for Austria, the first Austrian Eurovision victory. The contest was still broadcast in black-and-white in most participating countries and was dominated by established European chanson and formal-ballad traditions. Sandie Shaw was an established UK pop star with Top-10 hits going back to 1964; her Eurovision selection was a commercial strategic choice by the BBC after years of competitive UK entries that had placed well without winning. Bill Martin and Phil Coulter were emerging as a Tin Pan Alley-style British pop songwriting team who would go on to write 'Congratulations' for Cliff Richard the following year and 'My Boy' for Elvis Presley. Legacy Shaw's 1967 victory is the UK's canonical Eurovision-launching moment and the start of a strong British run through the late 1960s and early 1970s. Her barefoot stage persona became a permanently cited Eurovision visual motif. Martin and Coulter's work would dominate British Eurovision submissions through 1971. Shaw's eventual public dismissal of the song has become its own retroactive layer of the story — the winner who hated her winning song, which she nonetheless performed at Eurovision anniversary events for decades. The song's status as a pop standard has been both its commercial legacy and its artistic burden on her. Mythology Shaw is often described as the first English-language Eurovision winner; that framing is inexact — earlier winners had sung portions of their songs in English or had English-language B-sides, but she was the first winner with a fully English-language entry that ranked decisively. The barefoot stage tradition is sometimes described as specific to Eurovision; she had performed barefoot throughout her career before Vienna. Her public dismissal of the song is occasionally exaggerated into claims she refused to ever perform it post-contest; she has performed it at numerous Eurovision-adjacent events.