Angela Farrell — One Day Love

MAY 15 1971 · 12:00

Angela Farrell · "One Day Love" · Ireland · 1971 Placement: 11th · Language: English · Composers: Donald Martin, Ita Flynn · Venue: Gaiety Theatre · Host: Dublin, Ireland · Type: performance innovation · Broadcast: color crt Ireland hosts Eurovision for the first time in 1971, fresh off Dana's win the year before with 'All Kinds of Everything,' and the country sends Angela Farrell to represent it on its own stage at the Gaiety Theatre in Dublin. 'One Day Love' is a tidy mid-tempo pop ballad in the style RTÉ favoured in the early seventies — strings, brass accents, a lyric about faith in future romance — and Farrell delivers it with the poise of a trained cabaret singer. Drawing thirteenth in the running order she has a quietly confident performance: no gimmicks, no staging flourishes, just a well-dressed woman singing a well-written song in the city where the contest was living that night. She finishes eleventh of eighteen with seventy-nine points under the new jury-duo scoring system introduced that year. Context 1971 was a reinvention year for Eurovision. The scoring system was rewritten — two jurors per country giving one to five points — and the visual presentation shifted toward lighter, poppier staging. Ireland, still giddy from Dana's victory, treated its first hosting duty with characteristic warmth and modest budgets. Legacy Farrell's Eurovision is now mostly a footnote between two larger Irish stories — Dana's 1970 win and the country's 1980s Johnny Logan era — but 'One Day Love' remains notable as the first Irish entry performed on home soil. Mythology The host country's second wave. Farrell as the careful follow-up to Dana, singing for an Ireland that had just discovered Eurovision could be something it was good at.