Isabelle Aubret — La source

MAY 15 1968 · 12:05

Isabelle Aubret · "La source" · France · 1968 Placement: 3rd · Language: French · Composers: Daniel Faure, Guy Bonnet, Henri Djian · Venue: Royal Albert Hall · Host: London, United Kingdom · Type: political statement · Broadcast: color crt Six years after she won Eurovision for France with 'Un premier amour,' Isabelle Aubret walks onto the stage of the Royal Albert Hall and sings a song about a young woman who is raped and murdered beside a spring in a forest. The melody is gentle, almost pastoral, the orchestration pointedly beautiful, and the lyric tells the story plainly: she went to the spring, three men followed, the water continues to run. Aubret performs it the way she performs everything — upright, direct, her eyes looking past the cameras at something only she can see. The hall does not quite know what to do. This is 1968; this is Eurovision; songs about femicide are not what Eurovision is for. And yet she finishes, and the applause comes, and the scoreboard gives her twenty points and third place. It is the most serious lyric anyone had then offered the contest, delivered by a woman whose return to the stage after a near-fatal car accident in 1963 was itself a kind of testimony. Context The 1968 contest is remembered chiefly for Spain's controversial one-point victory with Massiel's 'La, la, la' over Cliff Richard's 'Congratulations.' Aubret's third place has often been overshadowed by that drama, but 'La source' stands out in the year's field as the only entry engaging contemporary social subject matter. Legacy 'La source' has aged into one of the most respected non-winning French Eurovision entries of the 1960s, cited when commentators argue that the contest was never only light entertainment. The song's subject matter — sexual violence treated with plain language and no moral cushion — anticipated the kinds of protest entries that would not reach Eurovision again until much later. Mythology The return that refused to be ornamental. Aubret as the first artist to make Eurovision carry a story the audience did not want to hear.