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Caught in a Eurovision controversy

Eurovison's slogan is United By Music. Given that an estimated 163 million people watched the 2024 broadcast, it seems fair enough. This year's contest, in Basel in mid-May, will mark 70 years since the European Broadcasting Union set up the committee that devised the song contest, intending it to promote cultural understanding and peaceful cooperation in a continent still recovering from the destruction and animosities of WWII. Yet among the harmony, there can be discord. Just ask Chris Harms. Harms, singer with Hamburg goth/metal rockers Lord of the Lost, knows what it is like to be caught up in a Eurovision controversy. While overtly political songs or nationalistic statements have been banned from the start, rows have still managed to erupt over Israel (which joined the EBU in 1973), over the Balkan conflict, over a border dispute between Armenia and Azerbaijan and more recently over Ukraine and Russia. The Lost of Germany reacts during the voting following performances of the final of the Eurovision Song contest 2023. Photo: OLI SCARFF/AFP via Getty Images Harms's band, who will tour the UK later in the year, were the German entry in 2023. That was the year Liverpool played host on behalf of Ukraine, who had won the previous year but were unable to stage it at home in the wake of the invasion, for which Russia was banned. Even for a seasoned musician who says he had 'played 1,000 shows before that already, been on tours in more than 40 countries' the experience was a blur. 'I still feel like I haven't really processed all of it,' he tells me, 'because it was one of the most intense times in our career.' Harms, who recently released a surprisingly different solo album, 1980, talks about the numbers – hundreds of interviews over two weeks on Merseyside, 55 seconds for the changeover between acts, 100 people rushing on and off stage at a time and 20 cameras recording it all. But what he can't avoid is what happened to Lord of the Lost and their song, Blood & Glitter. It all started, he says, with the Grand Final Flag Parade, first introduced in 2013, in which the competitors walk out on stage one after the other, holding their national colours. At the 2023 contest, waving flags was never likely to be a completely neutral gesture, and the fervently anti-nationalist Lord of the Lost's solution was not to carry one at all. Harms says, 'We said in many interviews over the years, 'you will never see us going somewhere waving our national flag'. We thought that running around with this sheet would just look stupid. I totally despise nationalism in general. Germany Entry Lord of the Lost performs on stage during The Eurovision Song Contest 2023 Grand Final. Photo:'I myself am very happy that I was born here, I feel very privileged, but I cannot be proud at being German. There are so many people waving the flag for the wrong reasons. The people you usually see on the street waving the flag are the people you don't wanna see wave any flag. 'Then for the [official Eurovision] TikTok reel where everybody was waving their flag, we said, 'We can wave the St Pauli flag from our football team, because it's the skull and bones, it looks beautiful, we can wave the white flag for peace, you know, or a pride flag'. They said 'Yeah, we have a pride flag', so we did that.'' Lord of the Lost had enjoyed a good fortnight in Liverpool – visiting a local school to play music with pupils and answer questions, and doing an acoustic show at the Cavern Club – but this was the start of a bad night. When the final votes were counted, Sweden's Loreen was top with 583 points. Germany were some way behind, with 18. They finished rock bottom, even beaten by the UK. What was to follow was even worse. While the band were accustomed to playing 50,000-seat stadiums supporting Iron Maiden, exposure to a live television audience of 167 million was in another category completely, gaining them a significant number of new fans worldwide, yet simultaneously exposing them to a whole new level of scrutiny and abuse, including death threats. 'After Eurovision,' says Chris, 'the amount of hate comments from German right wing people about the flag and stuff, it was so intense, we had to block them all, and I needed to clear my mind about that. It took me a while to understand that when someone writes something about you in a hate comment, it doesn't say anything about you but it says everything about these people.' Once the fury had died down, Lord of the Lost decided that there had been so many good things about their Eurovision week that they decided to travel to 2024 host city Malmö and perform a show of their own the night before the Grand Final. Echoing the belief of the competition's founders that music can be a unifying force, Chris states that the band would happily do it all over again. 'If you just go there because of the contest and you lose the sense of musicality and the art and the togetherness, it doesn't mean a thing,' he says. 'We would still enjoy it even if we'd go last again.' Chris Harms' solo album, 1980, is out now, and Lord of the Lost will tour the UK in October and November