Being Conchita Read online

  ‘When do we start?’ I wanted to know.

  ‘You can already guess’, replied René, unable to keep back a smile. ‘Now. Right now.’

  And that’s what happened. We set to work straight away.

  With a population of roughly 740 million, the continent of Europe stretches from the Atlantic coast of Portugal to the Urals and from the North Cape to Cyprus. More than one-fifth of these people watch the Eurovision Song Contest on TV, an incredibly large number! It is hard to think of an event that crosses so many borders and brings together as many people as this contest. We wanted to do the event justice and prepare viewers for the arrival of Conchita Wurst. All of a sudden, my life revolved around airports, planes, trains, taxis, hotels, TV shows – and giving performances. I might fly to Madrid on a Thursday for a Euroschlager show, take a six-hour flight to Riga to perform there the next day, and then travel on to Amsterdam to sing on a TV show in Hilversum a day later. Over the course of these few months, I gave over 400 interviews all over Europe and talked about what it was that Conchita Wurst stood for: love, acceptance and enjoyment of the world’s universal language, music.

  Throughout my travels, I could feel in every bone of my body that I was a child of Europe, of this breathtakingly beautiful – but all too often blood-stained – continent where history can be soaked up with every breath: from the Europe that saw the sophistication of the ancient Greeks to the Europe of the Roman Empire, whose citizens enjoyed a quality of life that would not be matched again for centuries. The Europe of Charlemagne, King of the Franks, who was arguably the founding father of Europe, and was also known as pater Europae. But this is also the Europe of empires and battles, of the Thirty Years’ War and all the death and destruction it caused, and the Europe of the First and Second World Wars, which resulted in unimaginable suffering throughout the world. Nevertheless, it’s the Europe of the great thinkers, of the Enlightenment, of tolerance and respect for human dignity. Equality, brotherhood, freedom – we are also indebted to Europe for these.

  When I was born, Europe was split in two by the Iron Curtain. When I was one year old, the Berlin Wall came down, the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact fell apart and East and West came closer together. Nowadays, we live in a society of which millions of our ancestors could only have dreamt. During my travels across the continent, I barely ever had to show any ID to be able to go from one country to another. I paid for my coffee in a single currency and could converse with most people in a common language. These achievements are so huge that they sometimes seem trivial, a realisation which awoke in me a new sense of concern for Europe. My tour not only served its real purpose, that of preparing me to take part in the Eurovision Song Contest: it also opened my eyes to the fascinating issue of our shared European homeland. I listened closely wherever I went, talking to people about their wishes and dreams, their worries and woes. My aim wasn’t to then go out on the rooftops and shout about what I’d learnt, but sooner or later I started being asked questions myself, and I wasn’t afraid to share my views: I love the wonderfully different cultures that make up our continent , and the unique opportunity Europe offers to experience them all side by side. That’s why I talked about democracy: without democracy, we couldn’t have this variety of cultures, and I believe it’s the best political system that exists. That’s not to say that democracy isn’t complicated at times – of course it is. What’s more, it demands active participation. Yet if you share my desire not to be ruled by others, but to shape your own life, the European ideal offers you everything you could ever wish for.

  It was with these impressions and thoughts in my mind that I headed back home in early April 2014, having concluded my tour in London. The grand finale of my journey had been the Eurovision Preview Party, which had been held in the Café de Paris, right in the middle of the West End, my favourite part of the British capital. I now had several engagements at home, including a TV show in Vienna that was aptly titled Welcome Austria. Austria was giving me one final welcome before seeing me off again in a few days’ time. Then it would be ‘Welcome to Denmark – Velkommen til Danmark’, and we would discover whether I was able to convey my enthusiasm for Europe in music as well in words. This prospect filled me with an excitement that seemed to know no limit: it felt like anything could happen in Denmark.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  THE NUMBER 11

  ‘I want to make magic,

  I want to breathe fire on the stage!’

  FROM THE MUSICAL FAME

  I love the city of Copenhagen, with its tolerant and cosmopolitan citizens. As soon as we landed at Kastrup airport, I felt calm and carefree – not at all as if the toughest time of my life was about to kick off. Copenhagen is a place of light and water and air, and for a few brief moments I forgot that I would be spending most of the next few days shut up indoors. For a fleeting instant, I wondered if it was really right to present music in the form of a competition. After all, music is something that binds people together, not something that divides them. Then I recalled the old European tradition of singers competing against one another, which stretches as far back as the famed thirteenth century Wartburg minstrel contest.

  The airport arrivals hall was teeming with cameramen, journalists and radio reporters. ‘Quite nice, really’, I thought, ‘that a music contest is capable of causing such a buzz. No war, no arguments, no natural or manmade disasters: just a couple of dozen singers performing their songs.’ I went to stand in front of the first camera, speaking into a dozen microphones. This is how I spent much of the next few days.

  Obviously, we were all feverishly looking forward to the semi-finals. By ‘we’, I mean the team of people supporting me, who performed their jobs with such dedication that I occasionally suspected they could read my thoughts and wishes. Perhaps this stemmed from the fact that we already knew each other so well, along with the fact that we really were a team, in the sense of a close-knit and committed group of people. In addition to René Berto, there was Nicole Fernández-Fernández, Tamara Mascara and Matthias Steurer. They were all anxious to make life behind the scenes as pleasant as possible for me. The B&W Hall on the island of Refshaleøen was really something: the stage was huge, and sorting out the lighting posed some difficulty. I was dying to meet the other contestants, especially Aram Sargsyan – a.k.a. Aram Mp3 – who was representing Armenia. Hugely popular in his homeland, he was one of the favourites to win.

  Then there was Swedish singer Sanna Nielsen, who had sparked my interest by citing Céline Dion as one of her inspirations. I completely agree: I think Céline is a stellar singer. In fact, in a neat coincidence, she won the Song Contest the same year as I was born. Like many other people, I had barely heard of Dutch duo Ilse DeLange and Waylon, probably because I rarely listen to country music. There were many acts that were in with a strong chance, and there was a lot of lively discussion among the experts as to who would ultimately be the winner, which I thought was great. There’s nothing more boring than a contest where the winner is a foregone conclusion. What was key for me was that Europe stood at the centre of things, with every spectator able to see how colourful and unique our shared homeland is. Subsequent newspaper reports spoke of a show that offered ‘something for everyone’. Even today, I think there’s something truly impressive about the idea of Eurovision as proof that we’re not wasting our time trying to make everything look the same. Instead, we’re celebrating cultural diversity. In a sense, it felt like it was already a victory just to be involved in that celebration – though obviously there was a part of me that wanted to win.

  Today, if I try to recall the last few minutes before going on stage, I find that the events in my hotel room of the previous night superimpose themselves on my thoughts. As I stood in front of the mirror, pondering what I could say if I won, I reflected on my past, on where I had come from, and on how I came to reach this point. I thought about little Tom, from his quiet little corner of Europe; and also about the elegant Conchita, and how she embodies t
he rising from the ashes, the birth of a new ideal. And then I started to think about the number 11. It wasn’t so much from a mathematical perspective, where 11 is the smallest two-digit prime number. In astrology, the number 11 represents incompleteness. This was something that resonated with me, as Tom had also been incomplete until Conchita stepped into his life. The number 11 seemed to have been springing up all over the place recently. My birthday is in the eleventh month of the year, and 11 was also the number of my hotel room, as well as my number in the running order for the final. What’s more, the number 11 would frequently crop up in my calculations whenever I had to work anything out in my head. We returned home from the contest on 11 May, touching down at 11:16 a.m. It was only the rainbows over the B&W Hall on the day of the final that came in pairs – eleven rainbows would no doubt have been too much of a good thing. While I’m not someone who’s constantly trying to read a deeper meaning into things, there was something about all this that made me feel excited. It generated a positive feeling inside me, which is known to act as a source of previously untapped energy. People say that ‘faith can move mountains’. By this they mean that possessing a positive inner attitude can shape what happens in reality. It’s up to you whether you believe in this or not, but that night before the final, as I marvelled at the frequency of the number 11, a second scene arose in front of me. In the first one I had been little Tom, but now I was Conchita, standing on the stage in front of thousands of spectators, victorious. Whenever such visions appear, we quickly push them aside – we don’t want to see what can’t possibly happen, and in pushing them aside, we are also shaping reality. This vision was one that I didn’t cast away. Instead, I stayed with it for a good five minutes – a very long time when it comes to visions.

  Did I go to bed afterwards feeling certain that it was all in the bag? Of course not. But I fell asleep with a good feeling inside, in a completely positive frame of mind. For the night before a final, you couldn’t really wish for more. Then, when the final itself took place the following day, it seemed to last no more than five minutes. This is what has stayed with me from those few hours that changed my life.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  RISE LIKE A PHOENIX

  ‘Once I’m reborn, You know I will rise like a phoenix’

  WORDS FROM THE SONG WRITTEN BY ALEXANDER ZUCKOWSKI, JULIAN MAAS, ROBIN GRUBERT AND CHARLIE MASON

  There is a scene in David Lynch’s film Lost Highway in which the hero is approached at a party by someone he doesn’t know, who tells him something very odd: the mystery man tells him that he is at our hero’s house at the same time as being at the party. To prove this, the mystery man hands him the telephone; answering the phone on the other end is the mystery man himself. I love stories where time and space cancel each other out, like a Möbius strip where you can no longer distinguish between top and bottom or between the inner and outer surfaces. It’s true that we like to insist that time is linear, and every watch and every alarm clock on our planet makes that claim, but sometimes we end up in situations where things are different, where the hands do not move, where everything comes to a standstill and we find ourselves in a time bubble.

  That’s what happened when I stepped onto the stage on 10 May 2014. Everything seemed to have slowed right down. I seemed all of a sudden to have all the time in the world, because I was in a state that was simultaneously real and unreal. I was singing and giving it everything I had in terms of voice and emotion, and that was real. But my calmness felt as unreal as if I was in Śūnyatā, which is described in Zen teachings as ‘a state of emptiness free of thoughts and temptation’. The TV recording shows that when I emerged from this time bubble, I looked nervous, jittery and out of breath, and that the precious minutes when I was performing could not be defined in terms of the usual units of time. Eventually the flames behind me and the light above me faded away, and the golden rain died down to be replaced by a storm of ecstatic public acclaim. That was the moment when the time bubble burst. I was now back in the linear normality of our reality. It was only now that the events of the evening caught up with me: someone handed me a glass of champagne – I gulped it down in one go, and immediately drank another.

  René, Nicole, Tamara and Matthias stood round me and we now just had to wait while the clock hands kept ticking by at an obscenely slow pace.

  Wait.

  Wait.

  And wait a bit more.

  All at once I felt a sudden need, an urge arising from a combination of the champagne and my nerves, the latter of which had returned with a vengeance and swept away all the calm from my state of Śūnyatā.

  ‘I have to go to the ladies!’

  ‘Not right now!’ I don’t know who blurted this out, but the tone was extremely tense. ‘The result could be coming at any moment.’

  ‘I don’t care. We have to run!’

  The hall was so big that the technicians had to move around on small electric golf buggies. The train of my fishtail dress was three metres long and the toilets were at the farthest end of the hall; we did not just run, we sprinted. When I arrived I had to strip down completely because the dress was so tight. But I couldn’t complain – after all, I had designed it myself. It had been created by the ART for ART costume studios in Vienna, which are the best in the world. The company still employs expert artisans with the traditional couture accomplishments you rarely come across in Europe these days – milliners, seamstresses and costume dyers. My design had certainly needed their expertise. The fishtail dress was made of white glitter-speckled tulle, overlaid with golden lace and covered with Swarovski crystals sewn on by hand. But now, as I began to get undressed, the microphone clip detached itself and ended up falling into… well, you can imagine where. So what did I do? I had to laugh because the situation was so wonderfully grotesque that you couldn’t have made it up if you’d tried. Outside in the vestibule, I neatly cleaned and dried everything; fortunately, the sensitive electronics had not suffered any damage from coming into contact with the water. I was now well and truly relieved, in both senses of the word: if I win, I thought, I’ll have to sing again, then there’ll be a news conference and after that life will be like a state of emergency. There’ll be no more opportunities to disappear when that happens. But at this moment in time, yes, I could go – because right now I was just one of many contestants.

  A few moments later and we were back in position, the clocks ticking away as before, while the organizers whizzed up and down various European countries via their TV links. In the end, a total of thirteen countries announced: ‘Twelve points go to Austria’. Even though I had visualised this earlier, even though out of all the favourites I had been regarded since the semi-final as primus inter pares – first among equals – and even though I had been lucky enough to have felt that magical moment of timelessness, I could still hardly believe it when the final result was announced.

  Now that my victory was absolutely definite, I again felt the full force of my doubts rising up inside me: this is impossible – not you, little Tom from Styria. The one they picked on and ridiculed. The one who shocked people so much because he was different. The one who’s gay. The one who’s just asking for it at the railway station. The one who somehow always managed to wriggle his way out to safety, and had not just one but two coming-outs: the first to be himself as he really is, the second to reveal this mythical and magical creature, this bearded woman called Conchita who was hidden inside him. Conchita was now standing in a stunned daze right at the centre of the cheering, and had I not had René and my friends next to me, who knows what might have happened.

  There was plenty going on as it was: I made a speech, celebrated, laughed and cried – sometimes doing all four things simultaneously. Some of the words I said were recorded, others were drowned out in the chaotic pandemonium, but I most certainly did say: ‘This evening belongs to those who fight for peace and justice.’ Was that the sentence I had thought up in front of the mirror? No. Nothing had occurred to me when I was
in front of the mirror. What I came out with was spontaneous, and once again emanated from my most deeply held convictions. I didn’t realize that I was proclaiming something as honest and sincere, as inflammatory and provocative, as Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream’, or Mahatma Ghandi’s ‘First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, and then you win’.

  Even while the victory celebrations were still in progress, a storm of outrage was breaking out among the kind of people whose fearfulness makes them cling to the past: nationalists, xenophobes and homophobes. They were saying that the Red Army should never have left Austria – in other words, someone like me should have been nailed to the cross a long time ago, or sent to the gas chambers; should have been shot, or silenced. There was more to come: they tried to blame me for the spring flooding that affected large parts of Serbia; rightwingers claimed their bigoted attitudes were being attacked; and church fundamentalists lambasted the ‘decadence of the West’. That night, my response was, ‘We have no time for you now’, but this soon changed to, ‘We need to talk about the die-hards.’ That’s why, before too long, I was addressing the European Parliament and meeting UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. For many people, perhaps the greatest surprise of the 2014 Eurovision Song Contest was that, from the word go, I displayed such strongly-felt political views. I strived to do more than just inspire people with my music. I want to help create a more tolerant society. There’s still a long way to go, but I’m not giving up.