Read Online Baby You're a Star by Kathy Foley - Free Book Online Page A

for his achievements.
    “It was fantastic because nobody had ever won it twice before. He wrote the song. It was his chance to make all the money and become famous again. He just lived, he lived every minute of it. He had fantastic self-belief and he proved everybody wrong and he won, and he had a huge hit record and made a lot of money that time around.”
    Louis saw the business opportunity straight away. No-one had ever won the Eurovision twice before. He had been pressing copies of Logan’s single on anyone who would take it all week, but he decided to stop handing out promotional copies after the Contest, telling journalists and industry figures attending the after-show party to buy the record.
    The win took the music industry in Ireland by surprise. Each of the major record shops had taken only the minimum order of Hold Me Now , which was 25 copies. The record company CBS, which had signed Logan for the second time, hurriedly organised the pressing of another quarter of a million copies of the single.
    It is both an advantage and a disadvantage of celebrity that the general public tends to have a short memory. After his second win, the Irish public and media completely forgot how they had sniggered at Logan’s earlier downfall and turned out in their thousands to welcome him home.
    When his flight landed at Dublin Airport, Logan stared out of the window in disbelief at the five thousand fans waiting to greet him. He clutched at Healy for support saying “Oh God, I’ve waited for this.” It was déja-vû for all concerned.
    Once again, Logan had to brave the multitude of fans at the airport, but this time it was so much sweeter. Seven years of self-doubt vanished among the cries of “We love you, Johnny” and the banners declaring “We’re holding you now”. Louis, of course, was ecstatic and elated. He was the manager of this double Eurovision-winning wunderkind and he was making the most of it. “He is made for life,” Louis declared rather grandly to the waiting media, “and this time he has control over his own affairs. The bookings are already flooding in. Nearly every European country wants him to do a TV show.”
    Logan immediately set off on another tour of European cities, appearing on TV shows, being interviewed by the newspapers, and enjoying the plaudits wherever he went. He even appeared on the Royal Variety Performance, exhorting the Queen to hold him now. The single went to No. 2 in the UK charts, and No. 1 in the Irish charts, and sold six million copies in total, twice as many as What’s Another Year had sold. Logan was back, Louis was in charge, but then disaster struck.
    Bewilderingly, Logan’s career crashed and burned for the second time in seven years. There was no fracas between sparring managers. There was only one record company involved. The ingredients for lasting success were there, but the momentum wasn’t. His career simply fizzled out. He was good-looking, he could sing, and he had a certain song-writing talent. What on earth went wrong?
    Eurovision expert Geoff Harrison believes there were two main reasons for Logan’s second fall from grace. “In 1987, when Johnny Logan won the Eurovision Song Contest, it wasn’t as popular as it is now,” he says. “It was quite popular in the late sixties and the early seventies, and then it sort of faded round about 1975 or 1976 and really didn’t make it back into popularity until some time in the mid-nineties, until all those Irish wins. That really boosted its popularity. I think he hit it at a time when it wasn’t really that big a thing to be the winner of the Eurovision Song Contest.”
    Bad timing wasn’t the only problem, according to Harrison: “I think he also had a style that didn’t really fit in at the time. The style, while it was a winning style for the Song Contest, was not necessarily a winning style with the public. I think there’s a market that likes this sort of stuff but won’t buy it. It’s the Radio