After the Eurovision Fame – Scott Fitzgerald
We would like to introduce you to our new column: After the Eurovision fame. Today we put Scott Fitzgerald in the spotlight. Scott Fitzgerald was born in Glasgow, Scotland on April 28th, 1948. He began his career on the GTO label, releasing the singles “Judy Played The Jukebox” in 1974 and the title track to glam rock movie “Never Too Young To Rock”in 1975. Fitzgerald’s greatest success was with “If I Had Words”, a duet with Yvonne Keeley and also featuring the St. Thomas More School Choir. It reached number 3 in the UK Singles Chart in 1978, and later went on to be a hit in Australia, Ireland, New Zealand, Belgium, the Netherlands and Scandinavia, selling more than one million copies. The song also featured in the score for the 1995 film BabeIn 1999, the band Westlife collaborated with the Vard Sisters to record the song. In 1988, he was the first ever artist chosen by telephone vote to sing the UK’s entry in the Eurovision Song Contest with the song “Go”. The song was written and composed by Julie Forsyth, daughter of the entertainer Sir Bruce Forsyth. Forsyth joined Fitzgerald on stage at the contest in Dublin, alongside her husband Dominic Grant (also of Guys ‘n’ Dolls) and Des Dyer (formerly of Jigsaw), to perform backing vocals. Ronnie Hazlehurst conducted the live orchestration. Fitzgerald came second in the contest, by one point, to Switzerland’s winning entry performed by Celine Dion. “Go” reached number 52 in the UK Singles Chart in April 1988. Fitzgerald reunited with Yvonne Keeley in 1992 for the single “United We Stand”, which was released on Red Bullet Records. In 2010 Fitzgerald and Keeley reunited for the final time in an all star version of ”If I had words” for Charity in the Netherlands which featured Gordon, Patricia Paay, Thomas Berge and many others. His album from 1988 ” The wind beneath my wings” has recently attracted interest again, and can be heared on Spotify and is for sale on Amazon. Fitzgerald is married to Shereen Fitzgerald and has three children, Liam Paul Patrick McPhail (passed away in 2020), Neeley Fitzgerald and the singer-songwriter Ki Fitzgerald, an original member of the UK boy band Busted and hit-songwriter to artists around the world. Ki co-wrote Monsters for Saara Aalto’s Finland 2018 entry into Eurovision Song Contest, adding to the family’s Eurovision history. Fitzgerald’s Eurovision experience was allmost forgotten until he decided to embrace his past and performed at a number of party nights in 2021 to celebrate the contest.
