The first ever winner of the Eurovision Song Contest, Lys Assia, who won the 1956 festival which was organised in her native country, has expressed her interest in representing Switzerland once again during the 50th celebration of the contest, taking place in 2005.

So she's alive and still producing music, one might ask, but in fact she's working on a new CD in these days, called Neue Hits und Evergreens. Still going strong dispite her age of 76 years. If she'll reach the Eurovision stage in 2005, she will break a record as no one has entered the festival before at the age of 79 years.

Her record company is supporting her in the attempt of staging a comeback in the 50th song contest. She has expressed her desire to perform “a love song typical of the sixties”, and her closest aides have been asked to find a fitting composer for the tune. At the same time she is aware of and concerned by the fact that the contest has changed radically during the years, becoming a lot more commercial. Nowadays, composers don't care whether the song is of good quality or not, solely the commercial potential has their attention, she has declared.

Lys Assia is a unique human being as she knows by heart eight different languages. Of course she speaks the three official languages of Switzerland; German, French and Italian, but she can also master English, Spanish, Portugese, Swedish and Danish. In two of these for her foreign languages, Spanish and English, she has been working professionally, as she once was an employee of a British broadcaster and also was hired by a broadcasting company of Venezuela during the second world war. Even in that epoch, she dedicated a lot of her time on singing.

In 1956, at the age of 29, Lys Assia made history with the song Refrain, which brought the first victory for Switzerland in the long running festival.