Five years ago, Swiss singer Gunvor finished last at the Eurovision Song Contest 1998, receiving zero points for her song Lass ihn (Let him). Now she is back on stage, performing the role of the naïve hippie girl Chrissy in the musical Hair. In an interview with Swiss newspaper Sonntagszeitung, she spoke about her hard times after the Song Contest and revealed a weakness for conspirational theories.
Gunvor pointed out that “the three minutes of Eurovision” were the best experience of her musical carreer to date. She is still certain that she sung “pure and without a wrong note.” Although she claims to have accepted her bad result in the meantime, she said that she was “surprised, because I was one of the favorites. Israel won, Switzerland lost, and exactly in this time period the story about the nazi gold was uncovered. Probably it was a political vote. But it did not hurt me. I was hurt by the other stories.” With which she refers of course to an ugly press campain which surrounded her participation in the Eurovision Song Contest.
After that, Gunvor suffered from depression which resulted into a shopping addiction. But she said that she is stable now since one and a half year, after she has “decided to seek my inner balance” through a therapy. Asked if success came too quick for her, she answered: “I wanted to become famous and all of a sudden I was. Aged 23, I was allowed to represent Switzerland. This is hard to cope with. Suddenly you have many friends, but they are no real friends.”
The musical Hair, premiered in 1967, is a hippiesk anti-war play. Gunvor seemed a bit influenced by her role when she, asked if she favors a war against Iraq or not, responded: “I am against it. I suspect that 9/11 was staged by the Americans, so that they could make a war against Iraq.”