Ireland's Eurovision exhaustion was real. Hosting cost RTE the better part of an entire year's entertainment budget; four times in five years had drained the broadcaster's reserves and patience. There was open speculation in early 1997 that RTE might co-produce with BBC Northern Ireland as a way to share the cost. The Irish broadcaster decided against it. They would do one more on their own, and do it properly. The Point Theatre on the Liffey docks was upgraded again. The set was the most ambitious yet. The orchestra played one final Eurovision under conductor Frank McNamara. Then, as Katrina Leskanich and her bandmates stood on stage holding their trophy, RTE made what amounted to a quiet farewell. Ireland has never hosted again. The Point itself was demolished in 2008 and rebuilt as the 3Arena. Many in Ireland still call 1997 the end of a golden age.

Until 1997, every Eurovision country's points were decided by a 16-person jury -- balanced for gender, age, and the mix of music professionals to ordinary citizens. In 1997, for the first time, five countries (Austria, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK) trialled televoting: viewers at home phoned premium-rate numbers to vote for their favourite songs, and the aggregated phone votes were converted into the points allocations. The trial was a triumph. The phone lines lit up across Europe; the engagement was on a scale the contest had never seen. From 1998 onward, all participating countries were strongly encouraged to use televoting, and within a few years it was universal. The democratisation came at a cost: televoting allowed neighbourly bloc voting to flourish (the Balkans tended to vote for each other, the Nordics likewise), and the contest's results became less predictable. But the audience, for the first time, had a direct hand. Eurovision's modern fan culture -- the parties, the costumes, the obsessive prediction markets -- dates from this moment.

Iceland's entry that year was a slow, sensual, electronic-tinged song called Minn hinsti dans (My Final Dance), performed by the 27-year-old Paul Oscar. He came on stage flanked by four female dancers in PVC outfits, draped himself across a chaise longue, and turned a Eurovision performance into something nobody had quite tried before -- a piece of pop theatre with explicit sexuality and queer aesthetic intent. Paul Oscar was the first openly gay artist ever to compete as a lead performer in Eurovision. He came 20th. The performance scandalised some delegations and delighted millions of viewers. The European Broadcasting Union, to its credit, did not censure him. The following year, Israel's Dana International -- a trans woman -- won the contest with Diva, in part on the strength of a fan vote that had been impossible before televoting. The Paul Oscar performance in Dublin in 1997 is now widely regarded as the moment Eurovision became, openly, what it had always quietly been: a sanctuary for the kind of European queer culture that had nowhere else to be quite so itself.

The 1997 contest was the last in which the orchestra was central. Until then, entries had been required to perform with the host orchestra or with their own live instruments; backing tracks were limited to sounds that were also being mimed by visible performers. The 1997 rules permitted, for the first time, fully recorded backing tracks without any live musical accompaniment. The change had been forced by the falling cost of broadcast-quality recording and the rising influence of dance and electronic music, where a live orchestra would have been ridiculous. By 1999, the host orchestra was dropped entirely. For a contest that had begun in 1956 with seven Western European countries singing acoustic chansons accompanied by a chamber ensemble, the 1997 change marked the final break with Eurovision's original conception. Conductor Noel Kelehan, who had led the RTE Concert Orchestra at the 1994, 1995 and 1997 contests, became the most experienced Eurovision conductor in history. He retired from the role with the 1997 contest. The Eurovision baton was, literally, put down.

And the song that won? Katrina and the Waves were not unknowns -- they had reached the global top ten in 1985 with Walking on Sunshine, a song so relentlessly cheerful it has soundtracked half the romantic comedies made since. By 1997 the band were past their commercial peak, looking for a comeback, and persuaded by Rew that Love Shine a Light might do it. The song was originally written for the Samaritans' 40th anniversary fundraising campaign. It was the kind of warm, hopeful, almost gospel-tinged anthem that Eurovision rewards when the political tides are right. The UK was midway through its New Labour moment; Tony Blair had been elected the day before the contest. Katrina Leskanich's powerhouse voice and the song's surging chorus carried it home -- 227 points, ten maximum 12-point scores, the largest winning margin in Eurovision history at the time. Ireland came second with Marc Roberts's Mysterious Woman, narrowly missing what would have been its seventh win in seven years. As the credits rolled, RTE breathed out. They were done.