In the run-up to last year’s Eurovision Song Contest final, Joost Klein was amped for victory.
Klein, a Dutch pop star, was a favorite to win with “Europapa,” a madcap song in which he raps over a bouncy beat and circling piano riff about a journey through Europe. The track ends in a hyperfast dance break, but the upbeat song also has a melancholy side: Klein wrote it as a tribute to his father, who died when Klein was 12.
Then, just hours before the finale, Klein’s chance to honor his father vanished when Eurovision organizers threw the singer out of the contest, saying he had threatened a camerawoman. When Klein learned he was in trouble, he was backstage and dressed up in a comically large blue suit for a rehearsal. He begged to talk to the upset camerawoman, in a desperate bid to change his fate. But his pleas went nowhere: Klein was out.
Nearly a year has passed, and the incident doesn’t appear to have hurt Klein’s career. He now has over three million monthly listeners on Spotify, and in February, he released a new album, “Unity,” to rave reviews in the Netherlands. After finishing a string of large European dates, this week he is embarking on his debut U.S. tour, including two shows at Irving Plaza in New York.
Still, in a recent interview in London before a show, Klein, 27, was stuck under the cloud of his Eurovision misadventure. “Everyone’s like, ‘Hey, your career grew,’” Klein said. “I don’t care.”
The disqualification still “stings,” he said, and he didn’t expect to get over it soon. Klein said that both his parents died before he was 14, and it took him more than a decade to process their deaths. He feared that shrugging off the Eurovision fiasco could take just as long. His new album features several tracks brooding on the incident.
“I wish I could forget stuff fast, or let it rest, but that’s not how I work,” Klein said, tearing up. “Look, three minutes in and I’m already crying!”
Eurovision is one of the world’s most loved music events — an annual spectacle watched live on TV by tens of millions across the globe. Since launching in 1956, it has helped create stars including ABBA and the Italian rock group Maneskin.
But Klein’s disqualification has caused a rupture between some Eurovision fans and the European Broadcasting Union, which organizes the event. At Klein’s recent concert in London, fans chanted an expletive-laced slogan against the organization before the pop star came onstage.
Swedish prosecutors closed an investigation last year into the incident between Klein and the camerawoman without any charges. Klein said in the interview that she had been filming him backstage in an area he understood to be off-limits for recording. He declined to discuss exactly what happened next, but prosecutors said Klein “made a movement” toward the woman — whose identity has never been made public — and that he touched her camera.
Klein said he did nothing “significant,” but conceded that, at over six feet tall and covered in tattoos, he could look “pretty intimidating” when upset.
Even before the altercation, Klein said, he had felt unsupported by Eurovision organizers. He repeatedly tried to contact a therapist who he had been told was available for the artists, he said, but nobody replied. “I don’t even know if they really existed,” Klein said.
A Eurovision spokesman did not respond to requests to comment on Klein’s assertions.
Klein won’t be watching Eurovision this year when it is held in Basel, Switzerland, in May: “Hell, no!” he said.
He had been tuning in to the contest since he was a child in Britsum, a village near the Netherlands’ northern coast, where many inhabitants speak Frisian at home, rather than Dutch. He recalled watching the show with his parents and enjoying acts from faraway countries like Turkey and Azerbaijan, whose cultures he had rarely encountered in the village of less than 1,000 people.
That family tradition abruptly ended when Klein was 12 and his father died of cancer. Soon afterward, his mother died of cardiac arrest, and Klein discovered her body, he said.
He had tried numerous methods to cope with the trauma of those events, including holistic medicine and boxing training, and making music had helped, too, he said.
Most of his tracks are upbeat and can sound silly; many are influenced by gabber, a punishingly fast style of dance music that developed in the Netherlands in the 1990s. Lyrically, he’s often madcap too, but his tracks also frequently refer to his lost parents. On “Droom Groot” (“Dream Big”), a fan favorite, Klein raps about missing his father and using drugs to suppress his loneliness. (“No, it’s not going well,” he raps.)
Teun de Kruif, a producer who works on most of Klein’s songs under the alias Tantu Beats, said that juxtaposing joyful music and emotional lyrics gives the tracks depth. “There’s nothing more beautiful than contrast,” de Kruif said.
On the new album, “Unity,” angry references to Eurovision offset the rave music euphoria. The first track, “Why Not?” accuses Eurovision’s organizers of stealing Klein’s dream. In another, “United by Music” (which is the song contest’s official slogan), the singer curses the organizers and says, “I don’t want to go to court.”
Klein said the album wasn’t just about venting; he also wanted its tracks to unite music fans, whatever their age, gender or nationality — just like Eurovision should. On tour, Klein said he had seen teenagers singing along to his songs, from Sweden to Switzerland, although they probably didn’t speak Dutch. Klein said those happy moments were what he wrote about “in my journal at the end of the day.”
A few hours after the interview, another journal moment came for Klein when he came onstage in London before 1,500 screaming, mainly female, fans. He opened with “Europapa,” the Eurovision entry, and it also came back near the end of the set, this time even faster than before. As he danced manically to the distorted beat, Klein looked like a man exorcising his demons. But he was also, clearly, having the time of his life.
