Sam Ryder may finally provide Britain a winning shot at Eurovision

Read more on telegraph.co.uk

On the day that US heavy metal giants Linkin Park headlined 2011’s Download festival at the Donington racetrack in Leicestershire, an obscure band called The Morning After were peddling their wares to a select crowd on one of the festival’s outer stages. 

Anyone who happened to be at the Jägermeister Stage on that wet Sunday afternoon can today proudly boast that they were there first: The Morning After’s singer, Sam Ryder, has been confirmed as the UK’s entry to this year’s Eurovision Song Contest, with his song Space Man.

Ryder has already come a long way from hair metal obscurity. In 2020, the 31-year-old became the UK’s most popular artist on video sharing platform TikTok due to his home-recorded cover versions of songs by Britney Spears, Adele and Michael Jackson. Thanks to his elastic vocals and charismatic performing style, he has amassed 12 million followers on the social media site. But Eurovision – which takes place in Turin in May – will thrust Ryder into the mainstream and see him perform in front of a global audience of around 180 million people.

So who is he, and can he finally save the UK from the Eurovision doldrums following decades of poor performances and our ignoble “nul points” at last year’s competition?

“My name is Sam Ryder and I’m a singer with long hair and a beard,” he told BBC’s Newsbeat in 2021. “I guess I’m just a guy who’s singing his head off and going red while he’s doing it.” But his “I’m just a singer” shtick belies some series graft. Ryder, thankfully, isn’t yet another product of the reality TV pipeline so beloved of the UK’s Eurovision machine in recent years. Rather, he has earned his chops. And for this reason he may represent our best chance for decades in Italy in May.

Ryder was born in Essex, attended Catholic school and got the music bug after he found a battered copy of an Iron Maiden album on the floor of a school bus on a trip to a nunnery. The powerful vocals of Maiden singer Bruce Dickinson “blew his mind” and gave him a template to mimic, something he has done with aplomb. His love for bombastic heavy metal took him down a path that led to that performance at Download a decade ago.

“I was a flea on a dog. I was just hopping between bands. It was valuable to learn that way, the tours in transit vans,” he said in an interview last year.

He certainly did plenty of hopping. After his stint in The Morning After, he joined a band called Blessed by a Broken Heart. Their 2012 track Out of Control is a slice of competent if overblown Eighties metal, all ear-shredding guitars and preposterous lyrics. The band dressed like extras from Mad Max. Ryder then joined a melodic hardcore band from Texas called Close Your Eyes. He toned down the outfits and – judging by the YouTube videos – played up his cockney accent. He seems to have performed in the band as Sam Ryder Robinson (he’s still on Twitter under that name, with a more modest 54 followers).

In 2016 Ryder decamped to Nashville and recorded an album with Canadian producer Bryan Wilson, who went on to work on British rapper Stormzy’s breakthrough album Gang Signs & Prayer. The singer shopped the album around record companies but there were no takers. So Ryder did what all self-respecting, struggling musicians do: he opened a health food café (with a person called Lois, someone he described on Facebook as “his love”). And then TikTok happened.

Ryder says his “pivotal moment” was his cover of Spears’ Baby One More Time. He knew he’d really made it when stars started getting in touch. Alicia Keys heard his version of If I Ain’t Got You (“Yo. He killed this. This is hard for me to sing,” she said). Then Justin Bieber started messaging him. “I’m brushing my teeth and then Justin Bieber gets into my DMs, and we’re chatting. So every time I like see Justin now I just picture a tube of Colgate,” Ryder told the BBC. “And, obviously, other toothpaste is available.”

The success saw him sign to label Parlophone, where he’s been writing songs with Amy Wadge, who won a Grammy for co-writing Thinking Out Loud with Ed Sheeran. It is thought that Ryder was chosen for Eurovision by Tap Management, the management company behind Ellie Goulding and Lana Del Rey. He has, in music biz parlance, finally “made it”.

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There is a definite edge to Ryder. Over the last decade and a half, the UK’s Eurovision entries have broadly fallen into two camps: aging pop stars (Bonnie Tyler, Engelbert Humperdinck) or former X Factor-style reality TV contestants (Michael Rice, Lucie Jones). Neither tactic has worked. Since 2003, we’ve come last five times. James Newman, last year’s entry, scored the dreaded “nul points” with his song Embers.

Ryder represents our greatest hope of rising from the Eurovision ashes for years. The reality TV bubble has finally burst and he’s a bona fide star of pop culture’s new defining medium, TikTok. Not only can he sing, but he can perform too thanks to his time on the metal circuit and in Nashville. He has charisma. And there’s a whiff of Eurovision zeitgeist about him: musically, he occupies the middle ground between the heavy metal of last year’s winners, Måneskin, and the James Blake-esque balladeering of the previous year’s winner, Duncan Laurence. Picking him is a clever move.

Having said all that, we’re the UK and everyone hates us. We haven’t won Eurovision for a quarter of a century and it’ll take a minor miracle for that to change. But at least Ryder can console himself with one certainty about this year’s Eurovision: whatever happens in Turin, he can’t do any worse than last year.