It all started with a quiz question from a newspaper. “What was the name of the dog that was the first living thing to go into space and orbit the Earth?”
The answer is Laika, a stray dog found on the streets of Moscow, who became immortal when she was launched into space on November 3rd, 1957, a month after Sputnik became the first satellite.
Laika died of hypothermia in her capsule, but she survived long enough to confirm that human beings could withstand space flight.
It’s an unlikely story to inspire Emmy’s hook-laden, earworm, Europop-friendly Laika Party which comfortably won Irish Eurosong on Friday night and will represent Ireland at the Eurovision in May.
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“I said to my Dad, ‘I have to leave, I just have this song idea’. When I hear this story that is really sad, I do want to write a song about it because that is how I deal with it,” said Emmy (24), whose full name is Emmy Kristine Guttulsrud Kristiansen.
“Her [Laika’s] story is really sad, so I wanted to create a scenario where she doesn’t die, but is having her own party in the sky.”
The Irish connection to the song is Larissa Tormey, who was born in the Soviet Union and has lived on a beef farm in Kilbeggan, Co Westmeath, for more than two decades.
She met her Irish husband Christy when he was on a stag weekend in Moscow in 2001 and they married six months later. She is a trained mezzo soprano and a professional singer-songwriter.
Last summer Tormey attended the world’s largest songwriting camp, the Rena Song Fest, in Norway where she met Emmy and her brother Erlend.
It is a Eurovision factory set up to generate songs for the competition. With so many songwriters involved, Tormey was going to cancel going “but then I found it was non-refundable”.
She explained how the song came about. “Because it was the last day, we had a short day so I said, ‘we have to start with something we have already started’.
“So Emmy was sitting there nice and shy and very reserved. I was told she was a singer and I asked her, ‘Emmy, do you have anything’ and she said, ‘I heard something yesterday about a little dog Laika. Do you know anything about her?’
“I said, ‘me? That’s my history’. I learned her story in school and we went for it. We bonded so fast and we wrote the song in two hours. She recorded vocals and then she made a video with images of Laika. I kind of knew we had something special.”
Emmy had the verse, Twomey had the chorus and Erlend provided the keyboard hook. Two other songwriters, Henrik Østlund and Truls Marius Aarra, were also involved.
Rather than send it along with dozens of other songs to the Norwegian song contest, they submitted it to Ireland instead.
Emmy and her brother only set foot in Ireland for the first time last Sunday.
She has been making TikTok videos all week for her 1.2 million followers about trying to become “as Irish as I can in a week”.
She has sampled the delights of high Irish culture for her followers – the spice bag, the big fry-up and Tayto among them. This tourist will soon become a musical ambassador for Ireland.
Ireland and Norway have successfully collaborated before in the Eurovision. Norway won in 1995 with Nocturne performed by Secret Garden which featured a long violin solo by Fionnuala Sherry.
There was a time, though, when Norway was known as the also-rans of the Eurovision. “Norvége, null points” was a running joke for many decades, but Ireland, still the most successful country in the competition, has struggled in recent times with the exception of last year when Bambie Thug finished in a respectable sixth place.
“We must qualify for the final,” said Erlend. “All we can do is our best,” his sister added.
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