IT’S almost enough to put the boom bang-a-bang into a new cold war.

Before turning off the gas supplies to Ukraine, his neighbour, Vladimir Putin, Russia’s hardman leader, rejected a plea from Andrew Lloyd Webber for Moscow to vote for the UK in the Eurovision song contest.

“Can I ask you please . . . Can Russia vote for Britain?” the composer asked.

Putin replied: “Well, speaking for myself I am prepared to do so, but I believe you should better address this question to the Russian audience.”

The Russian prime minister even told the musical peer, who is on a personal mission to save the contest, that he expects Ukraine to vote for the Russian entry.

In an interview with Lloyd Webber, Putin made a spirited defence of the block voting system. It helped Russia to win last year and prompted Sir Terry Wogan to throw in the towel as the BBC presenter of the contest.

Putin singled out Ukraine and Russia as shining examples of how neighbouring countries “understand each other” and offer mutual support during the annual song-fest. Last week Russia switched off energy supplies to its former Soviet satellite republic, a conduit for gas to western Europe, citing unpaid bills.

“For instance,” said Putin, “if you take the trans-border countries of Russia and Ukraine, sometimes you cannot tell where there are more Russians or where there are more Ukrainians. The ethnicities, they are so mixed they create a combination, a symbiosis of cultures.”

The prime minister’s remarks, sometimes bordering on the surreal quality of the song contest, were made at his dacha outside Moscow, where as host of the 2009 competition he received Lloyd Webber.

The Oscar-winning composer will write the British entry but has made it clear that he will not pen “nonsense” similar to the song Boom Bang-a-Bang that took Lulu to joint victory 40 years ago.

Putin, a judo aficionado, threw Lloyd Webber by at first fawning in his presence before suggesting that he had borrowed some of his melodies from Russian classical music.

“In the early 1990s I was on a business trip to Hamburg and had an opportunity to enjoy your musical, The Cats, which was running for 10 years there,” he said via an interpreter. “I could not imagine that I would ever have an opportunity to meet you and talk to you.”

The nature of Putin’s “business trip” remained unspecified. Putin resigned from the KGB in 1991 during the abortive coup against President Mikhail Gorbachev, which the state security service supported.

Putin added: “I myself believe that in your great musical, Jesus Christ Superstar, one can easily trace some melodies which resemble Prokofiev and this can he heard.”

Lloyd Webber admitted: “Yes, it’s true. Very true.” Although coy on his own choice of popular music – “I cannot boast of being an expert in this area” – Putin picked out the British band that had kindled Russians’ aspirations of freedom during the cold war (when Putin was tasked with suppressing political dissent).

He said: “Of course many generations in Russia have been raised by and still have a strong love of the creative works of the Beatles. I had the pleasure to meet, several years ago, Mr McCartney and of course their songs and the pieces that they have granted to this world are still on top.”

Extracts from the discussion were televised last night on BBC1’s Your Country Needs You, in which Lloyd Webber will help to select the singer who will perform Britain’s entry and compose a “tailor-made” song. The series is introduced by Graham Norton, who will succeed Wogan as BBC presenter of the Eurovision finale in Moscow in May.

Lloyd Webber’s record in this area is not good: in 1967 he wrote a Eurovision song with Tim Rice called Try It and See, which was rejected. Perhaps this explained his need for Russia’s support this year, exploiting the fact that no country can vote for itself.

The exchange illustrated the gulf of perception between the British and the Russians about the gravity of the song contest. Lloyd Webber established on his fact-finding mission that east European countries were avid followers who felt the UK was no longer taking the competition seriously.

“The message that came back loud and clear,” Lloyd Webber said, “was that the country that had brought them the Beatles not only wasn’t even bothering to make an effort any more, but was in fact laughing at the countries who were – and since then they’ve harboured quite a lot of resentment towards us.”

This earnest approach was echoed by Putin, whose image of the contest would be unrecognisable to most Britons: “First of all it’s about the young people . . . I hope that millions of young people in Europe and in Russia will be listening and watching good music and will be raised and educated by this good music.”

How the blocks shape up

Block voting at the Eurovision song contest has become so widespread that Sir Terry Wogan cited it as a reason for quitting the show after 37 years.

Following Russia’s victory last year, Wogan said: “Those who care will have had it up to here with the blatant political voting.”

Russia’s entry, Believe by Dima Bilan, received a maximum 12 points from six neighbouring countries: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine, Belarus and Armenia. Israel was the only other country to award Russia top marks.

The success of Serbia in 2007 could similarly be attributed to generous scoring from its neighbours: Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Hungary and Montenegro.

Meanwhile, Lordi, a heavy metal band from Finland, won in 2006, after receiving “douze points” from Iceland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Estonia.

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