….or possibly not as the case may be. First in this quartet is the Bulgarian entry, Love Unlimited by Sofi Marinova, and are we the only ones to find this a tad bizarre? The song is upbeat and fun, the singer is dressed as though she is about to sing a Lithuanian Disney ballad, and is standing all alone on that great big stage with just a few giant sparklers for company. Surely a song like this demands a few dancers or at least something beyond static fireworks? Better liven it up a bit before Baku we think, otherwise it’ll back to semi-final oblivion for the Bulgarians. Again:
And here’s Estonia’s effort, Kuula by Ott Lepland. Not one of your finest hours, Estonia, it has to be said (and could you really have come up with something more different to Rockefeller Street if you had tried?????) Although we sense there could be a bit of jury love a la Lithuania 2011 heading in this one’s general direction:
And speaking of Lithuania, here they are with their entry, Donny Montell’s Love Is Blind. Now this isn’t bad once it gets going but we have some questions: 1) why does it sound like two songs stuck together? 2) In what way was this better than the dwarf rapper from the national final? 3) why, Donny, are you dressed like Zorro for the first half of the song? Fair enough if it’s a gimmick but don’t come crying to us when you fall into the orchestra pit mid-song on semi-finals night:
Finally we have FYR Macedonia, a little number called Black and White by Kaliopi. Or as we are sending here, the Macedonian answer to Bonnie Tyler:
You might have noticed in our latest round-up of this year’s Eurovision entries that we missed out the effort from FYR Macedonia, which was chosen at the weekend. Not so, rather we have chosen to single it out for a very good reason. THIS is the song that will go to Dusseldorf:
It’s called Rusinka, it’s not bad at all, and its performer Vlatko Ilievski is easy enough on the eye to prevent us from taking the toilet break we have become accustomed to taking when the Macedonians are strutting their stuff. However, we can’t help but be a tad disappointed that THIS effort, which was also in the final, didn’t take top honours:
Now we know it’s ridiculous, it’s being sung by a man in a chicken suit and it sounds a bit like a nursery rhyme – but secretly, we bet you wish that it had won. As it was, it was utterly trounced in the final and didn’t get even within sniffing distance of the top spot despite rumours sweeping the likes of Facebook that he had indeed won, causing us to tune in to the final to see for ourselves (a move we may regret for some time, given their fondness for announcing half the results, having 20 minutes of singing then announcing more results. Goodness knows what would happen if they ever got to host the damn thing)
Still, the fact the song flopped does suggest that while the Macedonians haven’t had a decent entry in years, they still haven’t sunk quite as low as all that and have clearly learned from the mistakes of Ireland, who were the last country to try something quite as ridiculous as sending a man dressed as a bird (remember Dustin The Turkey? No we didn’t think so) And you should also be very thankful that this song wasn’t in contention for the UK. Because given the track record of the voting public, if it had been it would be on its way to Dusseldorf right now…..
Still, Rok Agresori shouldn’t be downcast. He is still an all-round good egg. And at least his song wasn’t that much of a turkey. Actually it was a bit of a poultry effort. And had he won he might have been too chicken to go to the contest anyway (all right, that’s enough – Ed)
So, we’re midway through national finals season, and now the songs are coming in thick and fast, with another trio of, how shall we put this, varying quality chosen over the past 48 hours. Let’s get cracking with FYROM (Former Yugoslavian Republic Of Macedonia), who last year were neck and neck with the Netherlands as our least favourite song in the contest. And guess what? This year they are in the exact same position! Jas Ja Imam Silata is by Gjoko Taneski featuring Billy Zver and Pejcin and confirms that our theory that in the rest of the world it may be 2010 but back in Skopje, in musical terms at least, it is still 1987. There’s an attempt to modernise it with a Linkin Park-esque rap bit in the middle but unfortunately for us this makes it even worse as it just smacks of someone who’s put his brother in the band and given him something to do because his mum told him he had to. It’s not quite as horrendous as last year’s effort but to be honest that’s not saying much. Watch, endure, and try and remember that this is the same country that just a few short years ago were coming up with the uber-cool likes of Ninananja:
And so to Malta, whose all-consuming passion for Eurovision appears to be alive and well, if their national final was anything to go by: we watched it on Saturday night, all 14 hours of it (well it felt that long at least: by contrast we expect the UK final to begin at 8pm on March 12 and be all done and dusted by 8.02….). Still, the winning song, My Dream by winsome Liza Minnelli lookalike Thea Garrett, was certainly worth all the effort as this is one of the better Maltese efforts of recent years, a simple, understated ballad that we suspect will get plenty of love from the juries. Quite why, however, Ms Garrett is mauled mid-performance by a man dressed as a giant seagull we have no idea. We saw him sitting nonchalantly, in costume, in the Green Room as the results came in, looking as though it was the most normal thing in the world to be sat at a table wearing a giant beak. Still there’s no doubt in our minds that with a good performance on the night this song could fly (that’s enough of that – Ed). Wonder if Birdman will be talking about it on Twitter (er, we’ll get our coats…….)?
Sunday evening brought us the Slovenian entry, possibly the first ever ‘mash-up’ in Eurovision history. Except Narodno Zabavni Rock by Anzambel Roka Zlindere and Kalamari appears to think that blending traditional accordion-based folk music with tacky 80s rock guitar appears to be a good thing. The resulting effort is kind of the musical equivalent of a tuna and banana sandwich, just wrong on so many levels. And yet, there is something strangely appealing about it – in its own way it is as awful as the Netherlands yet at least the band looks like they’re having fun and they give it their all. Their enthusiasm is infectious, and their song has stuck in our head. Actually we’re obsessed with it. And that tuna and banana buttie is beginning to sound like an enticing prospect. Help???????
Finally – and we’ll include it in the weekend since it happened on Monday – comes Spain’s entry, Algo Pequenito by Leo Sayer lookalike Daniel Diges. It would of course be all too easy to start poking fun at the ‘clockwork toy’-inspired backing dancers – but just for a change we’re not going to, since the song itself is so completely lovely we don’t want to:
Just when we were starting to actually think that FYR Macedonia deserved their yearly place in the Eurovision final (due to their apparent ability to breeze through even when dishing up a hearty pile of musical cack…..), they come up with this little number from local lads Next Time for Moscow 2009. Is it just us, or is it as if 1987 never ended……?
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