Oh my life. When I first heard that Uncle Ralph Siegal was writing a new song for lovely nan Lys Assia with a view to representing Switzerland again at next year's Eurovision I fully expected it to be another syrupy ballad about the old days.
When someone told me that it was going to be a hip hop tinged pop tune with a bunch of young lads with the rather out-of-date name New Jack, I thought one of my fellow Eurovisionists was having a jolly jape.
Remember the dour situationist choir who
warbled out a slightly drunken hymn about helping strangers in last year’s
preliminaries – no, probably not. Well this year they’ve returned, and in a
clever(ish) nod to next year’s hosts, have treated us to a mournful retelling
of a well-known furniture giant’s customer catalogue.
Don’t these fools realise how many of
Eurovision’s most closely adhered to rules they’re breaking with this song? If
they get to Malmo they’ll be disqualified for sure!
It's September 12th. A scant four months since we all packed up our souvenir oil paperweights and staggered home from the last Eurovision Song Contest on Baku. And yet today Swiss telly has published their first nine contenders for the 2013 edition, due to take place at the back end of May in the Swedish city of Malmo.
And quite by chance, the very first song I chose to play from the 2013 season was pure Eurovision Apocalypse gold.
What begins as a quite serviceable little girl fronted club tune takes an unexpected left-hand turn bang on the thirty second mark as quite possibly the two worst rappers you've ever seen start to mumble and gurn through some piss weak rhymes. And better still, the video looks as though it was filmed on a 2003 Nokia camera phone.