We may have been mocking poor Sebel Cəfərova and her strangled mangling of Euphoria from the Azeri process, but a couple of you fine folks have pointed in the direction of an even more frightening event from last year's selection tournament in Baku that managed to escape our attention.
I won't spoil the fun by giving anything away, but do stick with it to the end, because it just keeps giving - and the reaction of the hostess is particularly entertaining. Big ups to Roger Fry and Phil Colclough for tipping me the wink to this rare jewel.
Now that they've finally won the thing, the Azerbaijani's are opening up their selection process to one and all. Over a period of some months, a good 80 acts are singing their favourite Eurovision songs in the hope of being selected for a mammoth final some time in the distant future.
We're a couple of weeks into the process, and the gems are starting to fly. Witness the pain of this poor lass, who starts out badly and digs herself into a bigger pit of pain as she goes on.
And to think, they've already been through a pretty harsh audition process to get this far! This, dear readers, is a bit special.
Ukraine clearly had Nan envy after last year's Russian Granny extravaganza, and decided to go a bit more serious and traditional. But somehow it ditched the charm and came over as a bit cold and calculating. But it's still a jolly little could of minutes of folk-flavoured fun.
Perhaps surprisingly, this got beaten by a howling ballad that sounded a bit like The Lion King being chucked down a stairwell in an echoey car park.
The Ukrainian national final takes place tomorrow morning at the ungodly hour of 9:50am UK time, and of the songs taking part, there are very few that would encourage me to rouse from my slumber that early in the day.
Everywhere you look it's mawkish lady ballad followed by slightly bluesy shouty lady, and it's probably worth hanging on in there with your lay in an get up just in time for the results.
However, there was just one song among them that looks like being a cheerful aside, by two cheeky chappies who clearly can't dance for treacle. The song's pretty poor, but at least it's lively, and the whole thing becomes worthwhile bang on the two minute mark when the shaggy haired lad clearly looses his mind.
Such a shame they released a version of the song on the internet waaay to early and it'll be instantly disqualified if they win. Although they won't.
Tonight's final of the 51st Festivali i Këngës in Albania offers up the usual tableau of histrionic balladeers in frightening frocks, growly voiced men in blue suits and the fabulous Dr Flori, but there's one particular song that's really caught my eye, and it could be the dark horse to watch out for.
Adrian and Bledar may not be the prettiest of lads, but there's something epic about this sombre epic that shows flashes of dark-hearted folk with some massive orchestral flourishes to the choruses.
It won't be a popular choice among the more hardened FiK fans among you, but I really feel that if selected, this could do surprisingly good business in Malmo next May. ***STOP PRESS***
The pre-Christmas finals continue apace this weekend, and the Lithuanians choose their pick for Malmo tonight. And as much as I hope that Miss Sheep and her mates make it though, I've got a sneaking regard for this over expressive little chap. He might over egg his presentation a tad, but there's something curiously endearing about the whole affair. The backing track has got a gently chunky long raincoat jangle pop feel about it, and his vocal melody never quite goes where you predict.
You know how sometimes in a Eurovision performance the song starts off with some ill-advised little staging concept, but after about a verse and a half the act break ranks and carry on with a regulation two-step dance routine.
Well someone clearly forgot to tell Linas Adomaitis and his mob the rules. Car crash is perhaps slightly apt for this one.
Sorry, what's that you're saying?...it made it to the Lithuanian final you say? Strewth!
We have our first guaranteed entry for Eurovision 2013 (Belarus chose their winner last week, but we know how unlikely that is to go unchanged), and it comes from a most unlikely source - a Salvation Army band!
Now it's as yet unclear how many of this mob are actually fully paid up members of the old Sally Ann - indeed one old boy in his 90s looked as though he may not even make it through the song, let alone get onto the stage in Malmo - but what we do know is that it's a catchy, likable Christmas Market kind of pop rock tune with a smashing optimistic chorus.
It may be glued to a gimmick, but unlikely the dreary Do The Monkey from the same final, it's a sweet tune that could get a half decent result in Sweden, despite the funny outfits!
So it was not to be. What could have been the greatest ever moment in Eurovision history was cast aside because two pensioner judges couldn't pick the joy out of the racket. A single point more from the juries and it would have made the superfinal - and then who knows what would have happened.
It was a vain hope for we punk-leaning Eurovisionists, but for a brief moment there we thought it was going to happen. From the first audio-only YouTube clip, we were hooked. Surely they couldn't look anywhere as near as the sounded. And then this clip from Estonian breakfast TV crept onto the web...
Oh my days, we thought. This might just get out of its semi-final.
Then came the official video. No one had any idea what was happening, but it looked fantastically brain bamboozling. We likely more and more and more...
Then, when we finally got to see them play in front of people in the semi-final in the video at the top of this page, we wept real tears of joy. Finally a song by a band that I'd actually go and see in real life might actually get to Eurovision. They're in the final. It couldn't happen... could it?
It's going to do it. It's really going to do it! But despite coming an easy second in the televote, and guaranteeing it a slot in a superfinal it would have surely walked, the churlishness of two grandparents cost Europe possibly its greatest ever delight. Well done ETV, I'm sure your nice fresh-faced ballad lass will battle you to a nice lower mid-table position in its semi-final, and we'll all be struggling to remember who she was this time next year.
There are some countries that you'd fancy going to visit on the basis of their failed Eurovision contenders alone, and for me Lithuania has always been one of them.
Take this slightly bonkers piece of Baltic electropop. It lilts along insistently in a nicely 90s kind of way, with a gently unhinged lyric and a moderately not-quite doolally dance routine and it makes you smile, quite calmly and happily.
It's nothing to get your gran excited, but it's got enough interesting little difference nodules to make you want to hear it again.
Now we're talking! After all that amateurish Swiss cobblers, our mates in Lithuania have finally kicked the live shows off with proper Eurovisionistic gusto. And this here is all you want…
A couple of jocular skinheads in regional fabrics and homemade instruments bouncing out a happy-go-lucky little folk pop gem? Perfect!
It did take us a fair while to realise it was being sung in English, mind…
When I first started watching this clip, I thought that it was most probably some kind of Swiss in joke, featuring some locally well-known comic setting himself up for some jolly jape at the end. But the more I watched, the more I realised how completely straight, and completely brilliant it was.
From the barrel-chested singer and his independently moving hair, to the old folks digging his singalong sounds and the unfeasibly fast-flowing torrent in the background, this clip is near perfect. How sad that it will almost certainly be going nowhere near the Swiss final.
I'm always hearing the fanboys wittering on about how songs should more closely represent their nation - well how much more Swiss can you possibly get than this?!
The Swiss open application process has up to now attracted something like 175 entrants, and they are for the most part pretty amateurish and unlistenable. There are also a heck of a lot of international entries, with acts from Greece, Sweden, Spain and Barnet all throwing their hat into the ring. But it's an entry from The Netherlands that has induced the most mirth in Apocalypse towers.
Featuring broad-chested Gordon from the late lamented Die Toppers, the snappily named Los Angeles The Voice look like an aggregation of well-weathered session singers clubbing together to sing the old songs for the Sanatogen circuit. Yup, they're like an opera-free Il Divo gone to seed.
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.
Think you've seen Georgian Jocker Anri Jokhadze somewhere before? Ladies and gentlemen, let me tweak your memories and reintroduce you to the quite astounding Gay Stalin!
2009 was the year when seemingly everything in the Georgian final seemed to be having a less-than-subtle dig at their burly neighbours north of the border, and we can only imagine they created this gem to raise some bushy eyebrows in the Kremlin.
But aside from all that nonsense, it's also fun watching the many, many costume changes not always going to plan!
Although most of the attention in the Slovenian final went on the two songs in the superfinal, the Prusnik twins also had another couple of crackers up for contention - not least this little slice of Yugo-nostalgic shuffle pop.
OK, so their pasty beige shorts were a tad unseemly, but the song itself was an infectious, jazzy, Andrews Sisters-for-Tito kind of number. And on this kind of form, one suspects that this won't be the last time we'll be seeing this pair in the EMA - and maybe even, if we're lucky, the bigger show itself...
So then, Engelbert's song for the 2012 Eurovision Song Contest has finally been revealed. We were torn whether it would be a Cash/Jones/Diamond style career reboot, or a return to the familiar crooning lounge style that made him the huge name (heh!) he is today. So what have we actually got?
Erm San Marino? Did you read the section in the rule book about songs containing brand names? (Or did they sneakily annul that one this year?) What's even worse is that our mad old German uncle Ralph Siegal wrote it. Whatever the heck were they thinking? A three minute advert for huge global business? With the range of arcane advertising licencing laws around dotted around Europe? That's surely never going to happen? Is it?
Oh, and the song itself? Cringeworthy cobblers!
We can only hope they've got a killer song on standby...
***STOP PRESS***
The EBU have posted a cease of desist order on this curious little ditty, informing them that they've either got to remove all references to the trademarked name of Facebook, or supply an entirely new song by the end of next week. It's a Crazy World, eh...
One if my favourite things about the Melodifestivalen is that every now and again, something so intrinsically Swedish pops up that it leaves the rest of us in Europe scratching our heads as to what's going on.
This year's contest dealt us a rather skittish gentleman called Thorsten Flinck. As a noted actor, rabble rouser and general character he's both beloved and feared by the Swedish public - think a kind of mash up of Nick Cave, Ray Winstone and any murderer Paul Bettany has played - and his slightly smokey and unsettling shanty sailed through the second chance round and into the final.
As to be expected, the international juries hated it. But as the televotes started to come in and Thorsten had yet to register a score, for one brief, beautiful moment you could hear the collective worry of a nation muttering "Oh shit, we've sent Flinck!" under their breaths. Now that would have been a chuckle!
As sophisticated a nation as Russia undoubtedly is, a limp popera tune about an 18th century castrato sung by a gaggle of pregnant goths and a man in a blouse sporting a floppy quiff was perhaps just a bit too high concept, even for them!
Friki spotters are going to particularly enjoy this one.
Moldova's selection is always packed with plucky triers who keep entering year after year in the hope that one day it might be their turn. So well done to Pasha Parfeny who finally grabbed the big prize after loads of half-decent stabs at it.
We've already mentioned last year's cracking Dorule elsewhere on these pages, but I'd all but forgotten his 2010 entry... until I watched this clip, that is.
Three and three quarter hours it took to choose this, and as always, the result felt a little bit fishy at the end. Still, pasha's got a bouncy enough little tune, and the zombie kung fu brides backing him make it an entertaining enough little show. Could do with a trifle more song, mind, but we can't have everything.
But believe me, this isn't the last you've seen of the Moldovan final, oh mercy!
The build up to Loreen's eventual coronation was enormous, causing a virtual civil war among the rank and file Eurovision fan. You either loved the song to the extent that you considered the poor lass the second coming of our good lady in blue, or hated her as if she was the devil witch from some kind of evil space dungeon.
So I feel kind of a bit out of place in that I don't really mind it, really. It's got a touch of that late 90s Ibiza beach party vibe to it, right down to the rather telling title - although I understand how to a good many ESC fans this still feels rather contemporary.
One thing's for sure though, from the moment it starts you just can't take your eyes off the gal. Whether her slightly kooky wind-blown spot of interpretive dance in her Nan's housecoat will go down well across the continent as a whole though is an entirely different matter.
Imagine the scene. You've battled for the chance to represent your country at Eurovision. You're drawn last but one in your national final and as the night goes on, the nerves are building and your throat is getting tighter.
Finally it's your turn to perform. A whole nation are watching in anticipation, but as you start to sing you realise that you can't hear yourself particularly well. But it's OK, you'll battle through...
What follows is one of the most uncomfortable three minutes of the Eurovision season so far. I think the faces of the backing singers say it best. Poor, poor girl.
Now I'm not one of these moaning types who insist that you should only sing in your own language at Eurovision. In fact I've always held by the opinion that you should sing in whatever language you feel most comfortable in, and the one you feel will give you the best advantage in the wider competition.
But when you sing in Serbian it feels all dark and mysterious. You could be singing your phone bill for all we know, but it would still sound important and atmospheric. However, when you translate it to English we can pick out every cheesy rhyming couplet and some terribly cliched lyrical imagery. Heck, at times it sounded like an Irish entry, and we don't want that.
Do yourself a favour mate. Stick to what you know, and leave the stilted English to the lesser countries. It's much less cringeworthy for the rest of us when you do.
Jaan Pehk's last couple of Eurovision efforts, including last year's fabulous grass solo, and his cracking little pop tune with Köök a couple of years before, suggested that his latest stab at Eurovision glory might be a cracker as well.
And while this sombre folksy ballad certainly had its merits, we suspect he shouldn't have got Mike Leigh into to direct the staging…
With all the attention and TV advertising showered upon the top three of Dima/Julia, rapper Timati and the fabulous nans, you may not have noticed that there were another 22 songs in the contest. So what actually came fourth, you might wonder.
This.
It appears to be two teenage girls arguing about an accordian – in French – but I have absolutely no idea what the flipping heck is actually going on. See if you've got any idea...
The Russians have finally realised what the rest of the world has been saying for two years and sent the Nans! Finally a Russian election result that everyone (barring perhaps Dima Bilan) agrees with!
Here's the first sneaky clip of the song many are tipping to walk the Russian final tonight. I think someone's filmed it on a 90s mobile from under their coat, but you still get a general idea.
It's the standard mawkish and over-wrought minor key ballad that you;d expect, but that's the music of choice over those parts at the moment, so it's got to be in with a pop - especially considering the pure star power on stage.
I still reckon the turbo nans or Russia's top rapper Timati are going to give them a run for their money, though. Tonight's final is going to be a bloodbath!
So finally after months of not saying much and keeping their plans under their hat, Slovakia finally revealed their act. At least when the UK did that, to much derision from the fanboy rank and file, we came up trumps with one of the top selling artists of all time.
Slovakia, however, suprised us all with a nice chunky little slab of Soundgarden-lite sung by a cheekyly handsome looking rock cherub called Max Jason Mai (or Miro Šmajda to his nan). It's just about rock enough to keep the grumpy grounded emo daughters interested on Eurovision night, but scrapes in with just enough melody not to offend the pop fans too much as well.
How it'll do on the night is anyone's guess, but I kinda like it being there. It's nothing groundbreaking, but I still wasn't expecting that at all.
What is it with Armenia this year? The lack of news coming out of the host country's nemesis neighbour is encouraging any nut job with access to a microphone to claim that they are the only true successor to the crown. And Lucia Moon here isn't helping any.
Just looking at her you kind of suspect she's American - and surprise surprise she is, also claiming to be Azeri born (from Nagorno-Karabakh, no less, which will please the hosts) and of Armenian heritage. I suspect this makes her think she's the perfect candidate for the job, when in actual fact she's more like that slightly worrying woman from the late night dispensing chemists doing karaoke in an empty bar. On her own. At 4am.
If Armenia choose this old tripe, I'll eat my dog.
Nestling among all the usual turbo pop, plinky plonk and mawkish ballads in the Romanian final, you can find this splendid little joy of boisterous wonder.
Employing the the kind of hardcore folklore frequently beloved by their cousins next door in Moldova, this is a happy-go-lucky stomp riot that would light up any stage - and especially one plonked on the very banks of the Caspian Sea.
I'd love to see them send this to Azerbaijan, and fancy that it would do pretty well if it got there - but will the good people of Romania be brave enough?
Lithuania chose their song last night, and rather than picking the rather fabulous Vytautus Matuzas, they went for the pre-match favourite Donny Montell (or Donatas Montvydas as he's known to his mum). It's a well song but unremarkable song that starts slow, then pumps up to a fairly lame mid tempo disco tune at about the halfway mark. But this clip is worth seeing for two hilarious reasons.
In a move of arch literalism, our Donatas spends the first half of the song wearing a rather festching satin blindfold. Not only will I have to resist the urge of yelling: "a bit further forward mate. A little bit more..." when he's on stage in Baku, but I really kind of hope that a real life blind singer manages to win one of the remaining Eurovision berths, just to fuck up his show, like.
But better than that, when the song shifts up a gear at around the 1:30 mark he's briefly possessed by the combined spirits of Michael Jackson, Elvis Presley and Nijinsky (the dancer, not the racehorse) for one of most laugh making ten seconds of the year so far. I hope he keeps that bit in when he gets to Azerbaijan!
To hear the teaser trailer for the home song, click here...
A micro snippet of this year's host song has just appeared on the official website for Azeri telly, and it's pretty interesting.
The few seconds that they're teasing with us offer up an eastern tinged jazz ballad that appears to be sung in the singer's home language. There's also no suggestions of the kind of hapless vocal runs she was prone to in her national final - but we wouldn't bet that there won't be any there. In fact we rather fear that there will be.
However, on this showing, it could be an interesting choice for the home town song - we'll be curious, if not a little frightened, to hear the whole thing.
***STOP PRESS***
Sadly this isn't the Azeri song. Instead they've gone for a standard Disney ballad, with the predictable Whitney-esque howling. We sha'nt be showing you that here.
I have a dilemma with this song. In my normal daily punk rock life, this is a pretty ludicrous little chunk of pop metal. Sung by possibly the cleanest looking lead singer ever to sport a tattoo, it's nothing much more than a slightly turbocharged schlager with some bloke shouting every 40 seconds.
But in a Melodifestivalen context this is pretty amusing. The fanboys glued to the front five rows will be horrified by the song's noisier chunks, and the marginal stabs at metal conventions, like the chains and flames, will confuse and bemuse the voting nans at home.
It's lemon squash weak in metal terms, but somehow in a Eurovision environment it works near perfectly. Damn its eyes!
Russia's vast list of finalists was finally released yesterday, and while the names of Bilan & Volkova, Buranovskiye Babushki (the folky nans!) and Jet Kids are the headline names, this likely little bunch are the first to have made their song public. And a bouncy little number it is too.
Describing themselves rather sweetly as hooligan-pop, their crazy-legged burlesquey crunch could make quite the stir on the big night, although drawn perilously early in the fourth slot, they might be sadly overlooked when it comes to voting time.
Still, we'll enjoy it while we can - if for nothing else than the guitarist's insane dance shapes!
Romania were hanging on so long before they announced their finalists that I kind of hoped they'd be presenting us with something pretty special. Sadly though there few pop thrills in among the usual mawkish dead-eyed balladeer blokes, and those tiny shrieking girls wearing not quite enough shiny fabric they always seem to dig out.
So this song stands out like a sore thumb amongst the mediocrity that surrounds it. It's not particularly great, but it's been all over Romanian TV all year, and by the look of the official video - that sees the glamourous singer cavorting inappropriately in tiny garments the length and breadth of Dubai - they've got a bit of money behind them. So if the Romanian public isn't sick of the song by the time it comes to chose, they've surely got to be in with a decent shout.
Actually, I'm not sure that the girl is even a regular member of the band, as most of the videos of them on YouTube show them to be a cracking little six piece marching band. So which loyal member are they going to dump if they get to Baku? My bet's on the tiny trumpeter.
Greece have just presented their four songs to the public. The conceit is that they're not going to say who any of them are by, so as not to influence the voting public into chosing their favourite act before the song.
The thing is, all four of them sound like they're by the same girl singer.
This is the best of the bunch - a punchy little Kelly Clarkson-alike stomper. A ludicrous lyric, to be sure, but at least it's got a bit of gusto about it. I wonder who it's by?
***STOP PRESS***
Turns out it's by a rather interesting looking twosome called Velvet Fire. Apparently they've already had a decent sized hit towards the end of last year, so we can only but hope!
Every year this contest throws up a few songs that pretty much defy explanation. The thing is, you never expect them to come from Sweden. Usually the home of happy-go-lucky schlager and eerily over-wrought ballads, nobody's quite sure what chain of events led to this one getting into the Melodifestivalen.
Quite how a cuprinol-treated crime novellist with the complexion of my old nan's sofa ended up barking randomly over a nice slice of formula Europop is unclear, but we're especially glad it did.
Nobody expected this song to even crawl its way out of its semi-final, but somehow it charged through direkt til Globen, and is building up such a head of steam that serious Eurovision commentators are now beginning to fear that it might actually win the thing. And with a host of parodies and spoof websites filling up the internet there's half a chance that might just happen. And then where will we be?
I love Mimicry. They've got to be just about my favourite Estonian band with their tasty brand of early 80s style electronica, all infused with contemporary club dance flavour. I love their aimiable persistance, too.
Every year they send a cracker of a song to Eestilaul, only to have their hopes thwarted at far too early a hurdle - curse that Estonian public! This year's attempt was a gorgeous mash up of Human League keyboards and New Order dance beats, with the singing boy looking cool and disaffected and every bit like a pre-acid Julian Cope, and the keyboard gal just looking cool.
I hope they don't take it to heart and give up trying, because hearing their annual effort is one of my favourite bits of Eurovisionism every year! Keep it up kids, you're flipping ace!
