The Internationalist Eurovision Blog

Whoo, anybody else still recovering from the excitement of the weekend? That's what switching between Melodifestivalen, A Dal, EMA & Supernova on the same night does to you! Anyway, we have another exciting weekend to discuss as we move in to the penultimate (that's right penultimate) week of Eurovision national final selections. Estonia I'm not entirely sure exactly why Eesti Laul is hailed as one of the most exciting selection processes in Europe. Yes, it found the gem that was 'Goodbye to Yesterday' in 2015, but that has since been followed by two miserable attempts at qualifying for the Grand Final. This year's Tallinn contest should be an interesting one. Stig Rasta has returned for a second bite of the Eurovision cherry, but the one that everybody is talking about is the poperatic 'La Forza' by Elina Netsajeva. Not only is this the favourite for Eesti Laul, it has also kept Estonia in the top three of Eurovision winner odds for the last few...

Come one, come all for the biggest week of the Eurovision 2018 season yet! By this time next week, we will know the entries from Serbia, Germany, Moldova, Hungary, Latvia, Slovenia, Ukraine, Armenia & Romania. With that in mind, I have a lot of writing to do and University work that I am conveniently distracting myself from in order to write this blog post. Serbia So credit where credit is due here, I was very negative about most of the finals I wrote about in the last post. I will therefore start this post by saying that in a country with a very firm recent history of internal selections, Beovizija 2018 could definitely have been just downright painful (they only need to look across the border to Montenegro to see how much of a car crash that one can end up us). I will say that I don't actually think this is a bad batch of songs. There's a little bit of something for everybody, a mix of genres, a return of Rambo Amadeus (what a stage name) and a lot of gorgeous Serbian...

Sorry for the delay all! I'm currently in the midst of my final year of University and I only get my bits and pieces of free time very sporadically (explaining of course why this post was started at about 11 pm on a Tuesday night). I'm nonetheless very eager to run down everything that's set to happen in the Eurovision world. I will not look at the songs already selected just yet and I will wait until after more of the songs have been selected to do a Class of 2018 review post. For now though, let's check out the races around Europe coming up. United Kingdom Coming up, I am planning to write a longer blog post about what the United Kingdom needs to do in order to win Eurovision again. Sadly, 2018 is not their year to break back into the chasing pack. In fairness to the BBC, they have at least managed to get something for everybody this year and I am fully convinced that tonight's show in the Brighton Dome will be fantastic, but let's not kid ourselves, we...

There's an update post coming soon but I am hoping to know the identity of some of the entries (cough, cough France, Spain & Switzerland) before getting into the meat and potatoes of some of the other exciting national finals going down. With that in mind, I thought I would take this opportunity to explore one of my personal favourite elements of the contest... the stage. Now, if you're not a die-hard Eurovision fan, you will probably have stopped reading by this point, but if you haven't, let me give you an opportunity to sway you on why this is so fascinating. Stages are in many ways representative of the identity of the contest, often they will be the biggest statement of the host country as to how they want their culture presented on an international scale. My personal favourite in this respect is the 1992 stage from Malmo where the stage was literally backed by a massive Viking ship motif (pictured below). (Eurovision 1992 Stage) In more modern times, this s...

Happy New Year to all and with 2018 speeding into our lives, the new Eurovision season gets properly into full swing and us die-hard fans get our teeth stuck into the various entries from around Europe. There have been some highlights and low points of early days of the race to be the Eurovision winner (listening to all 60 of the Romanian entries was tedious to say the least). Nonetheless, it is good to be back in the world where we have songs coming out from all around Europe every day! Let's take a look at the national races in play for January and Early February. France Barring Cyprus announcing their song before France's national final on January 27th, the next song to be officially confirmed for Eurovision will be French! As a Brit and therefore a citizen of a big five nation, it is downright refreshing to see a country like France begin to strategise a path towards winning Eurovision and having much success in the process. It says a lot that last year's entry whic...

A Merry late Christmas to all readers! If you do happen to be digesting this, you are probably not particularly one for the festive season of fun and frivolity and all I can say is "you're not alone". What I can excite you about however is that on December 23rd 2017 in Tirana, Albania, a jury decided that the winner of Albania's Festivali i Kenges 56 would be Eugent Bushpepa and 'Mall' ('Yearning' in Albanian). For all those who haven't listened to the song, I have included the youtube link below and it's definitely worth a listen. Now, everybody will have their own impressions and opinions on the song, so I am just going to start with some facts that put this song as one of the recent stand-out Albanian entries. 1) It's not a power ballad sung by a woman giving everything she has to a song that was initially written in Albanian and then translated (awkwardly into English). I am not alone in viewing the mess that was both 2016's ...

I was planning to write a piece on the United Kingdom and Eurovision. However, that was before the gift came into our lives that is the official announcements of the Melodifestivalen 2018 artists. For anybody who isn't a Eurovision super fan or a Swede, Melodifestivalen is the Swedish national final that decides the Swedish Eurovision act each year. When I first started getting into national finals, I was very hesitant about drinking the cool-ade on the contest, but have ended up giving into how bonkers, brilliant and infectious the Melodifestivalen bug is. The contest is six shows (4 semi finals, a "second chance" round known as "andra chansen" and a grand final). The shows take place in different arenas around the country with the final always taking place in Stockholm. The acts chosen are a combination of comedy, folk, schlager, pop, rock and many others whilst the production values are one step off the production values of the actual Eurovision finals. I hav...