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So, for this year’s Phil Explains it all – we’re having the helpfull comments of Shai along side my own ( Helpfully coloured in Blue!)- you can always rely on him!
United Kingdom
This will come as absolutely no surprise to anyone with functioning ears and eyes.
Let me kick this off with the fact that it is OK to take a risk, which is what the BBC did here, and based on his YouTube exploits we got everything that we could reasonably expect from Sam. The problem comes, as our group said in Vienna, when you write a song for the contest you rarely, if ever, get it right.
The juries were always going to hate someone who is kooky and left-field because they have the Green Guide to tell them what they are looking for. Vocal capacity? – Not so much. Stage show? – Messy and disjointed. Hit Potential? Hahah no. Relying on his social media following also didn’t help – and there was a classic mistake equating what people view there with the contest.
You still need a good song, and not a collection of British-only-understood phrases thrown together. It doesn’t work outside of the UK… mostly, so why the hell did the BBC think it would work here? No one would seriously think this was the best song and throw some of their hard earned money at it, so they didn’t. Great Idea BBC, but just go for a good song for God’s sake!
Was it the worst song of the evening? Not necessarily. But as it is always the case, it means that the song wasn’t connecting well, neither with the juries nor the audience.
The highest jury ranking, with the exception of Ukraine, was 15th place. The Ukrainian jury was the only one where this song wasn’t in the bottom five of each juror. Here and there, there were sporadic jury members who placed this song in their top 10, only for others to mark this song down.
Lesson to the BBC: If you choose to think outside the box, try at least to have a song that connects well with the audience and juries alike.
Austria
At least Cosmo did better than The Makemakes – but not by that much. A Germanic uptempo disco/trance type song that literally only appealed to the other Germanic country – Germany – and no one else. Again, nothing intrinsically wrong but again the question has to be asked – why would anyone outside of Germany vote for this when you have stronger contenders? What did the normals see? – A 19-year-old dancing with some people with animals on a massive stage. Again, nothing wrong with the performance but it does feel as though he was phoning in the performance and not, seemingly, enjoying himself. There was no connection with the camera and the people at home and those juries… well, He had no stage presence, it’s not a hit outside of Germany so they didn’t mark it up.
This is how you do it, when you don’t want to host again after winning. It was a lacklustre song. At least they didn’t finish last, like the last time they hosted.
Germany
This, I thought, was stone dead last from the moment I saw it. Sarah could not sing a song which, if given to Greece or Cyprus, could well have been dragged into the top 10 with some styling och consulting and a singer that could hold a tune in a bucket. Every time she performed this, it was just painful – especially in some rehearsals that you lot aren’t privy to. Lyrically “Like a vampire you come out at night” is not the height of Ivor Novello-award winning songwriting, and I think the dance break in the middle was a Godsend, because it meant at least 20 seconds where Sarah could no longer murder the notes. Watching the final performance, it seems she chose not to sing some notes, and that may have helped her score some points with the non-gays, but this was squarely aimed at the poufs, and they didn’t like it either. The red staging was just bad on the eyes and if the optics are bad, coupled with low-end dancing and trite lyrics and questionable singing, well… you take your medicine.
That song was always heading to the bottom five results. The juries gave it a very tiny recognition. The highest audience ranking was 11th place from the Luxembourgian televoters. And then 1 x 13th place and 2 x 15th place. At the end, another zero televoters points for Germany.
Lithuania
“But is it art, though?” is the question that crossed my mind when watching this. Intelligent Music Project from, I wanna say, 2022 was more of a project than a song, and that fell flat on its arse. And so did the silver man. Real people just looked at this and laughed their arses off, because he was so out-of-tune… and trying to vogue like Madonna just didn’t work for him. Also, singing behind the backing track didn’t add to the start of the song. Was it only me who wanted to get on the stage and slap the living shit out of him for being so damn smug with himself? If you come across as hateful, people won’t vote for you.
On Saturday, he was still off key, though slightly closer to the music than during the semi. No doubt, the Irish absence harmed his score here, as he missed the televoters points from their Lithuanian diaspora. However, even that wouldn’t have helped him go above 22nd place.
Belgium
Talking as coming across as hateful, we have Belgium. Where even the cows are bored, as I said on the train home from Vienna. God almighty… Essyla might have dragged a bland song to qualification, but in the final it was laid bare. I get the aesthetic with the snow and stuff as ice, and fire being on the background, but a song which has the lyric “where everything dies” is no barrel of laughs to start with. The juries in Latvia and Italy liked this a lot, and I can’t for the life of me think why.
Your simple televoter saw someone who had no connection, nothing likable about her, going through the motions in a song that was basically painting her as the ice queen. From a technical point of view, her intonation was awful and you could hardly make out what she was singing for large parts of the song – and that’s passable if you can read the lyrics like the juries, but televoters don’t get that luxury so the question in their mind might well be “what language is she singing in?” At least with most national language songs, you don’t have to answer that because it’s obvious. Again, you can name ten or more songs that were better than this – therefore it got 0 televotes.
If the semi was televoters only, this would not have qualified. Only ten points from the televoters during the semi, and those faded away when this arrived at the final. Montenegro would have replaced this one in a televote-only semi.
