Yes, the annual celebration of Euro-kistch has come round again. As we know, last year winner was Finnish monster metal band Lordi, who won at least partly as a result of a word of mouth campaign across metal forums and blogs across Europe.
Some random impressions of this years contest:
- Will somebody please strangle Terry Wogan. He committed the unforgivable sin of prattling all over Lordi’s performance of last years winning entry. Right. Through. The. Entire. Song. Metal Warriors! Burn the heretic!
- Finland have entered a rock number again. It’s very much in the Nightwish/Within Temptation style of commercial female-fronted pop-metal, but it’s just a little bit tame. Finland can do better than this.
- Nobody else has tried imitating last year’s winner. This is probably a good thing. Balkan monster-metal would be a scary, scary thing.
- The Irish entry certainly didn’t feature the best bodhran-playing singer I’ve seen this year
- A few countries avoided formulatic bacofoil glam disco, like Germany’s swing number, or the rootsy blues entry from Hungary.
- There were a lot of very, very bad entries.
- One of which was the British entry. Scooch were truly, truly awful. Who voted for this bilge? Nul points?
- Bacofoil disco is not dead.
- Neither is glam-pop from circa 1973.
- I voted for Finland. Anything that scares Terry Wogan is good for me.
- While they’re counting the votes they’ve got the wonderful heavy metal cellists Apocalyptica playing (a band I’ve seen live supporting Rammstein) and that moron Wogan is prattling over the top of them.
Update: Just when Britain’s appalling entry looked like getting the nul points it richly deserved, the Irish go and ruin it. Why?
Because the Irish entry was worse than the UK entry, and that is, I’ll admit, saying something. Maybe it had some Celtic cultural and musical integrity I missed, but I doubt it. Even so, both these were better than the Armenian entry which somehow picked up points from the EUD. Dull, dull, dull.
Not sure if the Irish last place was down to a mediocre song, or their shambolic underrehearsed performance. Shades of Father Ted and “My Lovely Horse”.
Fair enough, both performances were significantly below par, the UK one more noticeably for me as I had seen them be quite slick in previous performances, even if the song was execrable.
I was going to say Father Ted and My Lovely Horse too!