Watching the Eurovision 2007 semi-final, the influence of Lordi, last year’s winner, is clear. No one dressed up as monsters or dabbled in the dark side (bar Switzerland perhaps, although they smiled too much), there are:
- Too many guitars: Croatia have three, Iceland have four, five more than strictly necessary, which makes it look like an air guitar competition.
- Drumkits. In the good old days, you had the house band and a guest, named, conducter. Even last year you rarely got a drumkit. Now many entries (in the semi-final at least) have something approximating to a band.
- General wierdness. The range of entries is quite refreshing, from the Israeli mental entry, Switzerland’s Vampires are alive, Belgium’s 70s nonsense, Austria’s reasonable rock song with bonkers incongruous backing singers I can’t really describe with any justice, and Latvia’s version of Il Divo. That said, Portugal did an Iberian-style entry (poor), and Turkey did a Turkish-style entry (OK).
- Estonia’s chorus bears, in my opinion, more than a passing resemblance to the chorus of Lordi’s Hard Rock Hallelujah.
There were a couple of other curious themes: fans (as in paper and feather fans for dancing with), opera, and the that thing where people stand behind eachother and wave their arms (or fans) in such a manner that it looks as though the front person has lots of arms. That kind of thing.
My thoughts so far are Israel to win for audacious wierdness, catchiness, alleged political controversy, and the singer’s attempt at auto-dj’ing. Ace. I would like to see the four guitars of Iceland go through in the hope that they’ll add some more in the final. Finally, the Belarussian dance routine was easily the best.
Update: Belarus through: Yay; FYR Macedonia, so so classic Eurovision; Slovenia, “opera wierdness” my notes say; Hungary, not bad bluesy thing; Georgia, swordsmen, can’t remember the song; Latvia, more opera: the Il Divo nonsense; Serbia, like, whatever; Bulgaria, bizarre drumming thing, only a drumkit though a humdinger of a drumkit; Turkey, a Turkish song [one place left and still no Israel!]; Moldova: I can’t even remember it and made no notes about it. No Denmark (poor version of Dana International), Israel, nor Switzerland (one of the favourites). Ah well.