montyfood

It probably seems to the casual reader of my various blog entries about the Eurovision Song Contest that I take it a bit too seriously. Not so. The whole thing is about having fun and enjoying the interaction of music and cultures from around this strange continent of which we are a part. Good food, good friends and a good stiff drink make the affair go with a bang even if it means sitting through some ill-conceived experiments in popular music. Rather than commenting on all the entrants in this year’s final, I’ll just vomit up my thoughts about the ones that count as far as I’m concerned.

There seems to be a good smattering of songs with that Balkan brass band sound and I also noticed more than a few going for the onstage miming with stringed instruments schtick, faux gypsy style fiddlers included. (Worst offender: Norway.) But as ever, the key to success this year will be a big ballsy memorable pop tune loaded with eastern flavour.

So what are my top picks?

Turkey's Hadise is a sexy babe with a sassy eastern europop banger. I swear if this doesn't get in the top three I will never eat turkish delight ever again. (This isn't an empty threat - my Christmas isn't complete without a box of the pink sickly sticky sweet treat. Please don't ruin Christmas for me, Hadise.)

Sakis Rouvas is a kind of Greek Enrique, referred to as "the ultimate pop star in Greece" on the ESC website no less. The ladies will love him as he has the chiseled good looks of a god. But he appears to have the stage routine of a failed old David Copperfield trick, with a magic sticky slidey floor gizmo. Despite that, behind the stagecraft there’s a big eurohouse pop tune with a catchy if somewhat disappointing chorus.

I've got a soft spot for the electropop shufflebeat revival (Britney, Katy Perry, Sam Sparro, even the anodyne British girlgroup The Saturdays have had some winning tunes in this genre). So Armenia's track Jan Jan by sisters Inga and Anush floats my boat and sails it round the Caspian sea before returning to the bay for a skinny dip. Not bad for a landlocked country. Seriously, this tune is catchy and quirky in all the ways that a Eurovision song ought to be. This is my pick for an underrated outsider to get in the top five.

Ukraine. What to say that I haven’t said consistently for the last few years. These guys get pop music like no other nation in the contest. That they have been robbed of the winner’s crown (or is it a strange glass trophy) in recent years is a mystery to me. This year’s tune is another itchy catchy number. And who can’t love a floor show that has a singer with too much slap playing a drum solo surrounded by muscly Roman soldiers in shiny armour. Don’t know about you but it’s a recurring fantasy of mine. The official video has Svetlana Loboda dipped in crude oil or chocolate or both, confirming to me that the Ukrainian pop industry has a healthy appreciation of the potent marriage of fetishistic imagery and huge pop music. A year ago, I hastily predicted a landslide win for Ukraine in 2009. I don’t think this is it, but it ought to do well. If I’m wrong you can roll me in oil and chocolate.

Hopefully you know the score by now (and I don’t mean “Grande Bretagne, nul points”) in that the semi-final rounds are where the lesser nations fight it out to compete in the grand final. But the host nation (this year Russia) and the Big Four who help bankroll the event get a fasttrack ticket straight to the closing heat. The little guys literally earn their right to be there. How do these others measure up in 09?

Taking the hosts first, this female-sung ballad is all very nice but not the sort of song to distinguish yourself in a contest like this. I’d wager they went for an average act because they’ve spent more than the Russian GDP on staging the two semi-finals already.

Spain finally seem to have caught the current of the ESC in the 21st century. It has an advantage in this regard: it understands the gypsy, North African and Arabic cultures that have infiltrated the Iberian peninsula throughout history. So it's fielding leggy blond Soraya and a pounding eastern sounding pop anthem. I don't think it's good enough to win, but it's certainly their strongest contender for years.

Germany go the Lou Bega route (dear lord, no!) by melding the popular electropop shufflebeat stylings to the classic hi-de-hi-de-hi-de-ho big band jazz of Cab Calloway. I hear they have Dita Von Teese lined up for the live act, so at the very least there might be the ESC's first glimpse of nipple tassles. How I have longed to write a sentence like that.

France tend to regret nothing, but one wonders if they repent of sending the peerless Sébastien Tellier last year who sung in - sacré bleu! - English. They've found a sultry woman to sing a nice French pop ballad this time which must make them feel happier. The song’s okay but nothing more. (Trivia interlude: French is still one of the official languages of the contest - thus all the “douze points” nonsense at score time - although the rule that countries must sing only in one of the approved tongues has long been retired. And before you ask, yes, when that rule was abolished there were inevitably entries in entirely made-up languages. This is Eurovision after all.) Last year I dared to suggest Daft Punk as French Eurovision prizefighters. They’re too busy working on the Tron sequel soundtrack (yay!) so can I suggest the formidable Magic System instead. Those guys are French North African dance pop geniuses.

I think I've made my feelings pretty clear about the whole Lloyd Webber Eurovision strategy already. This type of contest really isn't the setting for his stage musical meanderings even though the PR says he has something of a following in Eastern Europe. That he is reportedly interested in casting Britain's Got Talent shock-sensation Susan Boyle in a musical says it all for me. Listen, Britain - by which I mean the BBC - stop treating Eurovision like some retro camp joke while insisting that the contest isn't fair and is spoiled by eastern bloc voting. (Jonathan Ross last night even used the word “fix”. How, pray, do you fix continent wide phone voting?) Field an artist who has some genuine sex, street smarts and an insanely catchy quirky tune, and you can save our national reputation at this event. If you really don’t know how to do it, call me. I have notes.

A couple of brief honourable mentions from the semi’s: both the Serbian guy sporting a goatee, bleached afro, golden yellow blazer with the troupe of bald dancers, and also FYR Macedonia’s curly-perm mopheaded rock twins were amazingly good entertainment value and I was shocked they didn’t qualify not for their underwhelming songs but on their memorable visual presentation. Top marks!