Yes, we know, it's only October...
...but a number of countries are already going public with their preparations for the 2009 Song Contest in Moscow.
Earlier this week, Swedish Tv carried a live broadcast of the announcement of all-but-four of the song titles and composers which will battle it out in Melodifestivalen 2009 (we said the Swedes took it seriously). There'll be four 'wildcard' acts, Swedish household names who get a direct ticket in to the line-up to make the public extra-keen to watch, announced a bit later on.
Greece has already announced who'll be singing for them in Moscow. This year's bronze-medalling nation will despatch 2004 bronze-medaller (and 2006 Contest co-host) Sakis Rouvas (pictured) to Russia in May. At a press conference this week he made plenty of rumblings about anything other than first place being failure. Rouvas got the UK's douze in Istanbul with an extremely dodgy vocal to the rather limp song Shake It! (what were we thinking?)
If you were watching that fateful evening, you may remember him whipping his jacket off halfway through the performance to reveal his vested torso (he used to be one of Greece's national athletes), before he started spinning around like... well, a big girl, if we're honest.
But nobody, nobody, comes close in the 'early doors effort' stakes than Bulgaria...
As this is tip-typed away, the Bulgarians have already broadcast two of the preliminary heats for the 2009 national final. This means that, three months before 2008 is consigned to history, there are already some Bulgarian acts whose hopes and dreams of 2009 Eurovision conquest are in tatters. It's just cruel.
However, this is what (we think) won the first Bulgarian heat a few weeks back. It's called I Promise and it's performed by Perfect Stranger. Or is that Perfect Stranger performed by I Promise?
Only six months until the UK final...
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Jamie McLoughlin - The news editor of Southport Visiter reveals all about his musical hobby that more people should admit to having.
It’s rather depressing to think that Greece will, by the votes of its widespread diaspora (mostly in North London it would appear) gain a shedload of votes with some dismal ethnopop effort with little to recommend it. The fact that the talent-free zone that is Sakis will be ‘singing’ their effort makes it all the more dispiriting. Sakis’s last effort was so over-marked it stretched credibility even tighter than his ill-fitting outfit. When he begins his ‘performance’, you’ll be praying for a trapdoor to open up underneath him at about 60 seconds in. It would be by far the most entertaining thing about his song. One can always hope, I suppose.
As for Bulgaria, there is even less chance of a half-decent effort. Mind you, anyone who caught the 3 spellbinding minutes of pure entertainment that a certain young man called Begacha gave in one of the many, many semi-finals for the 2008 Bulgarian national contest will be aching to see something that wonderful again. He had a certain kind of magic that had the audience in a frame of mind that could only be referred to as ‘hysterics’. After he had finished there wasn’t a dry seat in the house.