#esc 2010

[eurovision-revisited]

Eurovision 2010 - Wrap Up

This year, the financial crisis bit Eurovision. The excess of 2009 was replaced with dark warehouse chic. No LEDs. Barely any trappings like postcards or big interval production numbers. The glitz was largely replaced by improvisation and vibes.

However, what 2010 did bring was fun. The concept was to bring people together and in that goal it was hugely successful. From the flashmobs to internet memes, this Eurovision signalled that things were changing in positive if unexpected directions. The humour was good, the hosts were fluid and at ease in front of both the cameras and the huge numbers of fans gathered in the arena.

There were more experimental innovations such as allowing voting for the acts throughout the show. The juries were reintroduced to the semi-finals with results that were yet to be determined in the actual show. There was one of the all-time great semi-finals. More and more national finals were developing their own unique characters and more of them were becoming fixtures in their broadcasters calendars. Even if the show was running on a comparative shoestring, everyone was having a good time and trying new things.

However, peel back the paper and you could see the issues fermenting underneath the fun. Many of those new innovations had consequences which bubbled up in strange places.

The reintroduction of the juries was a sticking plaster on the pre-2009 concerns of voting blocks, however the changes had resulted in national finals filled with bland ballads and sub-standard, conservative pop, as broadcasters tried to second-guess the juries. The numbers of acts in those national finals plummeted after growing for several years. Counter-intuitively, that let the fun songs stand-out in the national finals which is probably why so many of them made it to Oslo.

Some national finals seemed to be attracting more corruption and government meddling as some countries doubled-down on using Eurovision as a form of soft power and national image projection. Other countries held big national finals which they poured money and their soul into, then felt so hard done by the results to the extent that it soured them on Eurovision permanently.

Even as Eurovision hit some of the biggest numbers for participation in its history, countries were leaving for good or for long breaks. Andorra had left, never to return, while Czechia, Hungary and Montenegro all took breaks for financial reasons.

The internet involvement wasn't limited to viral sensations appearing on the stage and the creation of one of the all-time memes. It also resulted in nastiness and apologies being given to national parliaments. The desire to involve the crowd in the arena meant there were heightened security challenges and that led to lapses.

The hurly-burly of national final season and Eurovision was boisterous enough that nations and audience members were getting bruised.

Somehow though, it all held together and we got many all time great Eurovision songs. There are seventeen songs from 2010 in the current songfestival.be Top 500, two more than 2009 and beating the record set in 2008. 2010 also happens to be one of my favourite editions of Eurovision ever.

Eurovision this year launched careers. Lena became one of the biggest stars in Germany for the next decade. Kristina from Slovakia and Alyosha from Ukraine were also at the start of big careers in their home countries. The SunStroke Project became international stars. Perhaps for the first time, Eurovision was showing it could launch several careers outside of Eurovision reliably for singers, and not just with one-off successes such as Abba and Alexander Rybak.

There was still lots of work to be done though, with many loose ends to be addressed. Eurovision needed fixing up if it was to continue for the years ahead, and next year it fell to Germany and ARD to take up the slack and get to work on it. What would things be like in Düsseldorf? You know, there are rumours that Italy is finally coming back…

[eurovision-revisited]

Eurovision 2010 - Televoting Watch

Juries are even more back this year. It’s not only the grand final that has them in 2010, but also the semi-finals. The EBU were putting great faith in national juries to remove the excesses and biases of the televote. 2009's experiment was considered successful, although I’m not convinced that it was and that 2009's emphasis on bringing ballads and having a stand-out winner masked that underneath, all the old problems remained.

However, new year, new rules. How did it all work out?

One thing that continued was the absence of joke songs and parodies. Everyone was playing it straight and earnest. Delegations and performers were out to impress with their ability to sing and to put on a show. There were some more avant garde and alternative takes, but these were not parodies. However compared to 2009 what there were fewer of was ballads. I think this was unexpected given the voting system changes and the lessons from 2009, but many of the songs that were at Eurovision were upbeat and fun. There was lots of pop. Different approaches to pop. Given the state of the world in 2010 and the starkness of the stage for Eurovision, it appears that what audiences wanted was to let their hair down, dance and forget the troubles going on outside Norway’s giant warehouse of a stadium.

This year's combined results were achieved by getting both juries and televote of each country to pick their top ten, score them according to the traditional Eurovision points system, then combining those results to reveal the countries final ranking and score. The combination resulted in some peculiarities particularly for those countries who scored consistently rather than highly on one or other of the two scores. It was entirely possible to get a combined score well below either the jury or the televote score. Conversely some countries got a better combined score than the individual results.

Take Belgium’s semi-final result. The jury awarded it 165 points whereas the televote awarded 146 points. The combined score ended up being 167 points. In semi-final two, Sweden got 76 points from the jury and 64 points from the televote, but only 62 points when combined. The system was all independently audited to ensure that the process of combining points was correctly applied, but it did seem to favour some countries and not others and led to much head-scratching. Especially in Sweden.

Even though the system was fair, it wasn’t that clear where the scores were coming from. Somehow, the process of combining jury and televote scores made the final results seem somehow artificial and inauthentic. There was no jury winner nor televote winner announced. It felt indefinably wrong.

There were as many discrepancies in between the jury favourites and the public favourites as ever. In the semi, the jury songs were the ones from Croatia, Switzerland and Estonia. Two ballads and, remarkably, the art-pop of Malcolm Lincoln. The public favoured Russia, Lithuania and Slovenia - a song from an Internet sensation, InCulto in their sparkly short-shorts and a strange combination of folk and rock jammed together.

In the final, the differences were even greater. The jury went for Norway, Cyprus, Belgium, Ireland, Albania and Israel - all getting more than seventy percent of their support from the juries. Meanwhile both France and Spain stood out for their predominately public support. France is understandable, but Spain had their stage invasion and redo at the end, maybe making the public more sympathetic.

Germany won both the jury vote and the public vote in the end. Türkiye did finish second in the public vote (by three points from third), but only seventh in the jury vote. Most remarkably for me is that it was the juries that preferred Romania’s third place entry marginally more than the public.

In both semi-final one and the grand final, there was a distinct running order bias again, in both cases the second-half of the draw was strongly favoured by both the juries and the televote. The second semi-final was much more even. As these running orders were all randomly drawn, it seems a bit strange that in this year, when it was possible to vote from the beginning of the show and throughout its run as an experiment. This was done to see if it affected the well-evidence running order bias that was present. It doesn’t appear to have done that, however there was one effect. The televote running order bias is usually quite a bit stronger than that of the juries. However, this year, they were both about equal. Maybe that is a sign that it removed some of the bias from the televote. However that doesn’t explain why, again, the second-half of the draw was favoured nor how this similarity between the jury vote and televote was achieved when there were such big discrepancies between the two sets of results.

This must have been fascinating for the EBU stats nerds at the time.

There was one other big lesson from the year regarding voting, and that is from the experiments with internet voting in some of the national finals. While in Finland, it all seems to pass in an orderly fashion, both Spain and Portugal’s votes from the previous two years had been hit by attempts to rig the vote and brigade the vote by the memelords of internet chat forums. If the EBU were ever tempted to try this relatively unregulated voting method with many vested interests trying to swing the vote, this warned them off. Maybe there should be lessons learned for the current voting situation too.

[eurovision-revisited]

Eurovision 2010 - The Best National Final

For two years on the run, Eesti Laul is my favourite national final. Having reinvented itself in 2009, Estonia and ETV are racing ahead defining that Estonian vibe and boy do they do that this year. Edgy, weird, fun, and always interesting. There may have been just ten songs in the competition, but seven of them are in my list for the year and the other three were close to making it.

A change of venues and a shift out of the TV studio emphasises that Eesti Laul is evolving and delights in surprising audiences. What is it going to have in store over the next few years?

Outside of Estonia and oh dear. Things seem to be heading downhill. There's still lots of songs, but the overall quality that took a step down in 2009 has dropped rather more sharply in 2010. The consistency has gone, and although several national finals feature one or two good songs, many fall far short of previous standards. This is explicable by the overall mood on the times with money being short and broadcasters putting less effort into finding a good crop of songs.

In Serbia, the lack of money explicitly affected the national final, with a much reduced event - only three songs and from the same group of song-writers. It turned out to be a good choice. That all three songs were as good and as weird as they were is thanks to them.

North Macedonia and MRT did have an interesting and challenging (for Macedonia) set of songs, but for whatever reasons, the broadcaster decided to put them all in the same semi-final of the ever-expanding Skope Fest. Most of them didn't make it to the final.

Melodifestivalan has become even more slick and polished and like Eesti Laul seems to be setting out its stall for the future, however this year, the selection seems to have confused Swedes. The winner wasn't typical Melfest material and didn't perform well at Eurovision. Similarly in Italy it feels as if many names are just taking the year off, whether they're in the competition or otherwise.

Slovenia and EMA do seem to be finding it's mojo, but 2010 is the foundational year for the format and the selection process. Maybe it'll follow a path similar to Eesti Laul. There is at least some variety in there.

Perhaps the strongest overall final in terms of quality and chances outside of Estonia is to be found in Russia, and that also generated an unexpected winner. Certainly one outside of the norm.

Two other trends are appearing this year.

One is the importance of moments and memes. YouTube and the Internet are becoming bigger factors, whether that's in the problematic selection process in Spain, or if it's behind someone who is already meme-worthy in Russia or even creating an all time legend in the form of Epic Sax Guy in Moldova. More generally, the importance of having an act who is immediate, visual and instantly fixes people's eyeballs on them is becoming clear. Whether that's Playing with Fire or Allez Ola Olé.

Second is the growing influence of corruption and manipulation in the selection process. Ukraine offers an example of this with its two national finals, and a compromise song chosen that appeared in neither - that nevertheless turned out to be good. In Azerbaijan, there is already no public vote and the jury has actual government representatives on it.

Eurovision is quietly becoming political at its very core and the EBU were looking away.

[eurovision-revisited]

Eurovision 2010 - Interesting Entries

It brings me immense sadness and displeasure to report that the 2010 contains the worst song ever submitted in a national final ever. More of that at the end. First here’s some lighter relief from something utterly terrible.

There was more than one puppet in the national finals this year. Malta had Ryan Dale singing a duet with Duminka and One 4 U. I’m not entirely sure what to say about this…

There was more than one band featuring a violinist and a saxophonist at O melodie pentru Europa in Moldova this year, but only one featured a distinctly Moldovan take on Riverdance. And another ballerina, but at least time, she’s not being taken hostage. The immortal Pavel Turcu singing Imn Eurovision.

In Ireland, Leanne Moore was asking Does Heaven Need Much More? It’s admirably dated pop, but most notably it contains the immortal rhyming couplet:

When we’re dancing for Jehovah, Will my heart go supernova?

Mariaana Seppern from Lithuania has a thing about London apparently. Her Family Home is Europe.

And so it comes to this. The worst national final song ever. It’s in Spain where the broadcaster unwisely held an open internet vote to select songs for their national final. That vote got brigaded by the internet forum ForoCoches who mass voted for this by John Cobra, Carol, named for his recently ex-girlfriend.

Not only did he get booed and react aggressively resulting in the head of RTVE having to apologise to the Spanish parliament, but both John and Carol had just been arrested. He for domestic violence (convicted and sentenced to jail), she for stabbing him in the leg in self-defence.

This was the last occasion on which RTVE held an open internet vote. This event may also be the initiating factor for the stage invasion Spain suffered at Eurovision later in the year.

[eurovision-revisited]

Eurovision 2010 - Bonus Content! - Sister Twister - "Love at the First Sight"

Well I guess we know who twisted Twisted Sister now.

This is Sister Twister, a band who have been together at school in Kokkola since they were eleven. They’re still only sixteen and their regular drummer hadn’t yet even made it to sixteen meaning that they had to bring in someone else for their performance at Euroviisut in 2010. Their lead singer and driving force is Elin Blom, who had only turned sixteen the previous month; she had begun singing and writing songs when she was eight. She’d also dyed her hair peroxide blonde for the occasion - a trademark that she’s still carrying off today.

When the band had hit thirteen, they entered MGP Nordic, a pan Nordic singing competition for singers and groups aged between eight and fifteen modelled after Junior Eurovision after the countries had decided to withdraw from the bigger competition. This was the substitute that would hopefully put less pressure on the child performers, but still give them a spotlight. In the first year that Finland entered that competition Sister Twister won it. At a young age, the band were already known across Scandinavia.

Getting onto Euroviisut wasn’t a straight-forward task. They weren’t one of the twelve entries directly selected by YLE, but this year, the broadcaster had decided to hold an open competition with online voting. This variety of entry had caused issues in other countries, but in Finland, things seemed to be a lot more straightforward. There were thirty entries, no disqualifications for vote-rigging, no brigading and vote-fixing. By the end of it one of the three winners was Sister Twister and they won a place on the Finnish national selection. All they had to do was turn sixteen.

The song they’d won with was Love at the First Sight. It was written by Elin in collaboration with veteran Finnish producer and song-writer Jonas Olsson, also from Kokkola, in his first involvement with Eurovision national finals, and it’s a high tempo pop-rock thing with a huge streak of female empowerment. There’s a key change (Jonas?), some basic choreography for Elin and a little rock all-the-band-together moment at the end. Perhaps because this is rock and also because Sister Twister have been performing on stages for five years already, as well as on TV and have all the confidence that experience brings, they seem considerably older than they are. They’re young, but they also have a maturity and poise with their stagecraft that belies their years.

Elin, front and centre, does seem a little rabbit-in-the-headlights at points, especially with her Jedward-before-Jedward startled hair, but no matter. Sister Twister got through their heat and straight into the Euroviisut final at their first attempt. For this year, Euroviisut had introduced a super-final with the top three acts in the initial televote. Unfortunately Sister Twister finished fourth. They weren’t so very far behind third place. So close, but it was not to be.

And sadly , this appears to have been the beginning of the end of the band. I don’t know what happened behind the scenes, but this appearance seems to be where the record of the band stops. There are no more records or performances. Elin heads off on her own, enters the Swedish version of the Idol franchise, finishes sixth, and there’s nothing more on the rest of the band. Post Idol and Euroviisut, Elin turned more towards song-writing and had written for several artists including Adam Lambert of all people.

However, that’s not the end of Eurovision involvement. Erin started another band and changed her performing name - to Felin. As Felin, she’s released two albums, several singles and made a return to the national final scene in 2025, fifteen years after her debut. Felin sang Solo Anthem at Eesti Laul 2025, and came in sixth behind Tommy Cash.

As Felin, Elin has been steadily producing her brand of punky pop-rock since 2015 and has her own devoted band of fans. This is her 2020 released Heroes and Villains.

[eurovision-revisited]

Eurovision 2010 - Bonus Content! - Safura - "Drip Drop"

Səfurə Əlizadə better known just as Safura had won the 2009 edition of Azerbaijan’s incarnation of the Idol franchise after starting singing at the age of six. Her Discogs mini-bio describes her as “singer, actress, saxophonist” which is a highly Caucausian trio of talents. What is it about the saxophone in that area of the world? She won that show when she was sixteen, turning seventeen just prior to being entered into the Azeri selection process for Eurovision 2010.

It was a weird one. Azerbaijan were in only their third Eurovision. As with all new entrants, it had taken a couple of years of experimenting to find their identity, although they’d had success from the outset. So far they’d not finished outside the top ten. In 2009 in particular, sniping and rivalries with Armenia not withstanding, the third place that had been achieved with a cohort of international songwriters from Greece and Sweden had given them a direction. In 2010 they sought out more Swedes and in particular discovered ‘their’ Swedes.

The process was in two parts, neither of which had a public component. All decisions were made by a jury comprised of seven people. One from the broadcaster, and two representatives of Government ministries. Three of the others held prominent positions in prestigious national musical organisations such as President of the National Music Committee of Azerbaijan. Their job was first to select three singers to progress from a pool of six. The second show was to select the song from the four that had been submitted along the the singer from those six who would sing it.

All four songs were from Swedish song-writers, with three having some contribution from Stefan Örn. It was one of his songs, written together with Anders Bagge and Sandra Bjurman. The song was Drip Drop and Safura was the officially ordained performer. Part of the deal was a post-Eurovision European promotional tour, a record deal and an album later in the year. Everything a young female singer could dream of. She was being handed a career on a plate.

The song is an prototypical example of the genre that has been come to be known among Eurovision fans as a ‘Melfest reject’. Although this was the product of the Swedish song-writing camps, given the bulk deal on Stefan’s song, I think this was more a case of the Azeri broadcaster being offered it’s own selection box of songs that hadn’t been offered anywhere else. In this case it’s a big pop ballad, and despite the questionable lyrical references to the smell of lipstick, Safura knocks it out of the park. Her voice straining with emotion, dancing dangerously along the edge of her belting abilities at times, but all the time connecting with the sorrow and anger at the heart of the song. Yes, it’s a pop product, but Safura injects the necessary rawness and performance to make it more than just pop product.

At Eurovision all went well. Safura was fortuitously drawn in the second semi-final alongside the acts from Ukraine, Georgia, Türkiye, Sweden, Cyprus, Romania and Bulgaria. Lots of friends. Yes, there was Armenia too, but in Eurovision you still can’t vote against other countries. Given the support of the neighbours and connections, Safura sailed through in second place. She even won the semi-final televote split ahead of Türkiye.

In the final, the voting was much, much tighter, with fourth to eighth place inclusive covered by a gap of just nine points. Safura finished in this pack in fifth place. Everything was set for her and the Azerbaijani broadcaster and government were so happy with the result, they kept revisiting song-writer Sandra Bjurman to write their songs. She’s been involved in six Azeri Eurovision entries all told.

Afterwards there was the tour, having already travelled Europe promoting the song. She was the guest on the first of Ukraine’s two indecisive national finals and met original Ukrainian selected act Vasyl Lazarovych there. Her album called provocatively It’s My War came out in the summer. She was being managed by Swedish label Zaphire and they were pushing a Europe wide career for an inexperience seventeen-year old girl who really hadn’t grown up yet. She wanted more time in her home country.

The deal ended acrimoniously and Safura returned to Baku. There she became a member of the governing New Azerbaijan party, married the son of Minister of Energy in 2013 and put her career on hold to have children. She has now resumed her singing career with her second album (sung in Azeri and Turkish) released in 2021. Here’s a sample of her recent output Yalanlar (Lies) released seven months ago.

[eurovision-revisited]

Eurovision 2010 - Bonus Content! - Skanksters - "Life Is Here Today"

I can’t believe it’s not Madness. The Skanksters are an old old school Norwegian ska revival band, formed in the early 1990s and entirely inspired by the early 1980s UK ska and Two-Tone scene. They do rocksteady and reggae too, but mostly it’s that cheeky, sound of Madness that are their clear inspiration. Any band called the Skanksters is bound to be, and there are more than one of them, so apologies if my wires get crossed with other bands in this blog. It can be hard to separate them out.

This Skanksters started out in 1991 as a collective in Stavanger, regularly performing at the Checkpoint Charlie club in the city. As with any band that requires a brass section, the line-up is large and has gone through several evolutions as members came and went. One of the main fulcrums around which the band revolve is lead singer Tom Haakon Brekke who appears to be one of the ever-presents.

By 2010, the band were pretty much over. Their careers had one album released in 1999, as well as a few singles released between 1995 and 2005. Since then, they’d been back doing their local gigs, but although you can take the band out of the ska-scene, but you can’t take the ska out of the band. Especially when their name starts with it.

Enter producer and musician Arne Hovda. His career was pretty much contemporaneous with Skanksters. Starting in the 1990s after learning music at Stavanger Cathedral School. He’d been in a group called The Getaway People, and had been a session musician for a whole variety of artists, but by 2010 he was moving into the studio for production and song-writing jobs.

He’d had a song in MGP before, in 2004, without much success. However in 2010, the MGP bug had clearly bitten him. He’d written two songs and one was specifically for Skanksters. They probably had met given the Stavanger connection, and probably in Checkpoint Charlie as it seems to be the hub for the local music scene. I don’t know who twisted whose arm, but one thing led to another and Skanksters took aim at Eurovision over five years since they had a record out.

Arne had written Life is Here Today for the band. It’s a slice of life film delivered by a happy chappy in a Cockney accent telling us to carpe diem. It’s authentic both to the Madness sound and their attitude. Life may be a little bit shit occasionally, but in the meantime lets bounce. The brass is on point, the energy is high, even Tom’s accent sounds spot on…

…and unfortunately the accents of all of the other backing singers aren’t. They’re not Cockney and more RP which to my ears is a horrendous clash and tremendously funny at the same time. Especially when they’re calling Tom a tosser, which just sounds so, so, awfully wrong! I know you have to be English class-system aware to get the linguistic faux pas, but when they’re trying to be this authentic and largely succeeding, those little wrinkles stand out a mile.

As it happens, Norway wasn’t totally averse to a slice of music from a very particular place and time and Skanksters got through into the second chance final. Unfortunately that’s where the journey ended, but if they had made Eurovision I can absolutely guarantee that this would have received twelve points from the UK. And possibly Türkiye.

It’s hard to find many Skanksters clips online as so much of their career took place in clubs and prior to the invention of YouTube, but here’s a track from the one album, Shaven, not Stirred… This is (Theme From) Skanksters

[eurovision-revisited]

Eurovision 2010 - Bonus Content! - Anna Bergendahl - "This Is My Life"

Onto a few bonus songs with Sweden’s biggest failure of the semi-final era. Anna Bergendahl had been known for TV talent shows in the last half of the 2000s. She’d appeared on a show called Super Troupers, then four years later, she appeared on Idol 2008 finishing fifth. That was enough to get her an actual record deal, with her first album due out later in 2010. Prior to all of this, she’d sung in choirs and had grown up in a musically-inclined family with Irish ancestry. Her first public performance had been at the age of eight singing with a choir in York Minster, UK

And so, with the assistance of her record company, she was lined up for Melfest. She’d actually been approached in 2009, presumably after a song-writing summer camp, by veteran Melfest song-writer Bobby Ljunggren. He’d written four previous winners and thus four Swedish Eurovision entries. In total twenty of his songs had made it to Melfest finals since he got his start all the way back in 1987. Together with lyricist Kristian Lagerström, he’d written a ballad.

Yes. A ballad. Most of his back catalogue is Swedish pop for the likes of Carola, Alcazar, Shirley Clamp and BWO, but this year he’d clearly got a dose of the blues. This is My Life is a song about someone who’s fed up. There are mentions of autumn. Of just wanting to get on with life rather than fighting others and having to be someone that they’re not. It’s a song about getting old. Maybe there’s even a touch of autobiography in there from Bobby as in 2010 he was having a particularly challenging personal situation that eventually led to a spell in rehab.

It’s not too surprising that he gave the song to Anna, as many of his songs ended up with young, female singers with big voices. And given that she’s recently made it into the big time, it was a natural match. However Anna was eighteen at the time of her Melodifestivalen debut. A song about being tired of life and trudging on through doesn’t really fit with her image or her youth. They tried to style her to fit the song. A little bit of the sulky teenager in a thrift shop dress, on trend black opaques and dirty Converse.

Her delivery is earnest. Intensely earnest. Scarily earnest. Yet she’s smiling through this song. She’s a great singer but the emotional connection is off. It’s a song about being just past the edge of resilience, about having just given up, yet having to continue. It’s a song suited for determined fragility, and I can see that Anna is trying to find that - but she can’t resist smiling and trying to light up her eyes.

Yet she won Melfest. The competition wasn’t hugely strong this year, but there were other options, some of which fans to this day I think would have preferred to win and be Sweden’s representative in Oslo. She also hit the number one spot in the Swedish charts for five weeks. For Eurovision, not much was changed and Anna’s half broken/half smiley performance remained. She sang in semi-final two and Sweden’s Eurovision magic wasn’t quite enough to get her to qualify. Anna finished eleventh, five points from that qualification spot held by Cyprus. Sweden gave Cyprus six points in the voting…

That left Anna with a burden. She was now (and remains) the only Swedish act at Eurovision not to qualify and it’s to her credit that she’s managed not only to overcome that but continue with her career. She’s had two albums released, many singles and by 2019 had recovered enough from her Eurovision experience to re-enter Melfest. Subsequently she appeared twice and is now something of a Melfest regular. All of the Melfest songs from 2019 have made some reference to her Christian beliefs.

Despite those beliefs, some of Anna’s singles have provocatively un-Christian titles. A good example of this is I Hate New York from her second album. This was released as a single specifically in 2015, the year the album was launched in the US, three years after its European release.