2017

A contest that’s no better than it has to be, on just about every level, and where the televoters reminded the juries that ESC’s meant to be, you know, fun.

⁰¹ Sweden

B: As opening lines go, especially when you’re first up in the first semi and thus the first song of the year, “I can’t go on / Gotta keep it together” would be tempting fate with just about anyone other than Robin the Robot. “Hands down to the floor my love / And I’m doing whatever you want” shows who wears the strap-on in that relationship.

A: There’s no arguing with the production values here – if ever a Swedish entry was underproduced it would almost certainly be knowingly – so you can understand why it had appeal among the juries. It borders on the clinical at times though, as these things often do, but that only makes Mr Bengtsson’s carefully dosed contribution more appropriate.

V: Every bit as annoying as it was in Melodifestivalen, with the antibonus of weaker vocals: Robin always seems to me to be about half a minute away from collapsing completely. It’s a perfect opener though. It feels perfunctory by the time we return to it in the final, but serves its purpose.

⁰² Georgia

B: One in the eye for the ‘no means no’ camp this, isn’t it, if “Don’t let nobody turn you down” is anything to go by.

A: Credit where it’s due – at least the music matches the lyrics in striving for heartstring-tugging anthemic greatness but plateauing out at godawful. No dusting is needed to see Anri Jokhadze’s fingerprints all over it: from the bombastic arrangement to the heavy-handed backing vocals, it’s him all over. Tako’s vocals should be the most palatable thing about the song, but even they seem strangely unattractive.

V: What was the point of the cape? Such an unrelenting dirge.

⁰³ Australia

B: I always struggle to listen to a teenager telling me how much he knows about love without rolling my eyes at the precociousness of it all. We have two of them this year, and I have a lot more time for what Kristian says than the perceived wisdom Isaiah is peddling. You’re 17 and you’ve been burned too many times, have you, Master Firebrace? Get back to me when you’ve stopped playing with matches.

A: Divorced of the plodding performance and Isaiah’s crash-mat vocal acrobatics, it’s easy to understand what the juries heard in this and why SBS went with the same writing team as last year’s Sound of Silence. It’s not in the same league, but is still an accomplished piece of music, and when the lad’s not forcing it out of shape, his voice is great.

V: Isaiah’s whole look here is fascinatingly androgynous, although the outfit’s a bit gestapo chic. A ponderous and dull performance is marred by that spectacularly awful moment in the semi, but he’s more comfortable and controlled and therefore more impressive in the final.

⁰⁴ Albania

B: Whatever else their failings, you can almost always rely on the Albanian entry to deliver English lyrics that do their best to capture the message they’re striving to deliver – and to throw up a phrase or two you rarely if ever hear in songs. Thumbs up here for “at a loss for words” and the rather marvellous “For the life of me, I refuse to be anything but free”. The title, however, is stunted and ungainly.

A: The sound layering on this is fascinating, like the composers handed it over to a Foley artist and said, “Here, tweak away to your heart’s content.” The second verse is particularly noteworthy for the acoustic drowning it seems to showcase. Lindita’s ice-pick sibilance only adds to the overall effect. An engrossing three minutes.

V: Further bewildering costume choices here. The veil/train hybrid looks like she’s just got caught up in a curtain, which might explain the teetering. Lindita makes the same mistake as the Jan jan girls from Armenia by wearing make-up that renders her cross-eyed. Her long note is amazing, but it’s arguably the only, ahem, notable thing about this performance. The stage looks wonderfully expansive.

⁰⁵ Belgium

B: There’s something poetic in the imagery of “Love came in between / The space in the city lights” that reflects and captures the song’s atmospheric instrumental roots. The minimalism here certainly works at the level of the lyrics.

A: It works well in the music, too, especially the verses, which have an almost sinister quality to them. There’s more going on beneath the vocals than I initially gave the song credit for – the stripped back post-middle eight chorus being a case in point – but I still think it’s a little too repetitive for its own good, and Blanche’s vocals too close to ‘bored’ for comfort. Still, another quality entry from the Walloons.

V: As if Blanche weren’t exposed enough in the semi, the sound mix then seems deliberately sabotaged to expose her even more. There’s a certain amount of audience love to be gained from looking that awkward – all the more so in the final, where she seems less frazzled anyway – but these are still an uncomfortable three minutes. Her naïve response to the warmth of the crowd (both times) is endearing.

⁰⁶ Montenegro

B: I love the way Slavko’s [self-penned?] Eurovision.tv bio informs us “he speak English”. It makes you suspect the innuendo-laden lyrics would have been beyond him. They’re better than they need to be, frankly.

A: Less bargain basement, more basement gay club in Podgorica. As a composition it was never going to win any awards, but like the effort expended on the lyrics, the music too is better than it’s likely to be given credit for. (In the grand history of Eurovision it might get lumped in with the likes of Dance with Me, but I’d argue it’s a cut above.) The few ethnic touches it bothers with are the only subtle thing about it, needless to say.

V: Oh lord, where to start! The fact he can barely sing isn’t even the biggest problem with this when he doesn’t appear to have a clue how to dance either. It’s all just so random and half-arsed. It was never going to achieve the greatness Slavko clearly believes himself to embody, but they don’t even try.

⁰⁷ Finland

B: Gloriously dark and painful.

A: Stunning arrangement, too. You can see why they went for the water motif in the official video. The whole thing mirrors the overwhelming sense of loss at the core of this, and then we get that perfect but oh so heart-breaking piano interlude. Couple all that with those vocals, so warm and yet so fragile, and you’ve got the complete package. After Strazdas, it’s the second song about a bird in Eurovision that just gets everything so utterly right for what it’s trying to say.

V: This never quite manages to capture the intimacy of the studio version, but is still a gazillion times better than just about anything else so far. Perhaps it was too dark and tortured for its own good, but it more than deserved a place in the final.

⁰⁸ Azerbaijan

B: Oh, it’s “Have my skeletons”? I thought she was insisting “I’m a skeletons”, which seemed about right given how unintelligible the rest of it was. It’s easy to lampoon for its thorn jeans, I suppose, but there’s a sense of it trying to say something meaningful amid the what-the-fuckery. “Have my lungs” is a line that’s undoubtedly never been sung before and never will be again. “I never dreamed that this could be happening to me” feels like it was written with the performance already storyboarded.

A: That’s three songs out of eight so far where the keyword at the tone meeting seems to have been ‘oppressive’. It’s not quite as effective here, I think because the rest of the tone seems so hard to pin down, which has the knock-on effect of me never really knowing what to do with the song. In the end I have to add it to the pile of entries I ought to like more than I actually do, however unfair that may be.

V: Dihaj’s light, almost floating vocals at the beginning don’t really go with the hard image she’s presenting, but then I suppose the whole performance is one of contrasts and concepts that aren’t the easiest to grasp. There’s a lot going on, quite a bit of it missed in the semi, but the overall effect is more bemusing than entrancing. It looks like she scrawls ‘horny’ on the wall in the final.

⁰⁹ Portugal

B: “Eu sei / Que não se ama sozinho” – Madam Palm and her five daughters beg to differ. But gosh, this is so gorgeously romantic that fishing for anything fnaar-worthy feels dirty, even for me.

A: Deceptively simple and yet so manifestly effective, you can call this old-fashioned all you want: it’s simply a beautiful piece of music. Salvador’s vocals complement it perfectly.

V: In what is probably the contest’s greatest coup, they manage to capture the sweeping filmic quality of this by doing almost nothing. The Midsummer Night’s Dream backdrop is inspired. I’m the first to testify to the song’s beauty, but I’ll admit I’m still surprised it won the audience over so completely.

¹⁰ Greece

B: I still go “Gah, it’s ‘self-defeating’!!!” every time I hear this. But fair dos, the verses actually have something to say for themselves when you don’t really expect them to. The chorus undoes much of the good work, but then the whole thing feels like an exercise in diminishing returns anyway.

A: Including the music. Someone should have staged an intervention to stop the composer pressing buttons well before the overblown instrumental break.

V: Whoever styled Demy did a textbook job of undermining how stunning she is. That dress does nothing for her, and the just-got-out-of-the-shower hair doesn’t help either. Vocally she’s a lot stronger than I remember her being, although the big note in the chorus sounds terrible every single time in the semi. The hologram thing proves pointless, and the gay-boys-in-a-paddling-pool presentation feels half-baked.

¹¹ Poland

B: Fire-desire-higher. Wire. I don’t understand half of this. Is it just a boring ballad?*

A: There are individual elements to this that capture the attention – the heartbeat effect, the whispered underlying vocals, the soundscape there at the beginning – but it’s less than the sum of its parts. It’s also convinced of its importance in a way I never will be.

V: *Or a boring paean to animal rights? The explosion of generic flying things seemingly from Kasia’s arse is one of the most visually arresting moments of the contest and successfully distracts you from the fact she appears determined to torture the hell out of every single line. (Ironically.) I bet she felt just as tortured being crammed into that top. She looks tired in the final, and like she’s not wearing any eye make-up, even though she is.

¹² Moldova

B: “It’s your girl and maybe should sleep at home / But I’ll steal her alone.” OK. I wonder what he will not anymore do what other guys did before.

A: If there’s one thing that surprised me in this year’s results, it was seeing Sunstroke Project do so well with the juries. Like so many others, I’d written it off to some extent on that front before the contest, pegging it as rudimentary and repetitive. Listening to it again now, stripped bare of its vocals, I realise it’s both those things and yet somehow still really effective. It might be a case of the tail wagging the dog, but at least I came round to it eventually.

V: This just works a treat. It’s the fun and easy but polished bit of fluff the contest so desperately needed, and is worth every point it got.

¹³ Iceland

B: What’s the Icelandic obsession with colouring people in with your blue? It must be an idiomatic thing. The paper metaphors are rather more mâché than origami here, but the rest of the lyrics aren’t bad.

A: There’s something distinctly ’80s about this, which is no bad thing of course. Indeed, there’s something distinctly ’80s about Svala, so at least there’s a through-line. This sits somewhere between Belgium and Azerbaijan for me, in that I can see the worth in it but can’t bring myself to like it more, however much I try.

V: Grete Paia’s mum sounds great (most of the time) but her trailer-trash superhero look and choreography (if that’s what you can call it) combined with the generally uninspired backdrops make this a pretty forgettable performance. It doesn’t help that there’s no big moment to latch onto.

¹⁴ Czech Republic

B: This may lack the Portuguese icing, but in its way it’s every bit as sweet as Amar pelos dois. It wears its heart on its sleeve in lines like “From the very first time I saw you / You were my home” and “From the billion hearts to choose between / I was your choice”, which almost makes it feel like the after to Salvador’s before.

A: Some might say it’s the poor cousin to Salvador, too, but I’d disagree. The chasm that exists between their results is in no way reflective of any difference in their value, at least to me: I love this very nearly as much: its understatedness; that it swells with emotion, musically and lyrically, but is content to display it in a quiet way that seems to suit the relationship it’s laying bare. Martina’s voice is the perfect vehicle to convey the message, strong and idiosyncratic, but warm and intimate as well.

V: Gosh, it’s not a good year for costumes, is it. Martina looks like she’s on her way to a Buck Rogers cosplaying event but hasn’t done her hair yet. Then there’s the giant people in nappies on the wall behind her. I love the timbre of her voice, but she never quite connects for some reason. The lighting goes some way to producing the warmth the song needs to showcase it, but not enough.

¹⁵ Cyprus

B: “Attached inseparably / It’s all we’ll ever be / You, me, gravity” is a nice way to round out what is otherwise a well-meaning but mangled analogy.

A: Competent, if unexciting. It has many parts to it but simultaneously manages to feel like it only has about two.

V: A little bit Russian, a little bit Belgian, a little bit Armenian and a little bit clueless, but lovable for it. Dark-eyed Hovig is surprisingly sultry, and surprisingly good, although a little close to the edge at times.

¹⁶ Armenia

B: “She took it all into her space.” How very accommodating of her!

A: This is a pass-the-parcel song, in that the excitement of peeling off the layers is ultimately cancelled out by the disappointment that there’s nothing more impressive at the heart of it all and you’ve no idea what you’re supposed to do with it. But it’s fun while the music and tension build, and there’s certainly enough to keep you engaged as it’s doing the rounds. It’s just that the journey is far more interesting than the destination.

V: Corners the ethnic market in the semi. Artsvik makes this performance look very easy when it’s not only vocally demanding but also every bit as carefully plotted and executed as last year’s. The song itself remains something of a handicap, explaining its eventual result, but the performance defies you to take your eyes off it for even a moment, and the stage rarely looks this good.

¹⁷ Slovenia

B: Never was a set of lyrics more fit for purpose for an entry that crashed and burned in the semis.

A: I’m more forgiving of this now than I was at first, but it was ever thus. It’s still a turd, just not as steaming.

V: The square-jawed matinee idol look suits Omar well. He’s obviously enjoying himself more than anyone watching him. The much-vaunted chandelier whatsit makes it look like he’s being beamed back up into the mothership at the end.

¹⁸ Latvia

B: If you discount the repetition, this is actually a pretty good set of lyrics. Which I guess is only surprising because of the way it’s packaged.

A: It’s not a bad bit of music, either, and maintains the direction the Latvian entries have been taking in the last few years, even if it did bring them their more traditional semi-barrel-scraping result. It’s obviously not the kind of thing that’s going to impress the juries though, and you can’t really blame them – as soon as the synth-driven chorus proper kicks in, you know you’ve heard all there is to hear. That’s bad news when you’ve got another 90 seconds to fill.

V: Hi drummer! This is all very Latvian. (Take that as you will.) Agnes looks like she’d be a spark-and-a-half. It’s both an obvious song to close the semi with and a strangely underwhelming end to proceedings.

¹⁹ Serbia

B: A bit of a cut-and-paste job, this, but it can have a point or two for the [probably unintentional] play on words in “Struck by every word that you said”.

A: This has one of the best openings of any song this year for me – the almost atonal xylophone is amazing. Sadly, it soon gives way to that unforgiving chorus. The whole thing is better than its result suggests, but at the same time its result is entirely understandable.

V: Oh dear – someone ordered their prom dress online from China. It takes an age for anyone to turn the lights on, but that’s possibly a good thing, since Tijana seems even more exposed when you can actually see her. Vocally she’s pretty good, but without you ever wanting to think “Yes, I’d love to hear more”. Useless (if pretty) dancer.

²⁰ Austria

B: There’s something charmingly insensitive about telling people that if their life’s shit it’s undoubtedly their own fault for being lazy and genuinely thinking that’s uplifting. It puts me in mind of the Prozac campaign that saves Eddie’s career in Season 3 of Absolutely Fabulous: “I want huge billboards. Depressed? Don’t be! Unhappiness is an unnatural state!”
A: Strings! It takes half the song for them to appear, but when they do, everything starts to gel much more effectively. The end result is still largely uninteresting, however. It feels languid, which is the last label something called Running on Air wants slapping on it.

V: It’s sort of children’s TV crossed with Christian pop, this. Nathan stays just the right side of slappable though, and is pretty good.

⁰⁰ Russia

If nothing else, we can be thankful that ESC in Ukraine spared us this, the most cynical entry in the contest’s history and a strong contender for worst Russian entry ever. Appalling for being so calculated, and for simply being so appalling.

²¹ FYR Macedonia

B: They’re going for fuck-you sass here, and just about getting there.

A: Not a million light years from what Kylie was doing circa 2001. (See what I did there?) That said, it’s the kind of thing that wouldn’t have even made the cut as a bonus track on the Japanese release of the album, let alone a B-side. Poptastic, if inescapably mediocre.

V: Of all the titles to take as your starting point for the performance this year, this was not the one. Jana is just about good enough, but the song needs much more than her alone on stage to overcome its limitations. It sounds great, and the backing vocals are some of the best of the contest, but – as I suspected from the start – Macedonia just doesn’t have the wherewithal to pull it off. Given its potential, it’s a huge disappointment, even when you’re prepared for it.

²² Malta

B: A ‘vacancy in your heart’ sounds like the mistranslation of a medical diagnosis. Gerard James Borg is every inch the Judas goat here in “I know the game, I take the blame.”

A: My goodness this is turgid! There’s a whole extra minute of song we’re denied because of the three-minute rule, so let’s be grateful for small mercies. But why anyone – especially a bunch this knee-deep in Eurovision – would compose a four-minute song and then just amputate the last 60 seconds with no thought to the consequences is beyond me.

V: “Claudia’s career is one big rollercoaster of so many beautiful and different emotions.” I wonder where getting a big fat zero from the televoters fits in on that ride. A curvaceous and vocally reliable performance that would be completely unexciting if it weren’t for the moments where she looks like she’s about to motorboat her own breasts and then eat herself.

²³ Romania

B: What’s the use of doing all this work you really don’t want to be doing? Why, it’s so you don’t fall flat on your arse off the confetti cannon on the night itself. This proto-anthem for workaday heroes speaks for itself without saying anything very taxing.

A: I can’t think of much to say about this as a piece of music. It’s no masterpiece, but nor is it a debacle. It’s just sort of acceptable in its sheer indifference. It’s the vocals that make it, in any event. Well, the yodelling. And though it should sink or swim on that alone, it too just makes me shrug.

V: Romania and Moldova both had the right idea this year amid the largely bland and/or po-faced competition, so it’s no surprise they both did so well with the audience at home. Nor is it a surprise that this didn’t do quite as well as Hey Mamma, since it’s trying (and has to try) that bit much harder and feels more studiously contrived.

²⁴ The Netherlands

B: Since it feels churlish to criticise a set of lyrics that speaks so candidly about something so painful, I’ll say no more than this: in a year where entries in other languages are in short supply, it’s lovely to see this one showcasing Dunglish in all its oblivious charm.

A: With a name like Rory de Kievit, you’d have to think Shelley’s boyfriend was destined for Eurovision greatness in the Ukrainian capital. ‘Greatness’ being a relative term, obviously, but I think finishing on the lower left-hand side of the scoreboard in the final was about as well as this was ever going to do, being the earmarked jury fodder that it is. Not to sell it short, mind you, since its harmonies are phenomenal. Oddly though, the instrumental sounds like it should be playing in the background of a corporate video; perhaps one showcasing outboard motors. I’m deliberately choosing not to refer to it as the karaoke version since, as beautiful as they are, the harmonies make this song almost impossible to sing along to and ever get right all the way through.

V: Appropriately if unhelpfully dark staging, offset by a bouncy and sparkly performance. Gratifyingly, if predictably, the understated power of the harmonies produces the first goosebump moment of the contest... 24 songs in. It doesn’t quite blow you away the way you hope it might, but it’s consummate stuff, and the fact that it (and the Eurovision experience as a whole) means so much to them is actually quite moving.

²⁵ Hungary

B: Something that translates as “At the age of four God talked to me” is an interesting opening gambit in a rap interlude. There’s a lot going on here generally, and it all seems just as personal as the Dutch entry, like Joci is opening himself up for three minutes and saying: this is me, take it or leave it. As ever, the Hungarian is endlessly fascinating.

A: Armenia seems to be doing ethnic out of a sense of obligation when held up against this, which feels so much more genuine and meaningful, and more intriguing. And yet for all that it’s somehow much more accessible, too, at least musically, with the echoing production and seemingly mournful fiddle conveying so much. Vocally and narratively it’s a mystery, but that, of course, is its beauty. It’s almost as mysterious as why the juries failed to recognise all this when the televoters so obviously did.

V: Gorgeous shimmering backdrop. Really quite an engrossing three minutes.

²⁶ Denmark

B: Ouch @ “Always closing up tight / And never releasing”. Oddly clunky lyrics for a native speaker.

A: Resolutely MOR, like most Danish entries of late, but far more successful than any of them in achieving what it sets out to do. The backing vocals sound awkwardly pitched and exposed when Anja’s are taken off the thing.

V: Anja has an impressive pair of lungs on her, but it’s easy to see why this was almost as roundly rejected by the viewers as Malta: it’s so overwrought. The backing vocals are at their shrill worst when they matter most in the semi, but are somewhat better in the final. I still like it though. Addendum [final]: She’s dribbled on herself!

²⁷ Ireland

B: Quite a sweet little love letter. “There ain’t no guarantee that / You and me won’t fail / But I’m dying to try” – it’s the Eurovision equivalent of assuming all relationships are doomed.

A: I suppose there’s something fittingly tentative about the arrangement in the first half of this, and the way it takes a leap in the last minute is right enough, too, thematically speaking. Musically it comes across as a non-sequitur, however, and the gospel chorus renders the thing elegiac rather than have the uplifting effect it’s presumably intended to. End result: funeral piece for a troubled teen.

V: Brendan is solid, but not much more than that, and I still struggle to work out what the performance has to do with anything. Neither the oil spill off the coast of the volcanic island nor the giant humbug he’s suspended from seems to speak of, or to, the message at the heart of the thing. In the end, however, I find I don’t really care, which is the song’s biggest problem.

²⁸ San Marino

B: “Him: Hey, are you the one I dream about? / Her: Baby, I am!” ROFL. Round of applause for the ingenuous presentation of the lyrics as the worst kind of script in the world. And another for it having been written by someone called Barnacle.

A: I never thought I’d say this about this song, but it needs a key change well before it gets one. Any distraction would do, to be honest. It does that weird thing of framing its first chorus like the bridging one before the final chorus, so extra points off for that.

V: It’s almost disappointing how good this is vocally, because that’s one less thing to laugh at. (Mind you, the backing vocalists are hilarious.) For middle-aged disco, it could be a lot worse.

²⁹ Croatia

B: There are two ways to view these lyrics. You can probably guess which one I subscribe to.

A: Those strangulated strings at the beginning there are reminiscent, appropriately enough, of Nostalgija, and every bit as twee. But as awful as the whole thing is, it’s still better than I initially allowed it to be. Which is as close to praise as it will get from me.

V: They miss a trick here by not pretending Jacques is twins. They could have revealed the big twist at the key change and everything. Tsk! It’s technically impressive – more so in the final, crucially – and is the queerest, most ridiculous thing Eurovision has given us in a very long time. Like, Big Gay Al levels of camp. Any and all of the backing vocalists can be my friend, preferably with benefits.

³⁰ Norway

B: Aleksander Walmann must have taken Nathan Trent’s invective to heart. The ‘nerves in the coffin’ bit always rankles with me, but other bits are good. I like “I need to stop drowning in distractions”.

A: Like City Lights, this gets a not exactly reluctant, but certainly cautious nod from me for its contemporary credentials, tempered by a wish that they’d provided a bit more variety (and a decent hook). It’s atmospheric though, and Alex’s vocals are pure honey.

V: Live as well as in studio. I’m still a tad surprised this did as well as it did, but fair dos to them, they don’t put a foot wrong. The lighting and camerawork lend it something approaching a festival feel.

³¹ Switzerland

B: An unexpectedly mature set of lyrics, now that I look at them. Two ticks for “But what are we now / If we never tried? What are we now?”, which is gonna get an answer out of him by hook or by crook.

A: When this isn’t being all synth-heavy, it almost sounds like incidental music – listen to it without the vocals and you’ll discover that the sound of a waterfall and the twittering of birds play underneath the entire thing. Why, I have no idea. But it’s interesting that it’s there, and it’s good that it’s interesting, because there’s not much else about the composition that is. It’s better than their last attempt, but nothing to get even remotely excited about.

V: Apparently the drummer “pursues his professional visions with boundless energy and a talent”. Not one for pulling off baby pink against a banana yellow backdrop, sadly. Rather like the Swiss entry in 2015, this is 1) better than but 2) every bit as doomed as you expect it to be. The lead singer is actually really good, so it’s a pity the outfits and colour scheme are so hideous.

³² Belarus

B: “У нашай крыві сонца зайграе” makes it sound like a suicide pact.

A: There’s not a lot to this, but there doesn’t really need to be: it’s upbeat, the guitars strum with infectious energy and Ksenia is a delight. Artem, as a vocalist, makes a great composer.

V: Lovely, and such a welcome addition to the final line-up. Ksenia’s recovery from almost going arse over tit is sweet, as is the kiss.

³³ Bulgaria

B: At least he’s not pretending to be some guru who’s had his heart broken more often than someone three times his age. It’s probably just teenage hormones, all the same, so he gets a pass for not knowing how to process it all.

A: The Australian entry is no slouch, but the Bulgarian entry is everything Don’t Come Easy is trying but not quite managing to be. It’s no surprise that the televoters in particular rewarded the more stripped back and focussed ballads and turned their collective nose up at the rest when the difference in the net effect is so stark. Kristian’s vocals are astoundingly mature for someone so young, and paired with this effortless arrangement produce hands down the most successful contemporary offering of the year.

V: Kind of a reverse-Brendan, with that amazing deep voice coming out of what is very possibly a little girl. The vocals are amazing, and the performance incredibly assured. Predictions of Kristian doing a Dima Bilan and coming back to give Bulgaria their first win must be a bet with very short odds. Here they show Germany how to take shades of grey and make them work for rather than against you. I could do without the cartoon electricity, however.

³⁴ Lithuania

B: I wouldn’t have a clue what half of these words were if they weren’t written down.

A: There aren’t many songs where my feelings are split right down the middle pretty much along the dividing line between verse and chorus, but this is one. I love these verses in all their unapologetic synthiness; the rest of the composition is one misstep after another. It’s the kind of thing that should by rights be coming last in an Eesti Laul semi-final rather than representing anyone on the Eurovision stage, but that’s Lithuania for you.

V: Arresting aesthetic, and Viktoria can sing, I’ll give her that. It has all the problems it always did, but it’s as good as it was ever going to be.

³⁵ Estonia

B: Rubbish even by Sven Lõhmus’ standards. He can’t even quote Where the Streets Have No Name properly.

A: More of that murky sound plaguing so many of this year’s entries, although the acoustic guitar soon steps in to rectify the situation. Purely as an instrumental, the first half of this actually shows some promise; then the ’80s-in-a-bad-way chorus kicks in and all hope is lost. It’s dragging its heels and no mistake by the time three minutes is up. Koit’s falsetto wasn’t the best of ideas in hindsight – but then neither was the entry – and Laura often sounds as thin and reedy as she looks.

V: Good for a laugh, this sort of melodrama. Too much make-up, not enough sleep, and Koit looks like he’s about to eat Laura’s face at one point. For the second year in a row any real feeling is sacrificed at the altar of performance, and what is touted as a certain qualifier crashes and burns in the semi.

³⁶ Israel

B: I’ve always found the narrative here a bit hard to follow, probably because the ‘breaking me to pieces’ bit sounds so negative when it is, I assume, meant to indicate that the guy Imri currently has in his life has made said life complete. “My job is almost done” sets the tone for the performance in the final.

A: “Building on from the success of the... official song of Israel’s 2015 Gay Pride Parade that brought them to public attention”, the composers clearly stick to what they know and pander to the same audience. It really does sound like it was written to be mimed to on a float. Given that’s the level it’s working on, it could be worse: some (not all) of the ethnic touches are surprisingly subtle, while the string arrangement is quite sophisticated in places.

V: It’s always nice when someone you expect to be a bit hopeless knocks it out of the park. Imri sings his heart out in the semi, more than earning his Thursday-night podium finish with this classic closer. The final’s a different prospect, but then it was always going to be, and with your objective achieved there’s less incentive to match the success that got you there. (It’s only in the last stretch that he really runs out of puff, anyway.) The outfits do nothing for anyone on stage when you have that much sculpted manflesh you could be displaying, and I’m still disappointed Imri didn’t have a boyfriend to propose to him on stage at the end of the song – but hey, Jana’s bloke liked it enough to put a ring on it, so I’ll have to make do.

³⁷ Italy

B: On point and 1980-something at the same time, but I guess that’s the intention. There’s something deliciously arch about feeding people the line “La folla grida un mantra” and them responding with an obedient “Alé!” on cue.

A: Even if it is having a sly dig at you, this is still the most infectious thing on offer this year.

V: I’d forgotten how much worse this sounds in the lower key, which drains it of so much of its energy. Arguably, so does the performance, which is colourful and upbeat but drifts a little too far into novelty-entry territory for safety. My gut feeling is that it was lucky to make 6th, which is a damned shame given the winning potential (and worth) of the song.

³⁸ Spain

B: Apologising in the very first line for the triteness of the chorus to come (“A veces cuesta decir todo lo que uno piensa”) won’t stop me ripping shit out of it, you know.

A: Uncomplicated – there genuinely are only about five things happening musically – but with no sophistication to it either. You can have one without the other if you like, but don’t expect it to elevate you above the bottom rung on the Eurovision ladder.

V: If it didn’t already have last place locked in, it did within about 30 seconds of this performance starting. Running with the West Coast stoner thing at least gives it the fun bit with the surfboards. The bum note is appalling and ushers in a non-existent key change.

³⁹ United Kingdom

B: The message isn’t all that sophisticated here, but it’s poignant. I’m taken with the recursiveness of the middle eight: “This madness / We’re running through / There’s magic / It’s inside of you / It’s madness”.

A: This song is so much about the voice that I only gained a true appreciation for the music when I listened to the instrumental version. For starters, it’s been given a far more contemporary production than I ever realised, with elements that aren’t dissimilar to last year’s Australian entry or, indeed, this year’s Bulgarian one. The last stretch of the song also features some decidedly ethnic-sounding instrumentation (is it a zither?) that I’d never noticed before. In a nutshell, there’s a lot more of interest here than there appears to be on first inspection, or even repeat inspection if you’re focussed on Lucie’s vocals the whole time. None of this changes the fact that the ending’s naff, or that the song gives you little to cling onto. Alas.

V: Strong vocals and some stunning visuals are undermined by gurning and overacting when simplicity was, or at least should have been, the order of the day. I love the hint of Botticelli in the shell and styling, but Lucie’s hair seems like it’s refusing to cooperate and her dress looks cheap. The natural make-up doesn’t really work either. That said, it’s a much more coherent package overall than anything the UK’s given us in many a year.

⁴⁰ Germany

B: “I’m not afraid of making mistakes / Sometimes it’s wrong before it’s right” mightn’t be the most original observation, but I admire the cheeriness of its que-será-será pragmatism. It’s indicative of a set of lyrics that is solid but generally unexciting.

A: The same can be said of the music. Where Germany’s concerned, there’s definitely a rut forming.

V: You can already feel the promise ebbing away as the camera spirals downwards in that inspired first shot. The graphical nature of the backdrops here is great, but I hope the allegedly bright spark who thought a colourless approach was right for a song like this – however appropriate you might want to argue it is – is no longer part of their staging team. The whole thing’s so washed out (including Levina’s vocals) that she only has Manel to thank for saving her from total ignominy. And even then only just.

⁴¹ Ukraine

B: This is every bit as political as 1944, and who can blame them?

A: Not as limp a piece of musical lettuce as I originally decided it was, but it’s the vocals being as wet as they are that does for it in the end. Similar sort of stuff has done better in the past, but this was never going to emulate it.

V: Decent enough. No one was going to vote for it, so it’s just sort of there. The giant head works well with the colour scheme and lighting.

⁴² France

B: Smart use of “Embrasse-moi, dis-moi que tu m’aimes” as the hook in the A-chorus, especially given the almost philosophical musings of the rest of the lyrics. The English bits are redolent of the romance of the French but inevitably sound less impressive.

A: There’s a whiff of the souk, as you might expect, and it’s all the better for it. I love the sense of flow and movement to this, with each element of the arrangement dancing to its own rhythm within a carefully devised broader choreography. It all leads to those final bars, which for me constitute (both musically and thematically) the best ending of any song this year.

V: Alma is such a gorgeous prospect, and vocally on song. The background does a lot to disguise how empty the stage is of the dancers the performance really ought to stretch to, but it’s better than I expected it to be.

And so to the points...

1 point goes to Norway

2 points go to Italy

3 points go to Armenia

4 points go to Belarus

5 points go to the Netherlands

6 points go to France

7 points go to Hungary

8 points go to Finland

10 points go to Bulgaria

and finally...

12 points go to...

Portugal!

Although Spain makes a strong case for it, the wooden spoon is awarded to San Marino.

2016

Like the Danes before them, the Swedes make up for their lacklustre turn as hosts the last time round by producing one of the slickest, warmest and funniest contests of the modern era – one in which the final is chock-a-block with solid entries and performances.

⁰¹ Finland

B: This is a fairly run-of-the-mill set of lyrics for an anthem of this kind, but they hang together well enough and get the message across. “If you’re focussed, you can make it” is a mantra Sandhja ought to have adopted ahead of the semi.

A: There’s a pleasing consistency right there at the start of this with the slightly murky, downbeat opening giving way to the unfettered brass and percussion. The post-chorus oh-oh-ohs make for a decent hook, and the piano doing its own thing throughout is pleasing, but I think the issue with the song is that once you’ve heard the first minute of it, you’ve heard all you’re ever going to – which means that however well it may hang together as a whole, and however intriguing the timbre of the singer’s voice, there’s not a lot to hold your interest. (Having said that, it’s the only song this year that gets me dancing like no one’s watching.)

V: Sandhja, who looks angry from the outset, keeps it together in the verses here, but come the first chorus she starts taking the title just a little bit too literally. The result isn’t as painful as it might be, but it does mean the performance comes across as hen-night karaoke rather than something they’ve been working on for months.

⁰² Greece

B: There’s a massive disconnect here between the banality of the English refrain and the more meaningful bits in Greek, which in its way is quite fitting. Some lines even verge on the poetic (“Ada nichton ki aki pou pame ksimeron”), although my favourite is the one that’s translated as “I got the pickles and my friend has got the drinks”, which makes it sound like the lads are getting ready for the most provincial Eurovision party in existence.

A: The first 30 seconds of this promise a lot more than the rest of the song delivers, with the chorus being the noose around its neck. (The instrumental break rivals it in terms of lacking punch, which is ironic, since musical punches is all it consists of.) Fair dos though: the production on the whole is better than I gave it credit for originally. Well, slightly better. And rap still sounds rubbish in any language other than English.

V: They’ve learnt how to pronounce ‘land’, but that’s about the only thing that seems an improvement on the studio version. By Greek standards this barely even qualifies as half-arsed.

⁰³ Moldova

B: For a song with Swedish input, this is very Moldovan in its mistakes – from garbled participles to the very title itself. Not that it matters much, since it still manages to produce some effective imagery. “I let the sunlight comfort me when all that’s left are memories” is nice, as is the analogy at the heart of the chorus, with the eponymous falling shooting stars being the ephemeral remains of a relationship.

A: That intro really needs to be about half as long, because the song takes the better part of a minute to get to the point, and said point is pretty underwhelming as it is – even when I reach it I still find myself occasionally caught out by it. All things are relative, of course: mediocre Swedish pop still makes for a pretty decent, if faceless, Moldovan entry, and it’s not something I’ll ever skip past on the CD. But the fact that the only compliments I can think to give it are backhanded ones says it all.

V: It’s also saying something when this is the vocal highlight of the semi so far. Lidia acquits herself well enough, but you could measure the distance between her and the strongest voice in the contest in light years. The spaceman comes across as one of those quintessentially Eurovision things that is utterly ineffectual and yet makes the performance at the same time. I’m glad he didn’t take his eye out with his accreditation flapping around on the end of his lanyard like that.

⁰⁴ Hungary

B: It’s nice to actually read these lyrics, since half of them are unintelligible the way they’re enunciated. I’m more forgiving of their shortcomings than I am of Moldova’s, probably because they’re striving for anthem status, but they’re not all that less twee than their last entry.

A: They’re just masked more effectively by the vehicle they’re delivered in. Gravel-voiced Freddie puts his own stamp on this the minute he opens his mouth. Perhaps appropriately, his accent never sounds more affected than on the word ‘fake’. He’s an acquired taste, but the voice is well-matched to the music which – surprising use of floaty, almost feminine backing vocals and plinky-plonk xylophone aside – batters you to death/into submission.

V: This renders the first three entries useless within a couple of bars of the first chorus. Everything about Freddie works so well that you have to wonder how many people voted for the song just for the chance of spending another three minutes drooling at the sight of him. The oh-oh’ing backing vocalists are hilarious, like they’ve been dragged in straight from a works do.

⁰⁵ Croatia

B: The metaphor employed here is unsophisticated but functional, which is true of the lyrics as a whole. I guess it’s not something non-native speakers would necessarily recognise, but the rhyming onslaught of ‘near’, ‘fear’, ‘disappear’, ‘steer’, ‘pier’ and ‘tear’ is taking an unattractive diphthong far too far when its pronunciation is bound to be exaggerated.

A: You discover all sorts of fascinating things in this composition when you pare it of its vocals and just immerse yourself in the music, several of them seemingly drafted in from much further east than the Balkans. (One or two of the elements are bordering on Mongolian.) There’s a wonderful descending flutter of strings into the first chorus that you just don’t hear with Nina singing over the top. Not that I’m necessarily suggesting the song’s better without her input, but having heard her perform other stuff I maintain this isn’t the best showcase of her vocal talents.

V: Considering how structural both of Nina’s outfits are, you have to wonder why they don’t make more of them. In any case, there’s a clear concept behind them, and if they distract at all it’s not enough for you to miss the fact that the performance in the semi is pretty good. (In the final there’s a sense of: we’re here, that was the point, this is the 837th time I’ve sung this song this week, near enough is good enough.) The key change works well both times, and the backing vocals are great throughout.

⁰⁶ The Netherlands

B: “I’m going nowhere and I’m going fast” is a brave line to open on in a Eurovision entry in a still largely untested genre. The lyrics suit it though, with a sort of country languor and drawl all their own. My only problem is with the clunky “I used to be without concern”, but even that feels right enough in context.

A: This is one of those arrangements that does exactly what you expect it to at every turn but never leaves you feeling short-changed. I think that’s because there’s a tendency to assume this sort of thing will be derivative by default; the musical equivalent of flat-pack furniture. But it’s an accomplished piece of song-writing: easy and familiar, yet layered and rewarding. And Douwe’s voice was made for country music.

V: So was his sleepy-eyed demeanour, like k.d. lang had a secret lovechild. And didn’t he turn out to be a chip off the old block! Terrific vocals, delivered so easily. The camera takes an age to find him at the beginning while it showcases the stage, and I still wish they’d cut away between him sitting down and taking to the mic stand for the first bridge. The interlude makes perfect sense in a country’n’western kind of way but just feels like a non-sequitur on a Eurovision stage where the only person who knows him is the fan waving the Dutch flag in the front row.

⁰⁷ Armenia

B: “Caught in a downward spiral” pretty much sums up the quality of the lyrics this year. As with Hungary, it’s refreshing to see these ones in print and actually understand them, since Iveta outdoes even Freddie with her wayward diction.

A: I’ll admit I’ve never truly understood this, and probably never will. It feels half-formed to me. I won’t argue it’s not effective, and I suppose I should applaud it for being unexpectedly restrained – the sense of suppressed power waiting to explode works well with what the song is saying. Hmmm. Maybe I do understand it after all and am just being hard to get along with because that huge build-up at the beginning doesn’t do what I want it to.

V: Every shot in this is calculated and controlled, and the result is amazing, producing visually the most consistent and arresting performance of the contest. Iveta looks stunning – Charlie’s Angels meets Victoria’s Secret – and matches it vocally, even if she sounds a little more like the end of her tether’s in sight in the final.

⁰⁸ San Marino

B: I know I’m bringing my work home here, and I know that in the scheme of things this bothers just about no one, but really, this makes LoveWave look like a masterclass in English lyric-writing.

A: I’ve got to say that although I’m not exactly addicted, this is a far more authentic and enjoyable slice of disco than I ever expected it to be. It feels more like an original track from the ’70s that’s been given a digital spring clean than a modern take on the genre. Even Serhat’s semi-spoken delivery fits, with its broken English and overly insistent backing vocals.

V: That said, they missed a trick in the authenticity stakes not having all five of them gathered around the one available microphone. Amazingly, this must be in contention for the title of most together Sammarinese performance to date. It’s not quite as genuinely disco as it probably needed to be, but its result shows that it still did enough to win more people over than anyone really expected. Its biggest victory is arguably the fact that Serhat manages to come across as endearing rather than sleazy.

⁰⁹ Russia

B: John Ballard and Ralph Charlie should hang their heads in shame for “Thunder ’n’ lightning it’s gettin’ excitin’”. On this evidence I’m not sure they’re real people though, so...

A: From the moment this was unveiled, the only thing I heard about it was that it sounded like it was 10 years too late and would have been every bit at home in a mid-noughties ESC. Which, to be fair, it would have, but I still say that even then it would have been a decade out of its time: it’s the closest we’ve ever got to Modern Talking in the contest. It does what it says on the tin, and in its own way does it very efficiently, but that doesn’t make it any less depressing a proposition for being so bland and processed. I suspect even the strings are synthesised.

V: It’s all the more disappointing a vehicle given who they’re forcing to drive it. Sure, some – not all – of the visuals are amazing, and sure, Sergei sounds and looks great, and certainly does himself and his country proud, but I can’t help but feel he’d have looked more like he was enjoying it and less like he was constantly two steps ahead of himself trying to remember all the moves if they’d just stuck to the kind of choreography we get in the first B-chorus. He’s got the voice and the charisma: he doesn’t need the gimmickry. (But the lower key here is even more of a cheat than it was last year when Måns used it.)

¹⁰ Czech Republic

B: There’s a proliferation of entries so far which claim to be [at least co-]written by people whose names suggest they’re native speakers in a way the lyrics singularly fail to. Based on what we get here, I’m surprised they’re not credited to Rhymezone.

A: In all the excitement of the Czechs coming up with an entry that might actually qualify, I think most people overlooked the fact that this is not entirely dissimilar to their last effort, in terms of being vaguely arduous and not having much mainstream appeal. Which is not to take away from its better qualities – the sweep and swell of the strings, for example, is glorious. But as much as it probably did deserve to qualify on merit, it need only look to itself to explain why it failed to make any impact come the final.

V: The stage looks very pretty here, which is nice, but it means we basically never get to see Gabriela: almost everything’s in mid- and long-shot. When the camera does actually focus on her, she looks surprisingly tired; and that’s how the performance feels to me, too. She’s a competent vocalist, but this is the kind of song that should send shivers down your spine, and not a single moment comes close. I’m trying to construe something from the fact that she lets her hair down twice and we never see it.

¹¹ Cyprus

B: “You know, I’m still inside” is not something you want to have to tell the other person, frankly.

A: Would it be unfair to hang the combination of bland lyrics and bland production here solely on G:Son? There’s nothing wrong with pop rock in and of itself, but this is a very tame example, despite the affectations. My immediate reaction to it when I first heard it was “too much bluster, not enough lustre” and my position hasn’t changed.

V: Francois is sporting some serious guyliner in the semi. This is a very good performance for underscoring the point I made above about affectations not really disguising how soft the rock is. Vocally it always feels a few seconds away from disaster to me, even if it’s better in the final.

¹² Austria

B: It’s no surprise this was such a fan favourite when you get to “On chante et on danse et on rit, on s’élance, réuni, enivré, dans l’imprudence” and realise Zoë was basically singing about us queer boys in the front row.

A: I do like the shifting clarity of tone in this, and the timeless quality of the strings. And the tolling of the bells. And the vocals, which suit it perfectly. But I still think the rest of it sounds like it’s been blackmailed into being uptempo. It’s one of those songs as well where discretion is (or ought to have been) the better part of valour: two-and-a-half minutes would have been more than sufficient.

V: Simple presentation, strong vocals. Works a treat. Zoë’s girly enthusiasm and Alice in Wonderland-meets-Sound of Music mien are delightful. I do like it when something I didn’t previously rate has me completely sold on the night. It’s still too long though.

¹³ Estonia

B: At least one entry each year tends to throw up an English word or phrase you never expected to hear in a Eurovision entry, mostly because you’ve never heard it in everyday life this side of 1965. Last year Ireland gave us the rather marvellous ‘unbeknownst’; this year Stig and friends give us “Be that as it may” – the first of several subjunctives in the one contest. (Honestly, you wait half an hour for a bus and then three come along at once.) It suits the mood of the song, and the poster-boy look Jüri was originally going for, although the story the lyrics tell reminds me of something that would come along much later: the Pet Shop Boys’ It Must Be Obvious. For reasons that, ahem, are indeed rather obvious.

A: Serendipity though it probably is, the trembling strings this opens with, followed by the more robust and confident arrangement leading into the chorus, mirrors the situation the narrator finds himself in exactly. The composition as a whole, including the way the lead and backing vocals are balanced against the music, is one of the most impressive of the contest.

V: Which makes it a shame that it leads to such a disconnect between song and singer when they take their cue for the performance from the one fairly subtle Bond moment in the arrangement. Jüri makes every pose and gesture look like a nervous twitch; the matinee idol persona from the national final has morphed into ‘socially awkward serial rapist’. The suit – which was made to measure about two weeks earlier – looks terrible because of his strange movements. The stage is too dark. The card trick feels random and desperate. And worst of all, his vocals aren’t there. Gah! At least the backing vocalists are good.

¹⁴ Azerbaijan

B: It’s rather clever, in a fate-tempting sort of way, opening a song with the line “You got in my head... like a song”, but all too soon this stops to try very hard. Depending on your views of Samra and her talents, there’s fun to be had with the likes of “I made a mistake”, “We have hit the point of no return / We crash and we burn” and “Gonna take a miracle to save us now”.

A: The Azeris have certainly become adept at panning for gold among Melodifestivalen rejects: as cast-offs go, this is top-drawer stuff. It’s one of the few things this year that impressed me for sounding like a complete package from the word go. Whatever its stylings, it’s a thoroughly modern production of a song that knows exactly what it’s setting out to do, and does it well.

V: Samra’s not winning the Vocalist of the Contest title any more than, say, Lidia Isac is, but she’s good enough not to sink the song. Which is lucky, since the costumes are awful and the performance neither one thing nor the other. Like the Greek entry, it really feels like the Azeris couldn’t be arsed.

¹⁵ Montenegro

B: If, as purported, this is basically about shagging, I’m not sure what the wonderfully named Srđan Sekulović Skansi is telling us about the Highway boys by including the line “I see you inside me”.

A: Considering it was Miracle that got slapped with all the ’80s labels ahead of the contest, it surprised me how much the verses here sounded like something Heaven 17 or similar might have come up with back in the day – until it emerged that the song had been gestating for the better part of 30 years and had its roots in that era of music after all. Its combination of sounds and approaches has never jarred with me: the whole thing feels genuine in a way that Alter Ego never does. I’m always slightly disappointed there’s no pay-off to the promise of the verses, which suggest the Montenegrins are about to give us the clubbiest thing we’ve ever heard at Eurovision, but it doesn’t dampen my enthusiasm for the entry overall. There are even touches in the synths that harken back to Igranka, which can only be a good thing.

V: It’s basically 2013 all over again – it looks great, it sounds great, no one was ever going to vote for it, and I love it. My only criticism of the performance is that it doesn’t give us enough close-ups of the lads.

¹⁶ Iceland

B: I seem to recall Ms Salóme explaining at some point that this song was about battling demons. I must say, having just read the lyrics, that the voices in my head are none the wiser. At best the ideas seem underdeveloped.

A: This has the same animated western feel that Heroes had, and is striving for the same reach that Heroes achieved with half the effort. It has a number of elements that are theoretically attractive, but in practice I find it boring and repetitive.

V: The threads of the narrative are there, but all that’s strung out along them are set pieces. Which is to say moments of this work really well; it’s the bits in between of random wandering around and strange stuff on screen that don’t work, and there are too many of them. And it’s too dark, however fitting that may be.

¹⁷ Bosnia and Herzegovina

B: Deen addressing Dalal, or indeed any woman, with “Trebaće mi tvoje tijelo” when Jala’s “’mjesto kapetan da budem, bir’o sam da budem pirat” is so much more appropriate is tittersome.

A: Like Utopian Land, the chorus here is what does for Bosnia. For the first minute the song lulls you into a false sense of security, promising at least some of the Balkan greatness these things usually deliver. And that’s despite Deen’s vocals. Dalal’s are much more palatable, with the sort of colour to them that marks out many a female singer from this part of the world. In a minor victory, the rap manages to sound not as bad as the Greek one, although still comes across as an afterthought, and the song as a whole is too flat and alienating to achieve any sort of connection.

V: The staging would be WTF enough on its own without it having fuck all to do with the lyrics. It’s like they figured no one would understand it anyway, so they might as well make the visuals on-trend. Deen’s Gestapo Ken look is wrong on so many levels. Everyone except Dalal is overacting.

¹⁸ Malta

B: There’s a whiff of Vertigo about the colours being namechecked here. Apart from that, there’s not much to say about these lyrics; there’s not much of a lyric to say anything about. “I’ve been trying hard to hear what my heart wants to say” is nice, if inconsistent with what the rest of the song is telling us.

A: However contemporary this might be (although surely the gospel sound of the bridges and chorus is ‘timeless’ rather than ‘today’?), the whole thing feels over-produced to me. Aspects of it are certainly appealing – the aforementioned white man’s praise-Jeebuz bits among them – but at times it comes across as mechanical; more of a mission statement than a song.

V: There’s a call for you, Ms Losco – Mariah Carey wants her dress back. And her hair. And her cleavage. This is a very perfunctory performance. The dancer is largely useless, as they tend to be in most of these things, but especially so when they merge into the background. And whether it’s her bump or the high notes holding her in check, Ira just stands and sings this, well enough but without ever convincing me she’s not stretching herself to the limit. Neither she nor the song give you many reasons to pick up the phone and vote for it, which indeed the vast majority of people didn’t.

¹⁹ Latvia

B: Misheard lyrics 2016 #1: I could have sworn young Master Sirmais was singing “That’s what I need / Feeling again that you’re breeding with me”. That aside, Ms Savadogo’s come on a bit with her English since the gobbledygook of Love Injected.

A: Mesmerising. Alright, not quite as mesmerising as her last one, but they’re not fighting each other for the crown. You won’t hear any complaints from me if Aminata becomes the Latvian Siegel. Justs can come back too if he wants. He’s the only singer this year to rival Freddie in the growling vocal stakes.

V: Strong opening to the semi. Context is everything though, and for some intangible reason part of the impact is lost in the final, despite the performance being every bit as good. I love the technological look of the stage, like Justs has been dropped into some disused machine factory where the electricity’s still on. His face is intriguing – the short-form stubble on that feminine bone structure, set off by the floppy fringe, lends him a quasi-Conchita air.

²⁰ Poland

B: Blimey, what a bummer-fest. I’m assuming lines like “When you feel that everything is lost / You need to know there’s no life without fear” are meant to be saying ‘How you are feeling is perfectly normal and things will get better’, but they tend to have the opposite effect, piling on reasons to be even more depressed. The no-smoke-without-fire bit is a lazy choice when about a million other more meaningful things would have rhymed just as well.

A: The melodrama! Brewing since the early ’90s. If anything this year, or in any year for that matter, comes close to being a guilty pleasure for me, this is it: from the get-go I found myself taken in by it far more than I felt was right and normal, but then it came third in the televote and voila, vindication. I love how unabashed it is in its ordinariness. And multiple key changes.

V: [Semi] Mr Szpak is just a little bit off there at the start, but quickly finds the rails again. The straightforward performance sells this well, especially when we get that many close-ups of his stunning eyes. He pronounces ‘black’ as if he’s from South Africa. [Final] On song from the off.

²¹ Switzerland

B: “Here we are now, with nothing to lose” but the semi-final.

A: LOL @ Rykka’s official ESC blurb describing this as a “triumphant mega-ballad”, for both its bald-faced temerity and its cluelessness. Musically it has a fuck-it-that’ll-do quality that permeates the entire entry. It really annoys me the way the stabbing strings stop halfway through the bridge into the second chorus as though whoever cobbled the song together forget to switch them off earlier and just hit mute at some random point. [Waits for it to end] Ugh, the whole thing’s just so unattractive. I can’t be doing with it.

V: Until the first chorus, this fools you into thinking it’s not going to be the car crash you’re hoping and expecting it to be – and that’s in spite of the blue hair and the smoking armpits. Then Rykka starts doing her weak-bladder dance and yep, it’s back on track to being a disaster. On the whole it sounds (and, impossibly, looks) better than it deserves to, but it’s still a very long three minutes.

²² Israel

B: Fnaar at “You fill me”. Points off for “Don’t escape”. The rest is rather lovely. The middle eight in particular works well.

A: No one who’s familiar with my reviews will be surprised to find that this deceptively simple piano-driven ballad ticks all of my boxes, especially when the strings are layered on top. By the time the backing vocals and percussion kick in at the two-minute mark it’s all making perfect Israeli sense, but not in any way that threatens to derail it. For the sake of balance I should reiterate the one criticism I levelled at it when I first heard it – that it doesn’t provide a great deal of variety or progression – but that’s a pretty churlish complaint to make when its foundations are as solid as they are.

V: There’s a terrifying moment at the start in the semi where the backing vocalists threaten to be as awful as only Israeli backing vocalists know how to be in Eurovision, but thankfully that moment passes. The remaining two-and-a-half minutes are glorious. (All three are in the final.) Mr Star is just that, putting in a flawless and surprisingly moving performance.

²³ Belarus

B: I get that the title and overall theme here are a metaphor, but it still makes the whole wolf thing weird. He should have used a flightless bird, like the emu. Missed opportunity for televoting points from Australia right there.

A: This is an achievement of sorts in being one of the most plodding and uninspired entries of the year and yet also one of the most representative of its country.

V: Kudos to Ivan: he’s better than the song. The CGI wolves are fantastically bad, but then the graphics as a whole are one what-were-they-thinking moment after another.

²⁴ Serbia

B: There aren’t many sets of lyrics this year that really mean something, but Ivana Peters’ do. “I thought that it was supposed to hurt me / I thought that it was love” are two simple but striking lines in an accomplished sketch of a relationship that isn’t even lucky enough to be able to call itself dysfunctional. Its impact is diluted somewhat by Hungary having beaten them to the punch two years ago in Copenhagen, but that doesn’t undermine the importance of the message. And yes, I just realised I’ve punned several times, very inappropriately, for which I can only apologise.

A: Even in English this remains identifiably Serbian, thanks mostly to the backing vocals, although elements of the arrangement help pinpoint it as well. Otherwise it could come from just about anywhere. It’s easy to overlook how difficult a balance that is to achieve. But then this isn’t an entry to blow its own trumpet, pleasingly. I’d like to like it a little bit more than I actually do, but I still have a lot of admiration for it.

V: The one time the cage-bar lighting makes sense. This is up there among the vocals of the contest for me, even with that one little overexcited bit in the final. There’s some subtle stuff happening in the choreography, which is all about suppressed power and the fight for dominance. The backing vocals are marvellously Serbian. The whole thing works so well as a whole that I’m astounded it came so close to not even qualifying.

²⁵ Ireland

B: I’m not sure “touch who you wanna” is the best advice to follow, unless you want to spend the next 20 years on the nonces’ wing.

A: This really does feel like the kind of thing you’d find in a Teach Yourself Guitar book. Easy listening has never been more insipid.

V: Just about nothing’s been invested in this performance, which is decent simply for not being totally awful. Nicky Byrne’s pretty, but it’s obvious why he’s remembered – if he’s remembered at all – as the fifth one from Westlife. And turn the lights on, people! The clue’s in the title.

²⁶ FYR Macedonia

B: If it’s true that Kaliopi got this as part of her divorce settlement, there’s a delicious irony to the lines “Za sé što ti si mi dala / Od srce ti fala” on any number of levels.

A: This is another arrangement where the truly interesting things, few and far between though they may be, are lost beneath the vocals. All we’re left with is something that would have sounded dated back in 1994, when by rights it should have been Macedonia’s debut entry, complete with loud, badly dressed backing vocalists. A wasted opportunity, given Kaliopi’s ability to sell a song.

V: Black-and-white dress – check; shrieky backings standing in a line – check; completely static performance – check. It really is nineteen-ninety-never. And Kaliopi doesn’t even sound that good.

²⁷ Lithuania

B: This is no less insistent in its way than the song that follows it, but I do like the fact that lyrically it comes full circle.

A: It’s interesting to listen to this without the vocals (not that they change things much), as it really hammers home that they’ve managed to construct an entire three-minute song out of precisely two parts. Perhaps it’s that insistence that won people over in the end. Personally, as per Armenia, I still find myself shouting “Do something more!” when I listen to it: to me it’s 90 seconds of edging without the obvious pay-off.

V: That hair! That jacket! That trampoline flip you can barely see in the final because of the dry ice! Sounds great though, and the turquoise and green makes for a nice change.

²⁸ Australia

B: “It never makes sense” is kind of true now that I sit and peruse these lyrics. The opening verse in particular makes you wonder whether you (or they) really know what they were trying to say. In any case, David Musumeci and Anthony Egizii – better known as DNA, otherwise known as the songwriters here – seem far too cheery a pair to be penning something this self-absorbed: they look like they should be running a chip shop.

A: Well, this is stark. It has the same echoing quality as Walk on Water but feels less contrived, and far less desperate to please. It serves very effectively to showcase Ms Im’s voice.

V: I love the way Dami just sits there and sings as if to say “Look at me, I can do this on my arse with my legs crossed”, but without it seeming for a moment like she’s showing off. Which is what it tips over into a bit when she goes all vocal-exercisathon in the last half a minute or so; the rest sounds huge and is all the more impressive for being comparatively restrained. Also, hats off to Sahlene & co. (singular; there were only two of them) for filling the song out the way they do.

²⁹ Slovenia

B: They’ve come in for some ridicule, but I rather like the lines “You are not a composer, I am not your song / Strange chords, different worlds”. I also like the fact that the answer to the slightly daft-sounding question the title raises is never proffered, but is a perfect match for the bruises the lyrics hint at – and that with “Now the colour doesn’t matter / You feel blue and I am better” the tables really have turned. If Serbia was the before, this is definitely the after.

A: The similarities continue in the music, with both this and the Serbian entry employing certain techniques I can only think to describe as filmic. There’s lots to like about this, especially the instrumental version; the vocals somehow make it less consequential. ManuElla has one of the very few obvious accents of the contest, too, which always catches me out and feels wrong somehow, as if being from Slovenia she should be immune to such things.

V: Boy that stage looks empty. Which is presumably why they decided to fill it up with the pointless pole dancer. ManuElla is actually pretty good, but the whole thing comes across as an audition for a part in Nashville you know she’s never going to get.

⁰⁰ Romania

This couldn’t have had a more appropriate title if it tried. The lyrics are quite poignant as well, given the way the EBU handled the situation. My main reason for not being sorry we didn’t see it in the final – which it would undoubtedly have reached – is not its poor man’s musical bombast, but the fact it may well have qualified in Serbia’s place. I feel for Ovidiu, but yeah. No.

³⁰ Bulgaria

B: Again, the metaphor mightn’t be terribly nuanced, but it does the job. Nothing else comes close this year in bridging the gap between traditional pop balladry and rousing anthem.

A: Even in its quieter moments this is effortlessly upbeat – something that’s in surprisingly short supply this year. Sure, it might be more calculated for it, but Poli clearly realised that if you’re gonna bother coming back at all you might as well do everything you can to improve on your last result. And that she does, well before the scores roll in, with an accomplished and encompassing composition that doesn’t ignore its roots, but incorporates its ethnic elements in an unobtrusive way. Result: a song that’s very much of the country it comes from but which speaks to a much wider audience. Eurovision gold.

V: There’s something very warm and inviting about Poli’s voice which helps offset her very dark staging and peculiar choice of costume. Everything comes together in the last minute though, when the excellent backing vocalists get their 15 seconds of fame. There’s an enormous amount of love for her in the hall, and quite right too.

³¹ Denmark

B: I refuse to believe these lyrics were the collective effort of six people.

A: Ditto re: the music. Talk about the law of diminishing returns.

V: It’s fun trying to work out which one is the homosexual.

³² Ukraine

B: Who would have thought we’d ever get a Eurovision winner featuring the ironically immortal line “Everyone dies”. I admire the transition from “Where is your mind? / Humanity cries” to “Where is your heart? / Humanity rise”.

A: Instantly and utterly absorbing. What might under other circumstances be labelled the ‘instrumental break’ features basically no instruments and yet remains totally captivating. It’s interesting that the top two songs this year both paired minimalist productions with huge vocals.

V: What an unlikely but worthy winner this makes. Jamala forces the emotion a bit too much for my liking, given how strongly woven throughout the narrative it is anyway, but it doesn’t undermine the impact of the performance.

³³ Norway

B: These lyrics, and indeed the shift in timing, are all the more poignant when you consider the issues Agnete herself is fighting to overcome. They could easily form an internal dialogue. I’ve always been strangely taken with the emphasis given to the final word in “I’ll be your partner / And liberate you from your prison”.

A: Wait – this was co-everythinged by Ian Curnow? As in ‘Phil Harding and...’? I knew there was a reason it appealed to me immediately. Euphoria meets I Feed You My Love might be a reductionist way of looking at it, but it would only be to the song’s detriment if it resulted in it being less than the sum of its parts. And while most of Europe might disagree with me, I don’t think it is: to me it takes the best of both to create something all its own. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was the shift in tempo that put people off, but from where I stand, it fits seamlessly.

V: As appropriate as it may be, the somewhat sluggish movement here (and lack of variation, ironically) doesn’t do a lot for the song’s chances. Given this is the case, it’s also strange that the camera seems caught out by the fact that there’s a dancer in the background. I’m rooting for Agnete throughout, but it’s fair to say her performance is solid rather than exciting.

³⁴ Georgia

B: Well, this is easily the sexiest set of lyrics this year. I love the fact they eschew any kind of standard structure and just present a series of universal moments..

A: There’s more than one pie G:Son’s fingers are to be found in this year. If it’s a straight-up fight between this and Alter Ego, however, there’s no contest. Perhaps the whole Indie-cum-Britpop thing has only just found its way to Georgia, but in any case I’m glad it has. The music here charts its own course, just like the lyrics, and is all the better for being so unorthodox. The disco explosion has shades of mid-’90s Blur.

V: All power to them for trying something a bit different visually, but I’m not sure the mirror effect is the most cutting-edge thing they could have gone for. As expected, Nika and his Lolitaz just waltz on, do their thing and wander off again, albeit with slightly more sense of occasion in the final.

³⁵ Albania

B: Honestly, I can’t think of anything to say about this.

A: I much prefer the instrumental version here, as I suspected I would, since it allows you to roll around in the music and see what you find. (I particularly like the Bond-theme pretensions and the echoes of Unfinished Sympathy in the tinkle of the bells.) But this is basically the fourth year in a row the Albanians have given us an entry without a readily identifiable chorus, and there’s only so much you can do to make up for that. Besides, they had about 15 years to play with it, and although to this day I’ve never heard the FiK version, I suspect most fans are right and that they would have been better off retaining more of the original. What we got has the hallmarks of a pudding that’s not merely overegged but also underbaked.

V: Eneda has a great voice, but an odd mouth, and the gold’s fooling no one: her wicked stepmother look is the one truly fairytale element of the whole thing.

³⁶ Belgium

B: Misheard lyrics 2016 #2: “I see massive balls weighing down the people all around.” I think you’ve wandered into the wrong club, Laura.

A: I’m not sure where the disdain for this stemmed from originally; perhaps the fact that it wore its inspiration, like its heart, on its sleeve. But it was that charm which attracted me to it from the moment I heard it. While it might not be doing anything groundbreaking, what it is doing it does well, and without any hint of parody.

V: I was also surprised when recently watching the national final performance for the first time to find that Laura wasn’t the hopeless case everyone had made her out to be – true, strides were made between then and Stockholm, but the potential was there all along for it to achieve the kind of result it ultimately did. That’s thanks largely to the fact that they turn a performance which could very easily be irritating into three minutes of fun, one where it doesn’t matter a jot that Laura’s not the best singer in the world, because you’re too busy cheering her on to notice. All of this is doubly true come the final, where it makes the perfect opener. The Belgian colour scheme’s a cute touch.

³⁷ Italy

B: Effortlessly effective lyrics from the Italians, as ever. I can certainly identify with “Guardavo il mondo da una porta / Mai completamente aperta e non da vicino”. The inclusion of the English interlude prompted a reaction that was unfairly hostile, given it conveys the essence of the original so commendably and still manages to produce lines as lovely in their own right as “We are stars aligned together / Dancing through the sky”.

A: Perhaps the slowest burner of the year, this has gone up in my estimations with every listening. At first I was frustrated by its seeming determination not to go that extra step and be the truly wonderful thing it should be, but over time I’ve realised that it’s wonderful as is. Francesca’s vocals evolve from fluttering, almost hesitant, to a fullness that’s full of conviction, and have a warmth to them that radiates throughout. The modest orchestration matches this perfectly.

V: A strange three minutes, this, with Francesca appearing to become less rather than more sure of herself as she goes along. I think it’s the enormity of the situation; right at the very end there she’s on the verge of bursting into tears. Which is endearing, but doesn’t change the fact that the performance fails to connect the way it should, compounded by the lovely but perplexing staging and props.

³⁸ Sweden

B: Robbing “a post office too” seems so British, somehow.

A: Make that three minimalist productions out of five taking the top spots this year. With Frans it’s the complete opposite of Ukraine and Australia, his vocals being all about understatement. And yet that simplicity works just as well as anything more technically complex. The song itself still doesn’t do a great deal for me, as much as I’m happy to listen to it whenever it comes on, but that doesn’t stop me seeing how effective (or well-produced) it is. The only thing that bothers me about it is that the three-minute rule means the punchline is delivered without sufficient build-up: the whole “But I’m not sorry, no” coda would have a lot more impact if there was a bigger gap between it and the final chorus.

V: Yep, it just works.

³⁹ Germany

B: The fact that a narrative this mature is being told by a schoolgirl with a Manga obsession should annoy me every bit as much as the precocious Irish entry in Vienna did, but it doesn’t, because I actually believe this. It’s real, and clever, in a way that Molly’s essay competition entry wasn’t. I’m not now where lyricist Anna Leyne was (or at least had at some point been) when she wrote this, but I recognise it all.

A: This is another credible and creditable entry from the Germans. It might not be ‘right for Eurovision’, but who cares when it’s this good. It doesn’t have the sustained appeal of their 2010-2012 entries, or even Black Smoke, but that’s no indictment of its merit given the company it’s keeping.

V: “This fascinating, independent and exceptional artist... doesn’t take herself too seriously.” She wouldn’t want to, having delivered Germany its second straight last place. Not that she deserved it any more than Ann Sophie; it’s just the kind of song and performance that has 26th written all over it. It looks fantastic though, and sounds good as well.

⁴⁰ France

B: It would be doing this an injustice to reduce it to a metaphor for France trying to find their way in Eurovision, but you can certainly read it that way. It’s also as upbeat a ballad as any you’ll find. In an echo of L’amore è femmina, I love the way the French bits are essentially Amir’s inner monologue to the English bits he’s saying to the person who’s saved him. In and of themselves, lines like “Comme une erreur de l’univers / J’ai jeté tellement de bouteilles à la mer / J’ai bu tant de liqueurs amères / Que j’en ai les lèvres de pierre” are just as demoralising as their Polish counterparts, but it’s all about pairing them with the likes of “C’est quand on n’y croit plus du tout / Qu’on trouve un paradis perdu en nous”.

A: There’s also a huge difference in how you couch these things: compare this and Color of Your Life with no reference to their subject matter and you’d swear the songs had nothing in common. This just has so much joie de vivre. Amir sounds like he’s smiling the whole time he’s singing, and like he means it. To be fair, once both he and the song find their level that’s pretty much all you’re going to get out of them, but I’m happy to surrender complexity when modesty’s this charming.

V: Amir’s lovely, but this lacks focus. The last note isn’t even close to being what it’s meant to be. Still, sixth overall feels right.

⁴¹ Spain

B: A Spanish entry entirely in English is an attractive concept in theory; in practice, not so much. Still, crash and burn, live and learn. Hurray!

A: This sounds like the original was remixed by someone whose formative years were spent listening to everything Brothers in Rhythm ever touched but who doesn’t have the same innate ability to improve these things. That said, it’s a brilliant ’90s throwback that ticks quite a few ‘sounds like’ boxes. The best BIR remixes were all at least twice this length though; the production here is a little too kitchen sink for something three minutes long.

V: While this comes across well – and Barei shows Douwe Bob how to make a sudden halt to proceedings actually work for you – it also tells you immediately that it’s not going to make much of a dent on the scoreboard. The sound mix is a bit off in parts, and the four backing vocalists together aren’t half as good as Barei herself.

⁴² United Kingdom

B: Anthemic though this may be as an overall package, you’ve got to question whether the lads were oblivious to the undertones when they agreed to sing it. Let’s face it, they’re barely even that: the likes of “I feel I’m dancing in the sky / I come alive when I’m with you” can just about be extended to the audience, but the rest of it – the first verse in particular – doesn’t leave much (if any) room for interpretation. Either way, it’s nice to see they were completely unfazed by the prospect of both themselves and the song being slapped with the ‘gay duet’ label. (Woolford & Shakeshaft would have made a far more interesting name for them, incidentally. And poor Jake: with a surname like that he must have come in for a fair bit of stick at school. As it were.)

A: Bit of an understated gem, this. OK, it needs another polish to properly shine, but there’s lots of interesting stuff going on in the arrangement, and the fact it’s a bit backwards in coming forwards is rather sweet. Jake’s vocals are a little reedy in isolation, but the two of them together sound great. Which is fitting.

V: Best UK entry in years. It does fall a bit flat, through no fault of its own: the lads turn in a very self-assured performance. Again, it’s just that fickle finger of Eurovision fate. 24th might seem unnecessarily harsh, but it’s no slouch in a year of generally solid songs and performances.

And so to the points...

1 point goes to Montenegro

2 points go to Sweden

3 points go to Georgia

4 points go to Serbia

5 points go to the Netherlands

6 points go to Bulgaria

7 points go to Australia

8 points go to Israel

10 points go to Latvia

and finally...

12 points go to...

Ukraine!

The last wooden spoon of its kind is awarded to Switzerland.