Australia

It’s Sheldon Riley for Australia

Sheldon Riley has won the Australian national final “Australia, You decide”. Sheldon will represent Australia with the song “Not the same” written and composed by himself with Cam Nacson and Timi Temple. Australia will perform in the first half of the second semifinal. The full result of the contest is: Sheldon Riley, “Not the same”, 100 pts. Voyager, “Dreamer”, 97 pts. Jaguar Jonze, “Little fires”, 91 pts. Charley, “I suck at being alone”, 63 pts. G-Nation, “Bite me”, 56 pts. Paulini, “We are one”, 52 pts. Andrew Lambrou, “Electrify”, 51 pts. Jude York, “I won’t need a dream”, 47 pts. Isaiah Firebrace & Evie Irie, “When I’m with you”, 45 pts. Erica Padilla, “To the bottom”, 45 pts. Seann Miley Moore, “My body”, 23 pts.

Australia decides

Allocation draw: these are the semifinals

From the Madama Palace in Turin, the allocation draw took place this afternoon. The draw was hosted by Carolina Di Domenico and Gabriele Corsi. During the ceremony, mayor Ahmed Aboutaleb (Rotterdam) handed over the key of the Eurovision City to his Turinese colleague Stefano Lo Russo. The semifinals will be as follows: 1st semifinal, 1st half: Albania Latvia Switzerland Slovenia Bulgaria Moldova Ukraine Lithuania The Netherlands 1st semifinal, 2nd half: Norway Russia Portugal Denmark Armenia Austria Croatia Iceland Greece The countries that will not attend a semifinal but will vote in the 1st one are: France and Italy. 2nd semifinal, 1st half: Australia Georgia Cyprus Serbia Finland Azerbaijan San Marino Israel Malta 2nd semifinal, 2nd half: Montenegro Romania Czech Republic Poland Belgium North Macedonia Sweden Estonia Ireland The countries that will not attend a semifinal but will vote in the 2nd one are: United Kingdom, Spain and Germany.

41 countries in 2022 Eurovision Song Contest

41 countries will take part in the 2022 Eurovision Song Contest in Turin. That is what EBU announced today. In comparison with the 2021 contest, Armenia and Montenegro return. The full list is here: Albania Australia Armenia Austria Azerbaijan Belgium Bulgaria Croatia Cyprus Czech Republic Denmark Estonia Finland France Georgia Germany Greece Iceland Ireland Israel Italy Latvia Lithuania Malta Moldova Montenegro North Macedonia Norway Poland Portugal Romania Russia San Marino Serbia Slovenia Spain Sweden Switzerland The Netherlands Ukraine United Kingdom France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom will directly be placed in the final, to be held on may 14. The other countries will have to qualify through a semifinal on may 10 or 12. As one of the ‘big five’ was this year’s winner, there will only be 25 countries in the final.

After the Eurovision Fame – Scott Fitzgerald

We would like to introduce you to our new column: After the Eurovision fame. Today we put Scott Fitzgerald in the spotlight. Scott Fitzgerald was born in Glasgow, Scotland on April 28th, 1948. He began his career on the GTO label, releasing the singles “Judy Played The Jukebox” in 1974 and the title track to glam rock movie “Never Too Young To Rock”in 1975. Fitzgerald’s greatest success was with “If I Had Words”, a duet with Yvonne Keeley and also featuring the St. Thomas More School Choir. It reached number 3 in the UK Singles Chart in 1978, and later went on to be a hit in Australia, Ireland, New Zealand, Belgium, the Netherlands and Scandinavia, selling more than one million copies. The song also featured in the score for the 1995 film BabeIn 1999, the band Westlife collaborated with the Vard Sisters to record the song. In 1988, he was the first ever artist chosen by telephone vote to sing the UK’s entry in the Eurovision Song Contest with the song “Go”. The song was written and composed by Julie Forsyth, daughter of the entertainer Sir Bruce Forsyth. Forsyth joined Fitzgerald on stage at the contest in Dublin, alongside her husband Dominic Grant (also of Guys ‘n’ Dolls) and Des Dyer (formerly of Jigsaw), to perform backing vocals. Ronnie Hazlehurst conducted the live orchestration. Fitzgerald came second in the contest, by one point, to Switzerland’s winning entry performed by Celine Dion. “Go” reached number 52 in the UK Singles Chart in April 1988. Fitzgerald reunited with Yvonne Keeley in 1992 for the single “United We Stand”, which was released on Red Bullet Records. In 2010 Fitzgerald and Keeley reunited for the final time in an all star version of ”If I had words” for Charity in the Netherlands which featured Gordon, Patricia Paay, Thomas Berge and many others. His album from 1988 ” The wind beneath my wings” has recently attracted interest again, and can be heared on Spotify and is for sale on Amazon. Fitzgerald is married to Shereen Fitzgerald and has three children, Liam Paul Patrick McPhail (passed away in 2020), Neeley Fitzgerald and the singer-songwriter Ki Fitzgerald, an original member of the UK boy band Busted and hit-songwriter to artists around the world. Ki co-wrote Monsters for Saara Aalto’s Finland 2018 entry into Eurovision Song Contest, adding to the family’s Eurovision history. Fitzgerald’s Eurovision experience was allmost forgotten until he decided to embrace his past and performed at a number of party nights in 2021 to celebrate the contest.

Another Summer Night. EU Summer party

On February 10, 2015, the EBU announced that Australia was allowed to participate in the final of the Eurovision Song Contest 2015 in Vienna. This was a special, one time only, invitation because of the festival’s sixtieth anniversary. But as we all know…they never left. Guy Sebastian represented Australia with ” Tonight Again” and reached the 5th place in the big final. You can als follow our Summer Party on Spotify and YouTube

New music from Helena Paparizou, Little Big and more….

Former Eurovision participants released new music this week. Benny Cristo was, only two weeks after Eurovision, ready for some new work. The song is in Czech and is called “Zlobiva”. Note also the video with a clay lookalike of Benny. Former winner Helena Paparizou (Greece 2001 and 2005) recorded a duet with former Alcazar-member Magnus Carlsson, who took part in Melodifestivalen numerous times. Isaiah Firebrace represented Australia in 2017. His new song and video is called “Blame on me”. Note also the new hairdo. Little Big, the Russian participants-to-be of 2020 (and who knows also of 2022?) released an EP called “Covers”. One of the covers is the song “Everybody (Backstreet’s back”), originally sung by the Backstreet Boys. The song is now called “Everybody (Little Big is back)”. Timebelle, the group who represented Switzerland in the 2017 contest, has new material too. The group is Swiss/Romanian, their new song is in Romanian. Rapper Nosfe joined Timebelle for the occasion.

Eurovision Song Celebration without Ireland & the UK?

Almost all of the countries were able to travel to Rotterdam, except for Australia which Live-on-Tape performance we were able to see in the First Semi-Final. But what happens with all the Live-on-tape performances? Well we will be able to see those during this years Eurovision Song Celebration! We will see almost all of the back-up performances, The BBC and RTE have decided not to give their back-up tapes to the public. We don’t really know why but our guess is because of the disappointing results the two countries had in this years Eurovision. Lesley Roy had this to say to the people that asked her why she won’t publish her Live-on-Tape to the public.

Tonight and tomorrow: watch the backup tapes

Had enough of the Eurovision Song Contest in Rotterdam? No, of course not. But don’t worry: this weekend there is still something to watch! As there was a possibility the artists could not travel to Rotterdam for the contest, every country had to send in a backup tape. Australia in fact used that tape. But EBU decided not to throw all the other tapes in the dustbin. You can watch them tonight and tomorrow. Tonight, Krista Siegfrids (Eurovision 2013) will guide you through the non-qualifiers. You can watch them on Youtube at 21.00 CET. Tomorrow, she will guide you through the finalists, same channel, same time. photo credits: EBU

Malta and Switzerland winners semifinals

The results of both the semifinals are known. Malta won the first one and Switzerland the 2nd one. Where the qualifiers of the 2nd semifinal were very clear (number 11, Denmark, follows with a distance), it was a close call at the first semifinal. Norway was 10th with 115 points while Croatia was 11th with 110 points. The full results are: 1st semifinal Malta, 325 pts. Ukraine, 267 pts. Russia, 225 pts. Lithuania, 203 pts. Israel, 192 pts. Cyprus, 170 pts. Sweden, 142 pts. Azerbaijan, 138 pts. Belgium, 117 pts. Norway, 115 pts. Croatia 110 pts. Romania, 85 pts. Slovenia, 44 pts. Australia, 28 pts. North Macedonia, 23 pts. Ireland, 20 pts. 2nd semifinal Switzerland, 291 pts. Iceland, 288 pts. Bulgaria, 250 pts. Portugal, 239 pts. Finland, 234 pts. Greece, 184 pts. Moldova, 179 pts. Serbia, 124 pts. San Marino, 118 pts. Albania, 112 pts. Denmark, 89 pts. Austria, 66 pts. Estonia, 58 pts. Poland, 35 pts. Czech Republic, 23 pts. Georgia, 16 pts. Latvia, 14 pts. photo credits: EBU