Well probably not, but we quite enjoy their parody of Azerbaijan’s 2009 entry Always.

Well seeing as the good people of Ireland (not to mention Estonia, Israel, Norway, Portugal and Slovenia), awarded them douze points last Saturday, it might interest you to know that Chanée and N’Evergreen’s album In A Moment Like This is now available on iTunes!

Chanée was very friendly to Styling at the second semi final, blowing him a kiss and laughing kindly when he collided with an NRK camera and a butch lesbian camerawoman as the Irish nearly invaded the stage at the end of the show to celebrate Niamh’s qualification! N’evergreen could barely crack a smile despite their nail-biting qualification. We think track 2, See You The Same Time Tomorrow might be an Industry cover…

In other iTunes news, Lena is topping iTunes charts all over the continent, including our own Irish store and in a move that has surprised everyone, the interval act Glow performed by Madcon is pushing her close in most territories, including Ireland again! Hands high, hands high! Tom Dice and Jessy Matador are also charting well in iTunes stores across the continent. Josh Dubovnie is however nowhere to be seen…

Eurovision is also big on Amazon this week. Auctions on the popular trading site include

• 15,000 glow sticks (Warning: these glow sticks last for 5 minutes only once cracked).
• An Armenian fertility statue that sprouts fungal infections on key changes.
• A vanderly, vanderly vagon. Ideal for gypsies and travelling folk. Must be collected in Rotterdam.
• An LCD stairwell. (Warning: not suitable for use with heels).
• Many, many sets of adult sized wings. Ideal for the grown up princess/deluded queer in your life.

Greetings from Oslo!

Apologies for the lack of posts; being at my first Eurovision is all a little overwhelming! Having an amazing time here. Saying a prayer that videos of me onstage at the Euroclub at 2am don’t make it online!

Anyway, tonight’s semi-final is one of the hardest to call since the format was introduced in 2004. I got 9/10 on Tuesday but I think anyone would be doing very well to successfully list 9 tonight.

There are 4 countries I would list as being “safe as houses”

• ARMENIA
• SWEDEN
• ROMANIA
• IRELAND

And I think the 6 joining them will be

• ISRAEL
• DENMARK
• AZERBAIJAN
• CROATIA
• CYPRUS
• TURKEY

I would dearly love THE NETHERLANDS to pull off a surprise, and LITHUANIA, SWITZERLAND, UKRAINE and GEORGIA must also fancy their chances. It’s all terribly exciting! A LOT will depend on the live performance but I won’t have time to update from Telenor tonight so the 10 I think are most likely to qualify are:

• ARMENIA
• SWEDEN
• ROMANIA
• IRELAND
• ISRAEL
• DENMARK
• AZERBAIJAN
• CROATIA
• CYPRUS
• TURKEY

Many thanks to ESC Today for uploading this fantastic remix of Ireland’s It’s For You. We’d love to see Niamh performing this live in the Euroclub in Oslo but only once she’s over her sore throat!

In honour of awful British crimes against humanity (see Frank’s earlier post) let’s remember the Greatest Crime of All…

And now, why we secretly kind of love, love, love Cry Cry Baby

• 0:00 – The opening strumming of the Spanish guitar is kind of promising…
• 0:10 – But ohoh! The heifers in black parading around do not bode well!
• 0:20 – EUROVISION GOLD! Love, love’s not enough. In some alternative universe, where the laws of Physics are very, verydifferent, Jessica is in tune. And it’s considered acceptable to wear ice skating costumes in public. But look at her face; she knows she bombed.
• 0:22 – Oh dear, Chris is doing some Joe McCaul dancing with the middle aged Scouse backing dancers. I wonder is one his Mum? She must be so proud.
• 0:28 – Ew, she’s going down on her fag. Bad fag-hag. Bad fag-hag! Your cheap fake tan will rub off all over his cheap white shirt!
• 0:33 – Is Chris having a seizure? Maybe he’s some quirky oddball with the voice of an angel to rescue this mess…
• 0:37 – Maybe not…
• 0:50 – Amazingly, she’s gone even further off key!
• 1:00 – Come on! Ooh, it speaks! I bet Chris considers himself butch.
• 1:15 – Remember when all the gays had bleached mullets? The mid naughties were a dark time for Gay Crimes Against Hairstyling.
• 1:20 – The man with the Spanish guitar seems more and more like the banjo player from Deliverance.
• 1:28 – Ok, secretly… I kind of adore the dance routine. It’s British Chav Schlager!
• 1:42 – Oh dear, the three old slappers and the two up front are now singing in five different keys. Harmonizing they ain’t.
• 1:48 – Bye bye baby. Cry cry baby. Bye bye baby. Baby bye bye. The people who wrote this are presumably native English speakers? Dear God…
• 2:00 – She’s going down on the fag again…
• 2:11 – Backing dancers clapping their hands in the air like seals! Not one drunk poof in the auditorium can be bothered to join in! Where were the Schlagerboys???
• 2:14 – COME ON LATVIA! *tumbleweed in the hall*
• 2:25 – Baby Bye Byeeeeeeeeeeee. Worst key change ever! Although the impact is invariably lost when you’ve been wandering in and out of many different keys, some only audible to small Latvian rodents for the past two minutes.
• 2:48 – Does Chris need to pee? That’s what I used to do when I was five years old and needed to go but didn’t want to leave the dancefloor.
• 2:55 – Oh yeah, don’t wanna cry no more. Oooh, it’s getting a bit R’n'B! Chris is urban. He’s relevant.
• 3:02 – Oh, poor, poor Jessica. Look at her wee face! Chris is in seventh heaven (he probably thinks his impromptu dance moves and R’n'B bit at the end went down a treat) but she knows, SHE KNOWS she’s just bought herself a life serving Maccie Dee’s in Merseyside.

So, so bad, but kind of fabulous in its own way.

I must admit, I’m rather taken with the home entry this year. It seems to have been constructed in the style of an X-Factor winner’s single; simple melody, builds to a hyperdramatic finish, sexy and sweet singer… all it’s really missing is the obligatory Cowell Gospel Choir.

Still, Diddy has his amazing fake violinsts so what does he care. The lyric “I feel it rise again” would suggest that My Heart Is Yours might even be a sequel to Secret Garden’s You Raise Me Up. It certainly has a similar structure and melody.

• 00:00 – Single spot light, no backing track, just a mysterious man from Primark singing his song… intriguing…
• 00:20 – The lights go up… ooh isn’t Didrik dreamy! Not sure about that jacket though
• 00:32 – Right down the barrel of the camera, like a young(er) Nick Clegg… weak at the knees for the man from Primark…
• 00:48 – Fake violin playing backing dancers in arrowhead formation? Check.
• 00:54 – He really has great hair
• 00:57 – I feel it rise again. We love a man with stamina
• 01:22 – Love, love, love how the slut with the violin tries to make eyes at my Didrik; he teases her for a millisecond before turning to camera to look at ME, his one true love! Notice the position his left hand is in in too! It’s always different with the left hand!
• 01:42 – Because my heart is yours, I’ll never leave you. It’s a sing-along-anthem!
• 01:52 – Loving the left hand work.
• 02:07 – Surprise key change!
• 02:14 – Yourrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrs. We’re dizzy with excitement at this stage!
• 02:24 – We love the step-step-sidestep-whilst fiddling dance. So easy, if one had a fiddle…
• 02:30 – Bit of fisting action in homage to the great Johnny Logan. In fact that explains the rather dodgy choice of white jacket too…
• 02:34 – And a bit of a key change to go with the feasting. WEAK.
• 02:42 – A-GAAAAAIN. Ooh, another surprise key change and some pyrotechniks to boot!
• 02:52 – Wow. What an ending. Note to Niamh; this is how you close a big ballad. I actually want to throw some knickers at the stage when he stops singing.

So, yeah. I love, love, love the man from Primark. He’s only 22, bless his wooly hat. It mightn’t be the greatest song in the contest but it’s a perfectly constructed weapon for a Saturday night entertainment show. Unfortunately the draw has not been kind at performing third in the final will hurt the homeboys chances. But he’ll always have a place in our hearts, and apparently us in his!

What a flawed masterpiece this was.

With some more appropriate styling och consulting Killing Me Tenderly could have been a real contender for Maria Haukass Storeng in Melodifestivalen 2009. Instead Maria had her head turned by a talentless ho-bag and was kicked out at Andra Chansen, dashing her dreams of becoming the 21st century Elisabeth Andreasson.

So, in honour of what could have been…

Fem (5) StylingOchConsulting Tips!

1. Ditch the hussy in the mini – Charlotte the harlot didn’t go down well in 2008, neither will Anna in 2009.

2. Ditch the Chicago-esque light boxes; sexually depraved prostitues do not match the mood of this song!

3. Maria love, you’ve got a great pair of lungs on you but a dancer you ain’t. We loved, loved, loved your little pointy moves as you stood still and belted out Hold On, Be Strong but what’s gotten into you now? You’re wandering around the stage aimlessly and every so often you’re grabbing your tits, shaking your well proportioned booty. You may be trying to look sultry but it’s all coming across a little Bernie from Ballinasloe after a few too many Bulmers…

4. Have you rubbed Baby Oil on your boobs? Too much Maria, too much!

5. Borrow Jade Ewan’s steps, violinists and get a sultry Swede to play Lord Webber’s piano. Or better yet, try and get Dirik Solli Tangen to join you in your treason against Norge. Make your sexy eyes at him but try and be a little more subtle than your lazerbeam-in-heat antics with Anna…

And their you have it. From Zero to Like a star, like a hero in Fem easy steps.

Ah Severina! What’s not the love about this Ethno Balkan stomper Croatia entered in Athens in 2006? I mean it’s all outrageously bonkers but the bit at 1:15 where Severina develops a stutter and purrs “Su-su-su-sex” at the audience takes the biscuit. The “constipated chorus” (1:55) is also quite fabulous.

Following on from Alan’s tribute to the 1995 entry Amen, I’d like to present another anthemic mid nineties entry from Israel… but one that includes getting pissed on a train, Australian soap stars and breaking of one of Eurovision’s fundamental rules.

Why we love, love, love Shiru

• It’s not shown in the above clip but the postcard preceding their performance showed the Israelis getting pissed on a train and pretending to look sad and poignant at The Queenstown Experience in Cobh. Fabulous.
• 0:16 – The girls have raided the seventies for dresses! Bless! We’re loving the ruffled sleeves girls! It must have been all the rage in Tel Aviv! Or as Terry Wogan famously commented on the night “Shiru, dressed like refugees from a Christmas cake.”
• 00:20 – Ultra smooth Israeli strutting into shot from the boys! Gotta love timeless Israeli choreography. We’ll have to do a special feature on how this move has been used by Israeli performers at Eurovision since biblical times right up to the present day!
• They really do look like they’ve been dressed by the wardrobe people who do Lord Weber’s BBC reality musical theatre shows! Bonus points for the AIDS ribbons of course; ahead of their time here!
• 00:40 – What a chorus! Shiru, shiru strut-stut-strut!
• 00:53 – WOW! Love, love, love the turn to camera! And they reference “Yamaha”, the maker of their grand piano! Smooth product placement guys.
• 1:00 – OMG, it’s Morag from Home and Away! I never knew she was Israeli! Looks like she’s lost the use of her legs though; not that it stops her playing her Yamaha grnd piano like a woman possessed!
• Oh these guys are great singers but it is a pity that singing in Hebrew sounds a smoker of twenty Major clearing their throat!
• 1:34 – It’s Morag again! We love her, her purple blouse and her lace frock!
• 1:48  – Sing a song, sing, till you can no more. OMG, they are singing in English! But what about the free langugae rule? Oh it’s Israel I suppose they have a habit of making their own rules. The RTE Concert Orchestra looks utterly bored in the background so theyy’re obviously not shocked by it.
• 2:08 – Ethnic middle eastern drumming! Fab! And more strutting!
• 2:14 – OMG who the hell is she? Random bird in a white dress appears stage left? Where the hell did she come from and who is she? Why are she and Morag seperate from the rest of the group?Has their been a huge bust up in rehearsals?
• 2:26 – Shiru, shiru strut from right to left! What a chorus line, what a dance move
• 2:40 – OMG ! KEY CHANGE LANGUAGE CHANGE, AND MORAG WALKS! She slots into that tightly choreographed group like a profesionnal porn star! They’re something of the Von Trapps about Morag and her insanely happy younger friends
• From here on it’s an orgasmic, strutting, cresecnedo of a finale; even the girl in white gets to sneak centre stage right at the end… let the world know… sing a song!

Now, you might find this hard to believe but with 3 points from Portugal and 1 from France, Shiru finished second from bottom with 4 points. Unbelievable! It did however encourage me to dedicate my life to singing, strutting and offering much needed Styling Och Consulting to people who look like refugees from a Christmas cake!

ESC Ireland would like to extend its condolences to our Polish readers following the tragic air crash which claimed the lives of President Lech Kaczynski and many other senior Polish politicians in Russia this morning. The above video is Sama, the 1995 Eurovision entry from Poland; a haunting ballad with a traditional air that reflects the sombre mood in Poland today.

Solidarno??