I’ve just come out of the Israeli rehearsal session, and you know what? I 99% loved it. I’ll come back to the 1% later.
Every so often round these parts, you get someone who looks like they’ve forgotten they’re in a contest, and it’s often the better for it. Eddie put on a really relaxed, assured performance for us – more of an intimate night in with a few friends round the piano than a performance carefully calculated to make 500 million people pick the phone up. He starts off sat on the piano, and he really does look like he’s just enjoying the process of singing a song without any pressure.
The 1% of a problem is not a disastrous one, but it annoys me a bit. What we’ve got here is the kind of relaxed, smooth, soulful voice that I could certainly listen to all day in a way that I couldn’t for a lot of the others, but one of his backing singers decides that the big finish demands going for a big loud high piercing note… she gets it, but it’s like finding a bug at the bottom of a bowl of chocolate ice cream and spoils the mood a bit.
I’m probably going to be a lone voice here, but if you transplanted that into the semi-final I’d be calling it a certain qualifier. The final’s tougher, but I strongly suspect that backing it to come last would prove an embarrassing waste of money!
Franko is a brave man (who isn’t fond of the frequent switches between English and Hebrew, though Eddie lets English dominate proceedings more than I’ve heard previously), and I’ve left him to endure the Latvian soundchecks. I’ll join him presently for the full run-throughs. I like first rehearsal days, they give you time to think.