When you’re feeling tired and not quite in the mood there are some songs that will just lift you and send you off with a spring in your step doing cartwheels around the room for joy. And the Polish song Legenda isn’t one of them. Oh dear back to the life-sapping darkness of yesterday you might think.
Strangely though I’m drawn to it. I don’t know if it’s because we’ve been playing smurf songs and songs from Junior Eurovision 2009 in the flat but our Polish boy seems to be doing something for me.
He’s not to everyone’s taste it has to be said. In fact he’s probably not to about 124, 999,999 of the people who’ll be watching but folk that know me well know that my tastes are not terribly conventional.
It will shock you to learn that there’s choreography in the performance. The costumes are dreadful. Someone needs to tell them that it’s only Norwegians that dress in faux peasant costumes on the 17th May. The song sounds like something someone wrote as a stream of consciousness on a psychiatrist’s couch.
And most of all of course, it’s completely and utterly doomed because nobody sane could possibly like it. Take it from someone who knows 🙂
Phil: Well we rushed into the hall eventually to get to Poland and was it worth it?
Well, probably not. It’s another wrist slitting song and in this one there is HEAVY symbolism and choreography in this one. Women draped all over Marcin like a bad rash, the throwing of what appears to be water bottles and lemons on the stage, at one point he gets one of the backing singers in a half-nelson headlock while they are trying to sing and, most worryingly of all, they have slowed down the introduction and put in some comedy wailing, like the song needed to get any darker!!.
Marcin has a very slappable face which the camera seems to focus on far too much for my liking, he has clearly gone to the Nick Clegg communication school which is usually a good thing, apart from it detracts slightly from the song because he almost has a half-sly grin on his face – then he pretends to get serious in the lead up to the end of the song and it just fails to grasp me.
Nick: For today’s show, we’ve come to the Oslo regional capital of Oslo, in Norway. It’s an interesting place today; many of the local people are wearing clothes and waving little flags around. Hence, we at OnEurope have chosen to hang out in a darkened room while some people sing at us.
Catching two run-throughs of Poland was probably enough. It’s all terribly dark and mythic and legendary, with dancers and costumes and everything, and Marcin just has a slightly unhinged glint in his eye, suggestive of possibly stepping out of the screen in the last twenty seconds or so and hitting you round the side of the head with a blunt instrument and nicking your Pringles. Fortunately, he doesn’t actually go through with the threat – he just continues to look terribly dark and moody and brooding. It’s likely to scare small children, it’s not quite so likely to make Europe say “Y’know, I think I’ll invite that man to my little Saturday soiree”. Borderline.