Switzerland have had a very poor record in this contest since Annie Cotton‘s third place back in 1993. They managed a top ten finish in 2005 by drafting in some leggy mercenaries from Estonia but haven’t amassed many points from any of their other entries since Annie in spite of trying literally everything.Drafting in a DJ with a huge European reputation in 2007 and a very respectable rock band last year. If you’re Switzerland, one of the former powerhouses of Eurovision you should be very worried.
This year they’ve decided to go for popularism and get the FA Cup to sing their entry. I should remember his name as he left me his CD in my pigeonhole this morning, but I can’t and his song is equally forgetttable.
He’s wearing a light gold suit to fit in with the golden shower theme of the song and has three classically robed females backing him and doing a bit of not overly exciting choreography whilst a man in a white suit plays a triangular guitar.The song isn’t the greatest I’ve ever heard. It’s a real snoozefest and our first surefire non-qualifier of the day.
He could have shaved the scruffy tramp. They clearly don’t want to win….
Nick: When you have low expectations, it’s much easier to be pleasantly surprised. I’m still unconvinced that Il Pleut De L’Or (Dear yr.no… ta for sorting out the whole rainy thing eventually) is anything more than a tedious ploddy also-ran, but it looks alright on stage and it’s performed OK and Michael does some big notes which could quite conceivably be the ones he’s aiming for. I think he’s probably getting as much out of the song as he can, but the song’s the unsolvable problem.
Unlikely to trouble the judges too much; best case scenario still seems, I fear, to be “not last in the semifinal”, but that low threshold could be within reach.
Phil: I like the Swiss song in general, OK the title, which can be freely translated as Golden Rain or Golden Shower depending on your persuasion, is a bit odd bit overall it is a good well written song that, on record, is performed very well.
Transfer that to the monitor at the end of my desk here in sunny Oslo and you get a very different story. The set, unsurprisingly, is all in gold. Michael is dressed in Gold, the backing singers are in a sort of gold-ish colour… seeing a theme here???
Then Mike comes on and starts to sing and makes a good fist of it, one or two notes here and there that are ot of key, unfortunately they are the pivotal ones towards the end. Another case, it seems, of a singer not being able to get to the end of their allotted three minutes. The backing singers dance about in the background and the mix is wrong as you can hear one of them in the descant key singing louder than the other 2. I hope in the viewing room they sort this out because people are just going to point and laugh if they are not careful.
Borderline but if they get it right, it could go through.