Oh dear me… where do I start? Before I go any further, I need to state Sophie is EMPHATICALLY not the issue here. If anything, she’s the only saving grace this performance has at the moment. She connects to the camera, comes across well and gives us a confident and beautifully sung rendition of Solas. The problems are with everything else around her…
Sophie appears on stage in what I can only describe as a gold/cream/beige ballgown-come-duvet… OK, fair enough. You see something like that on a Eurovision stage and you know something else in underneath and will be revealed later on. We can forgive that. Those who have seen the music video will recognise the story arc with a lighthouse and storm – but these graphics look rather simple to the point of being amateurish. If you’re going to go for cartoon, do cartoon. If you’re going to go for realistic, go for realistic… don’t do a slightly cartoony reality that ultimately looks amateurish because it falls outside both. And that’s before we get to the final indignity… the costume change that leaves Sophie wearing what I can only describe as a set of fabric wings stitched together from several koi carp… yikes…
Sophie has an incredible voice and a quiet yet commanding presence on the stage that is very charming. This is a beautiful song that could have easily done very well – had the staging being a little more carefully considered. It’s not the worst staging I’ve ever seen at a contest, far from it… but it’s also a disappointing end result for something that could have been really special because the ideas are good in theory – it’s the execution that went horribly wrong. I feel bad for Sophie, she deserves so much more.