Eurovision 2010 live - part 2

Thank you to 'The Voyeurist', who commented upon my first post about Eurovision 2010 in which I didn't make it clear that what I posted were only some of my live musings and, specifically, I did not include the entry from Serbia.  That said here are most of the rest of those notes that I did take and it does include a brief note on the Serbian entry... 

I simply didn't have the time to write everything I might have done just on a single listening and certainly not the fascinating lyric highlighted.  What I will say is the Balkan influence on much western European traditional music is centuries, perhaps even far more than a millennium, older than Eurovision. 

The entry from Moldova caught my ear too. Another entry that I commented on is that from Albania and that is not merely a comment on the fact that it was a good shot from a nation so recently integrated into Eurovision.  If I had to choose one song to plug from the whole competition then this would be it - what a wonderful fusion of apparently incompatible influences.  Expect this kind of thing anywhere, and everywhere, across Europe soon.

We (in the UK) complain about the Eastern European influence (in Eurovision terms) in recent years but, on the latest evidence, I'm coming to like some of it.  The problem is ours: we can do great music but when it comes to Eurovision we are always something like a decade behind.

You can find any number of similarly minded, and very successful, artists and acts in the UK at the moment but why would they want to risk their reputation by participating in Eurovision?

It is a sad state of affairs, as regards the UK, but it is no reflection on the the Eurovision Song Contest itself and this might seem to be a very curious place to start to explain why...

The album is ostensibly Celtic folk and this my example of it, Polydor 'SUPER 2383 301' of 1974 and thus on vinyl. Several tracks on it are taken from North American renditions of folk songs and two others are interpretations of Romanian folk tunes. The thing is that there isn't a huge musical gulf between any of them...

It also includes 'P stands for Paddy I Suppose', a track that I rather like and one that has also been covered much more recently.

Eurovision 2010 live thoughts...

I've tried to write about Eurovision after the event before and it never seems to work out.
This time, apart from mentioning that I think that Norway put on a very impressive show with its use of lighting and the transparent stage, here are some of my thoughts, written live in pencil and on the back of the cover letter to a gas bill.

It'll be hard to read, harder still to understand, but that is the price you pay for what was very much live commentary.  There was good and there was bad and then, in the case of the UK contribution, the utterly forgettable.
As you can see I had not done much advance planning for this new concept beyond having 'an old Neil Young record and a bottle of red' to hand in case of emergency: a ploy suggested by Thea Gilmore on 'Harpo's Ghost' (2008).