To Liverpool with your luggage – Newspaper Kommersant No. 27 (7472) dated 02/14/2023

The European music scene is gearing up for the 67th Eurovision Song Contest, which will take place from 9 to 13 May in Liverpool. In some countries, the national selection of participants in the competition has already passed. This happened with the greatest fanfare in Italy, where the participants are traditionally selected at the Sanremo Song Festival. About what else the Sanremo festival was remembered for and how the rest of the continent is preparing for the pop song contest, tells Igor Gavrilov.

Representatives of 37 countries will go to Eurovision this year. Russia is not among them (see Kommersant dated February 25, 2022). However, there is still the possibility of Russian influence on the results of the competition – their votes will be summed up with the votes of viewers from other non-participating countries in the “Rest of the World” section. If there is no other solution, Russia will be able to vote through a special platform that will be created for this procedure (although Eurovision fans will need a valid card from one of the international payment systems for this).

The Italians will cheer, but according to the rules of the competition they will not be able to vote for the actor and singer from the city of Ronciglione Marco Mengoni. The freshly minted winner of the San Remo Festival in May will represent the country at the competition in Liverpool.

In the Italian song contest in Sanremo, Marco Mengoni first participated in 2010, and won his first victory in 2013 with the song “L’essenziale”, already being an extremely popular and titled artist. The song “Due Vite”, with which Mengoni repeated the achievement of 2013, like “L’essenziale”, is written in a melodic pop style. They are somewhat subtly similar. Not a melody, not a rhythm, but an instinctive understanding of what a popular song means in Italian. The choice in favor of Marco Mengoni was made through a complex voting system, which included members of a professional jury, a thousand specially registered music fans and ordinary TV viewers with smartphones. And this means that the public sees a representative of the tradition as the main Italian singer, and as a song representing the country at Eurovision, a distinct pop number with a predictable and comfortable melodic line.

The main international stars that visited Sanremo this year were Depeche Mode. The Italian scene was represented by the best people both in and out of the competition. Riccardo Foli played bass with the band Pooh, which he played with back in the 1960s. Al Bano took the stage with Massimo Ranieri and Gianni Morandi. Even Gino Paoli, who turns 90 next year, sang. There were Anna Oksa, and Eros Ramazzotti, and, of course, the main characters of the Italian scene – Maneskin, who sent Eurovision to Italy two years ago. Against this background, Marco Mengoni looked perfect.

Norway, Israel, Belgium, Greece, the Netherlands, Armenia, Cyprus, Georgia, Latvia, Malta, Albania, Azerbaijan, Czech Republic, Austria and Slovenia have already chosen their envoys. From Ireland, ex-Sex Pistols frontman John Lydon could take part in Eurovision, but during the national selection, his group PIL lost to Wild Youth, a fairly standard pop-rock line-up, which, however, has already gone down in history as “those guys who beat Johnny Rotten in the Eurovision preselection.”

Among other artists and songs already selected by countries, Israeli singer and TV presenter Noa Kirel stands out. In the arrangement of her song “Unicorn” in a moderate, but important in the light of today’s trends, there is a folk note, while the song itself is urban pop, which Internet users have already appreciated: in a month, the clip “Unicorn” gained 18 million views on YouTube . Alessandra from Norway will present a song at the junction of EDM and classical crossover “Queen of Kings”. This is a typical “Eurovision song” with an easy-to-remember chorus and powerful production – with such an arsenal, you can both win and stay in the shadow of less ordinary participants.

The Czech group Vesna, whose song “My Sister’s Crown” is sung in English, Czech, Bulgarian and Ukrainian, has the most chances to win at the moment. The song has several exceptionally sticky melodic lines at once, in the video the group members mix the aesthetics of The Young Pope and samurai films and in general do not give men any chance of successful competition.