Every single year Eurovision is one of my most listened to music genres and I take a lot of pride in my carefully curated Eurovision playlist – only a few lucky acts each year make it onto there.

Any Eurovision fan worth their salt will have one act that will stick in their head forever – for me, it is Norway in 2019.

The act was KEiiNO, a dance pop trio, and their song Spirit in the Sky started off well – fun, but nothing too out of the ordinary. But one member of the band wasn’t doing anything at first and I remember turning to my husband and saying: “Whatever that guy’s going to do, it’s going to be amazing.”

Loreen won the Eurovision Song Contest for Sweden in 2023. Image: Aron Chown/Press Association.

I was right – he is Sámi rapper Fred Buljo, fusing joik traditional Sámi singing with electronic dance music.

It’s not just KEiiNO that has captured my heart. In recent years I’ve also fallen in love with Måneskin, the Italian rockers who won the competition in 2021 and Apocalyptica, who play rock music on cellos. They were the halftime act when the song contest was hosted in Helsinki in 2007, and as a young teenage cellist I was immediately hooked.

It’s not just the music – there’s wide-reaching political impacts from the competition to think about as well.

In 2016 the competition became dominated by the Russian annexation of Crimea, with Ukraine ultimately winning with a song about the deportation of Crimean Tartars by Josef Stalin in 1944. Russia has been missing in action since the invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Remember when the competition was held in Tel Aviv in 2019? Madonna made a bold statement by having her backing singers adorned with both Israeli and Palestinian flags on their backs.

And ever since the watershed moment in 1998 when trans singer Dana International won, it has been a huge calendar event for the world’s LGBT+ community.

I’m now counting down the clock to May when I will be hosting yet another Eurovision party. And for those dying to know – my top song of last year was Cha Cha Cha by Finland, who I still maintain should have won.

Rachel Amery is political correspondent at The Scotsman

Passions: Help, I am obsessed with Eurovision

Comments