ESC Covers start the Eurovision 2024 countdown from position 37 to the top place. We are using the review of Morten Thomassen from Norway. ESC Covers google translated it from Norwegian to English.
This is a blog entry and represents only writer Morten Thomassen’s own views.
Although our Croatian friends have yet to win the ESC as an independent country they already have a victory on their conscience in a way, the group Riva that won for Yugoslavia back in 1989 was Croatian and the following year’s international final took place in what is now is this country’s capital, namely Zagreb.
Although they were close a few times in the 90s, this country had the benefit of getting on the podium and thus it had to be a relatively recent artist with the stage name Baby Lasagna, luckily you can almost say he was not baptized with that name, actually the guy’s name is Marko Purisic and he have actually been active as guitarists in a rock band called Manntra since 2011, so it seems that as an artist on his own he is relatively new.
When the odds for the final closed, the song “Rim Tim Tagi Dim” had a full 52% chance of winning and in recent years only the winners from Ukraine a couple of years ago have had better luck than us, last year’s winner Loreen had a 50% chance of winning in comparison and she won the easier she is and then one can wonder why the trophy didn’t come home to Croatia.
The show we are served is simply terrific and with decent and safe vocals, there is a sing-along from an audience who joins in on the dance break towards the end of the song and the hall is literally boiling and in a normal year this should clearly be considered a victory and when the jury was also so generous and in the end gave the song almost 40% of all the points it got in the final, there must actually be other reasons why the victory was missed.
We now know that many people voted for Israel to support them and there I think some of the 45 points that were missing from a victory were lost, moreover I think that those who did not want to vote for Israel could not gather around a song so that these the points were more spread out and in the end I think that the juries also rallied so much to support Switzerland there that together it meant that Baby Lasagna did not take the victory the oddsmakers thought he would take.
A bit of a shame because with a win I think this could have become a much bigger hit around Europe than it was, rock tones with lots of rhythm is something many people can find to like very much.
We’ll see if next year’s Croatian representative produces something with as much winning potential as this year, I guess I have my doubts about that.
Featured image – Corinne Cumming EBU