As of next Monday for 20 weeks in a row, ESC Covers will embark on a major project for the 2020 Eurovision song contest in the Netherlands. We got the go-ahead to select 20 Eurovision related songs for a compilation CD. The CD does not have a name as yet, but it the current working title is COVERING EUROVISION WINNERS.
The 20 songs will all be EUROVISION winners but NOT the actual artist or group singing them. It will be covers of these winners by OTHER artists in OTHER languages.
Roy van der Merwe of ESC Covers picked the 20 Eurovision winners. The criteria was simply – Eurovision winners with 5 or more covers done. In the end he found 26 of the Eurovision winners of the past have been covered 5 or more times and these 26 were narrowed down to 20 by selecting those 20 with the biggest variety of covers.
So starting Monday, for 20 weeks, one Eurovision winner will be highlighted and the 5 working days (Monday to Friday) there will be a link each day to one cover by this winner. Anybody can give a score from 1 to 10 for this cover and the first ten scores received for each cover will be added and that will be the total for that cover. On Saturday, the cover of the Euro winner for the week with the highest score, that cover will be selected to appear on the compilation.
Then week 2, we start with the second winner and for 5 days a link to a cover will be given and the same process will follow – the first 10 people giving a score from 1 to 10 for each cover will be added and on Saturday the winning cover will be revealed and that will appear on the compilation.
The process will go on for 20 weeks until 20 covers of Eurovision winners have been picked and we have the index for the CD.
This will end towards the end of November before the real high season for the 2020 Eurovision starts.
Some of the 20 Eurovision winners have up to 20 different covers, so there will be an internal selection as to which 5 for each Eurovision winner will be showcased to vote on. It will take into account various singers from various countries and various languages so that not all 5 covers are by females and in English for example.
Although just the first 10 people who give a point will count, it will be interesting to see what fans feel over these covers.
As ESC Covers is a website dedicated to Eurovision covers, this is a wonderful project for us and we are so happy that this project came actually happen.
The 20 Eurovision winners will appear at random, so it is not in date order, although to be fair, the 70’s brought the most covers of the winning songs.