Morten Thomassen from Norway decided to write about some of his memories of Eurovision and the Norwegian Eurovision selection. ESC Covers again will publish it after google translating it from Norwegian to English.
My first international final was in Malmö so this year I was going back to the country where my international ESC experiences started and this time it was the capital Stockholm that I honored with a visit.
I probably made my TV debut this year when I was interviewed during the final and I was very short-haired at the time.
Most people in the MGP club were probably satisfied that it was the girl group Charmed who was to represent the Norwegian colors in Stockholm, because these were girls with a lot of energy.
Not least, they could sing, and it turned out that this was a quality not all those who went to the Swedish capital to sing had in equal measure.
First up on the final night was the Israeli group PingPong, this country is well known for sending good singers, but this time they obviously didn’t quite go for it, what criteria they used to win the song “Sameach” is not known, but would like to know that.
The two girls in the group can hardly be called vocalists and had it not been for two choristers who provided significant help in large parts of the chorus, this would have been quite tragic vocally, but despite this this is actually one of my favorite songs this year.
According to tradition, contributions from Israel, which are not quite clean in their eyes, create quite as much furore and two boys kissing on stage and the fact that Syrian flags were waved on stage probably created a rather bad atmosphere in that delegation.
Some others who were not quite on the song notes were the four girls from the group XXL who represented Macedonia, and the girls’ names were Ivona, Marija, Rosica and Verica and where they got the name of their group from is unknown, but they themselves were quite far from XXL.
When I arrived at the opening party at the start of the ESC week that year, I noticed four young girls standing and giggling a bit in a corner and I wondered if some Swedish youths had simply managed to sneak into the party, it was only when Swedish Roger Pontare came in and greeted them I understood who they were.
Unlike our Macedonian friends, Roger was quite XXL and he looked as if he could eat all four of them for breakfast, luckily they survived the opening party and got to sing as country 19 in the final.
Well, singing and singing, having to dance and sing at the same time is not always easy and these girls did not master this to a great extent, which you could hear from the first note.
The song “100% te ljubam” is in itself perfectly fine, but will probably forever be remembered for completely wrong things, but as always, they should have tried and if I had sung it in person it would probably have sounded even worse.
My memories from Eurovision 2000 centered around the crisis I had at work with my boss moving my leave from May to March even although he signed my leave form on 26 January. I had a court battle but won and finally could go to Stockholm. But getting accommodation at such a late stage was difficult and I ended up staying in that boat youth hostel. It was the worst accommodation I had ever had because I had to share the cabin with another person and as most people staying there usually stay just a night, I had someone new in the room every night for the entire week.
Featured image – Eurovision.tv