Eurovision 2025: The Road to Basel Begins!

Stephen Perkins: 00:00:01

Hello London, we are ready for your vote. Hello, I'm Stephen Perkins and this is Doozbois, the Eurovision podcast from the team behind Bingewatch.

th of January: 2025

As I'm sure you're aware, a couple of Early Bird countries have already made that decision, so I thought we'd start the year with a little round up of everything that's happened so far. So strap yourselves in because it's already been a bit of a bumpy ride.

November: 2024

Montenegro's national final was won by the palindromically pleasing Neon Eon with the song Clickbait, a slice of industrial leather clad pop rock that, from what I could see, seemed to be quite a surprise winner for the people watching Montessorg online, and one that people didn't really seem to have a lot of confidence in regarding its chances at Eurovision.

Montessorg uses a combined jury and televote scoring system and Clickbait didn't top either one, but it finished second in both and given the slight disparity between the two sets of results, that was enough to see it emerge on top. Overall, however, there was a plot twist in store.

ival cultura Zabiello in June: 2023

RTCG stated that they would be consulting with the EBU about whether Clickbait could still be their entry and Neon Eon said that they had been unaware of this rule and added rather humb.

They felt the size of the crowd at that performance wasn't large enough to influence the result of Montessorg, but that they would respect whatever decision was reached by RTCG and the EBU and then on the 4th of December they announced their withdrawal from the contest, stating that they wished to end the uncertainty as a result on the 8th of December.

So a week after all of the controversy kicked off, RTCG announced that their new representative for Eurovision would be the runner up of Montessorg, Nina Zizic with Dobrodoshti with is Montenegrin for welcome.

represented Montenegro in the: 2013

Clickbait didn't really feel like a song that would qualify, whereas I think Dobrodoshti is in with a shot if it gets a favourable draw, if the field isn't too overly stacked with dramatic female fronted ballads and if Nina pulls the vocals off on her night.

Now that does sound like a lot of ifs, and it is, but in my defence I feel like it is quite hard to assess anyone's chances in any real sense when we only have two confirmed entries so far.

But Dobrodoshti, to me at least, feels like the type of song that has qualified in the past, whereas Clickbait feels more like the sort of entry that gains a bit of attention for being slightly offbeat and gimmicky, but never quite cuts through enough to translate into actual votes from the viewers at home. Still, let's see if I'm right when May rolls around.

Thankfully, things seem to have gone a lot more smoothly for the only other country to have confirmed their entry so far, Albania.

The 63rd edition of Festivali Y Kaniigas, the annual music competition which has been used to select the Albanian entry for Eurovision for the past 20 years, was held between the 19th and 22nd December last year, when most of us were frantically running around trying to finalise our Christmas prep.

After two semi finals and a nostalgia night, 15 acts competed in the grand final for the chance to represent Albania at Eurovision, with the victory ultimately going to Shkodra Electra Electronica with Germe, which is Albanian for fire. I'm a big fan of this one already.

Actually, I'm probably going to sound slightly self contradictory after what I said about Clickbait, but this one feels offbeat in a really interesting and potentially dynamic way.

It's a big sweeping modern folk electronica number with powerful vocals and a talky bit in the middle, which I always love, and it feels like one of those performances where the germ of some really good staging is already there, so they just need to build on what they've already got. Albania do have a fairly patchy qualification record in recent years.

They've missed out on the final roughly 50% of the time, but I think this could be a good year for them if they play their cards right.

And speaking of Albania, last year's representative Besa, who failed to qualify for the final from the second semi with her song Titan, appears to be one of the many, many artists in the running to represent San Marino this year.

We will cover the mammoth Samarinese selection process in a bit more detail when the time comes in March, but there are a few other names of note on there Teslenko, who was originally longlisted to participate in Vidbia, the Ukrainian selection process this year, but withdrew from the competition before the wildcard vote was completed.

justice readers in the early: 2000

We do also have a few more artists confirmed for the contest who haven't released their songs yet. In addition to the previously announced Theo Evan for Cyprus, we now also have Adonis for Czechia and Claude for the Netherlands.

Adonis is a 29 year old singer songwriter originally from Slovakia who was the first openly queer winner of Superstar, the Czech and Slovak version of the Idol franchise. Claude, meanwhile, is 21 years old and originally from the Democratic Republic of Congo before his family left for the Netherlands when he was nine.

He has taken part in the Voice Kids and had a number one hit on the Dutch charts with La Dada Mon d'ennement. So both very exciting signings and I'm hoping for absolute bangers from both of them.

In other selection process news, Iceland have announced changes to the upcoming edition of Song Verketnin. Perhaps the most headline grabbing one is the removal of the superfinal element which pitches the top two songs against each other in one final vote.

That can be problematic because it does give voters a chance to vote against a song winning rather than voting for a song they actually believe in, and it's thought to be the reason why.

Frontrunner Bashar Murad with Wild west ended up losing to Hera Bjork's Scared of Heights last year, only for the latter to end up finishing last in her semi final at Eurovision. This year's song of Akepten will consist of two semi finals being held on Saturday the 8th and Saturday the 15th of February.

There will be no wildcard qualifications, but three songs will advance from each round, meaning that six songs will compete in the final on February 22nd for the chance to compete at Eurovision. And again, more news on that one a little bit nearer the time.

December: 2024

in Malta's national final in: 2022

y to ask whether for the UK's: 2025

The uk, I think, is still getting to grips with what constitutes a Eurovision style song in this day and age, and I'm not really sure that I trust us to make in the first place.

I think, and this is true of many countries, not just the uk, that if you waste too much time trying to send a song that you think will do well at Eurovision, it tends to have a horrible habit of backfiring, because what you haven't done is send a song that you as a country value on its own merits and truly believe in, and that has a tendency to translate on stage, with the outcome being that the rest of Europe doesn't really get invested in it either and so you don't get the votes.

So with that in mind, I think I would come down on the side of stepping outside the box because I think Eurovision works best when you send a song that you feel proud of and excited about, even if it ends up flopping, because ultimately there is always going to be a risk that whatever you send will end up finishing in last place on Saturday night or even getting zero points.

And I think there's much less shame at least from an artistic perspective in finishing last with a song that you put your full weight behind than in finishing last with a song that you've submitted primarily as a box checking exercise. So yeah, I would say swing for the fences every time. Thanks for the question jtl and I hope I answered it at least semi coherently.

That's all for this episode.

Thank you so much as always for listening and we are hopefully going to be here with new episodes pretty much weekly between now and May, barring any unforeseen dramatic events in my everyday life that might prevent that from happening.

Please remember to rate and review us on your podcast platform of choice and don't forget to subscribe to us and our sister podcast Bingewatch to make sure you don't miss any of our brilliant upcoming episodes. Until next time, good night Europe and good morning Australia.