Tijana's Cunning Plan, Mk 2: The Croatian Connection

Macedonian Tijana Dapčević and her Yugo-kitsch victory at July's Budva Festival were transnational enough as things were, but a self-respecting Croatian online magazine like Index isn't the sort of place to let a tenuous Croatian connection slip away.

Which is how, only days after Tijana hung up her air hostess outfit Partisan uniform, Index was reporting the inspired rumour from the ropey Belgrade tabloid Kurir that the first lady of Croatian pop, otherwise known as Severina, was going to be featured alongside Ms Dapčević in a (still) as yet entirely hypothetical video for Sve je isto samo Njega nema. (Incidentally, don't ask what Seve's meant to be doing with that flag in the Index photo.)

It's so-not-true-but-should-be, and not just because Severina, whose day job is singing the Croatian style of semi-turbofolk, increasingly does for Croatia what the French would be horrified to think that Marianne did for them. Everyone in ex-Yugoslavia knows who Seve is, but mainly for the same reason that everyone's heard of Pamela Anderson, Paris Hilton, and Abi Titmuss. Internet traffic across the south-east European region apparently slowed to a standstill the day that Severina's tape was, errr, leaked out, and Draxblog - like millions of his neighbours - was keeping a watchful eye on things at the time.

After an island-hopping summer out of the limelight, Severina clocked back on with the confusingly-titled Bojate bane buski (not even she knows what the title means, so let's hope it doesn't translate as We Rushed This Out In August Before The Chorus Was Done), followed by her biggest hit from her '04 CD, Hrvatica - Croatian woman, with a striking video shot in an old Ljubljana factory. One might ask - as author Boris Dežulović did in no uncertain terms - exactly who thought it would be a good idea to dress Seve up as Lara Croft, surround her with uniformed dancers waving Croatian flags, and even give her an Evita-on-the-balcony moment a little later on. Well, Zagreb stylist Robert Sever (no relation) and Slovenian choreographer Mojca Horvat, that's who. Not to worry; none of this stopped it topping the charts in Serbia-Montenegro.

I still haven't seen it properly (look: you try searching for severina video and see what you get), but it's verging far enough into Tijana territory, or vice versa, that they might need umpires if they ever met each other.

Unfortunately for Index, Tijana's video itself seems to have remained entirely hypothetical, knocking the prospect of any Macedonian-Croatian military-chic exchange visits on its head. Instead, Seve's spending her autumn irritating culture vultures by starring in Gospoda Glembajevi at the Croatian National Theatre in Rijeka, three years after her stage debut there in a rock opera playing a local folk heroine renowned for going on board ship to 'persuade' a British admiral not to open fire on French-owned Rijeka during the Napoleonic wars.

Which makes a change from the talk shows that every other female singer in Croatia sometimes seems to have got...