Eurovision: Picture Worth A Thousand Words

The Serbian broadcaster RTS has come up with its logo for Eurovision, and the word from Belgrade 2.0 is that it's really quite a shocker.

According to RTS, the designers have chosen 'to create a group of different signs which are united by similar symbolism: Music, Serbia, Europe, Love, Youth, Happiness...', and which probably look an awful lot like a purple plum, a yellow trumpet, a green quaver and a pair of pink lips to you and me.

The full set of sixteen symbols (Ireland's RTÉ will be pleased to see one of them resembling a shamrock) can be combined in various ways so that: 'Instead of one sign which is static and always the same, a whole string of dynamic signs have been invented.'

Didn't we go through this with the London Olympic logo?

Eurovision: Two For The Price Of One

Crawling back after an extended summer break, the Gazette can't help opening its autumn season with what must be supposed to be the solution to the east/west impasse at the Eurovision Song Contest: starting '08, the event gets two semi-finals instead of one, with all countries having to go through qualifying except the hosts and the lucky four (Britain, France, Germany and Spain) whose national broadcasters are pretty good at paying higher dues to the European Broadcasting Union than anyone else but not so hot at picking an entry that comes anywhere near the top ten.

How far this will keep the various geo-cultural interest groups happy depends on one of the details still being held back - who precisely ends up in which semi. On previous form, one can expect any of the following:

• A random draw to be made by minor celebrities from the host country and presented as a pointlessly prime-time event, probably as the half-time entertainment at a beauty pageant;


• Some impenetrable UEFA-style coefficient, based on the longitude of the national broadcaster's headquarters, the number of a) Roman divided by b) Byzantine artefacts preserved in the archaeological museum, and per-capita album sales for i) Tarkan ii) Shakira and iii) Gogol Bordello;


• A permanently enshrined line down the map which will be guaranteed to upset at least three states which think they should be more western than that, and two which fancied their chances with the easties, but not the Russians or Ukrainians, who seem to know what they're doing wherever they are.

And who gets to watch which semi? That's the hard part, according to Eurovision executive supervisor Svante Stockselius:

'the proposal; is based on the idea that the two Semi-Finals of the 2008 Eurovision Song Contest will be aired simultaneously on Thursday, 22nd of May from Belgrade, Serbia. [...] Each Semi-Final is only being aired in the countries that are taking part, and only viewers from countries that take part in each respective Semi-Final can vote.'

But nevertheless:

'All participating broadcasters can broadcast the Semi-Final(s) they are not taking part in later as well, and the Semi-Finals will be webcasted live through Eurovision.tv. To serve the fans, both Semi-Finals will also be made available on-demand the next day.'

Oh. It must have taken a lot of work for somebody to make the system that complicated. But that's all right, because: 'To produce the two Semi-Finals live on different nights will result in high extra costs for both the Host Broadcaster and the participating Members.' As opposed to the Host Broadcaster having to kit out two venues for the semis instead of one, then.

It's still not certain where that leaves a Big Four broadcaster like the BBC, which wouldn't have to bother with the semis at all if it didn't want to: going by BBC Sport's usual form at tournaments when none of the home nations are involved, we're either in for full-on coverage of Ireland, or a frantic dash between the two feeds whenether something more interesting happens on the other channel, fireworks go up, or that girl whips her top off.

Oddly, none of this seems to have made the Croatian tabloids yet, although they can usually be guaranteed to leap into this sort of thing with a quick commentary on whether or not it benefits the national interest. But it's probably only a matter of time: the Belgrade-hosted show should make for a packed week of showbusiness ethnopolitics in any case, especially for those participants with more interest than your average state in pulling off a good result on the Serbians' home turf while still remaining true to the cherished traditions of national musical culture. (Here's looking at you, HTV...)

Eurovision 2007: Croatia And The Eastern League

As for the ongoing resonance of this year's Eurovision result in 'the region': East Ethnia reports that at least two political parties in Serbia are trying to claim some of Šerifović's reflected glory: the Roma Union of Serbia (to which her mother and uncle are affiliated, and for whom she campaigned herself), and the Serbian Radical Party (who claim her grandfather's membership).

Heading slightly north-west, the Croatian view of the bloc-voting controversy is oddly distanced from time to time: talking, like one Jutarnji list columnist, about the eastern alliance' and 'the hurricane from the east' begins to suggest that Croatia doesn't quite belong to it. And then there's Milan Jajčinović in Večernji list:

'Politics also used this year's Eurovision for some messages of its own. Just as in last year's voting by the ex-Yugoslav states - when they mutually handed out points to each other - the European nomenklatura emphasised the signs of normalisation in the states [which had] been warring until yesterday, so does the EU see not only the victory of a good singer in the Serbian song's triumph this year but the victory of a new politics!'

If the bloc situation is one theme of Croatian post-Eurovision coverage, the other is the Beautiful Homeland's failure to qualify for the Eurovision final. T-Portal writes that 'despite the winner's sexual orientation, this year's Eurovision result marks a return to normal after last year's freak show', before turning to the collapse of Croatia's own Eurovision effort:

'Sending an ageing rocker and a buxom blonde who can't sing into the company of transvestives, lesbians, monsters and DJ Bobo, with a song that sounds like a reject from the YURM [rock festival] in 1974, didn't prove to be a winning combination. Last year we could at least hope a good result would come as a reward for Severina's acting abilities.

What was going through the head of [head of entertainment] Aleksandar Kostadinov and the HRT team responsible for Eurovision when they put their money on Dado and Dragonfly isn't clear to us. As it is, we came 30th out of 42 countries, far behind the Serbs, Bosnians, Slovenes and Macedonians. Is there anything worse?'

T-Portal's not the only one to ask. Even Kostadinov's deputy Mario Sedmak, a former head of entertainment itself, argued in Jutarnji list's post-semi-final post-mortem that organisers of the national selection in the future should make it clear to songwriters 'what sort of songs do well in Eurovision, and which ones don't. This year's song didn't make an impression and we didn't have any staging.' (Should Kostadinov have to carry the can for non-qualification, Sedmak could well get to put this into practice next year.)

Pop composer Tonči Huljić, who's frequently steered Croatia into the Eurovision top ten, was guarded on that occasion, recommending only that the song selection should be left to 'professionals' rather than the public and/or a HTV jury; last night's Otvoreno talk show (on HTV), however, saw him more critical of Kostadinov. One of the song's performers, Dado Topić, has criticised HTV's organisation of the song (one 27-minute recording session and no promotional video), and Rock and Democracy suggests that he only reluctantly became involved with the performance in the first place.

And what to do about those pesky blocs? Marija Nemčić, head of HTV and Croatia's most important representative at the European Broadcasting Union, has promised that 'we're already beginning to work on a recommendation for a new format which would avoid the problem of neighbouring states' - and which, if it came from Croatia, might at least be sensitive to the problem of defining permanent Easties and Westies. Although, if the EBU ended up enshrining western and eastern leagues which happened to place Croatia on the western side of things, would that necessarily be a disaster from the Croatian state broadcaster's point of view?

Lastly: Radio B92 celebrates its 18th birthday today, but there's less happy cultural news from Zagreb, where the alternative club Močvara may be forced to close after a town hall decision limiting its bar opening hours to midnight.

Eurovision 2007: Join The Bloc Party

You can't keep a good Eurovision story down at this time of year, and far less one based on elementary number-crunching and symbolic-geographical stereotypes. BBC News Online rounds up some of the recent calls for Something To Be Done about the contest's east-west division, including Liberal Democrat MP Richard Younger-Ross's parliamentary early day motion to ask the BBC to insist on voting reform, Maltese protest voting and German tabloid sabre-rattling.

Notwithstanding snide columns or the prospect of a Eurovision comedy by the Borat scriptwriter (an almost inevitable combination after the advent of Verka Serdyuchka?), some of the Eurovision blogosphere is having a bash at countering what's quickly become the prevailing myth about the 2007 contest. Even counting only the votes of the less disputably western European countries, or even the remaining participants from 1990, the top of the scoreboard still remains eastern-dominated, although a western-only vote in the semi-final (see comments here) would have sent Portugal and Iceland through qualification at the expense of Moldova and Macedonia.

A possible conclusion: maybe it's currently more profitable to appeal to 'eastern' tastes, since by doing so there's a good chance of appealing to the 'west' at the same time. That might be to do with the various eastern European pop-folk industries' accommodation of contemporary pop/hip-hop production (quite a contrast to the music-for-entertainment-television schlager which tends to represent most of the western entrants), or to do with the glamourised easternness (Turkish, Bollywood, or abstract) occasionally articulated in North American music video.

If the future is pop-folk, at least there's an opportunity for the United Kingdom: British bhangra, a flourishing subculture rarely supported by the mainstream media in the UK (with the exception of the BBC's Asian Network and 1Xtra on digital radio). Angling for the 'eastern' vote, hitting BBC diversity targets and probably scoring higher than the French: it must be worth a go.

If nothing else, it's more ambitious than an air hostess routine...

A European Vote For European Serbia?

Following the line of Olli Rehn, the EU's enlargement commissioner who hailed Serbia's Eurovision victory as 'a European vote for European Serbia', the symbolic connection between the removal of Serbian Radical Tomislav Nikolić as parliamentary speaker and Serbia's 'acceptance' by the rest of Europe has not been lost on post-Eurovision reporters: The Guardian, for instance, headlines its whole-page article 'From pariah state to kitsch victory: how a Balkan ballad showed Europe a new Serbia'.

Jutarnji list likewise emphasises 'how symbolic that victory was in the week where Serbia on account of Nikolić had again become a country dreaded by Europe', and quotes the Vojvodinan parliamentary deputy Nenad Čanak's statement that (Nikolić having called for closer ties between Serbia and Russia) 'Croatia gave us twelve points, so did Montenegro and Macedonia, and Russia [gave us] five. So Tomislav Nikolić has to be dismissed.'

The Guardian's Ian Traynor also interprets the victory as a blow against the 'ear-splitting melange of Balkan rhythms, electronic pounding, and stridently nationalist lyrics' of turbofolk, although Rock and Democracy is less optimistic regarding the longer-term consequences for popular music in Serbia when Eurovision is hosted there next year:

'A mainly eastern bloc led by Ukraine will push into Serbia and then strengthen a growing domestic fruit, and of course you all know that that fruit is called Turbo-folk.'

There's not so much about cultural politics in Serbian tabloid Kurir, which treats Marija Šerifović's win as a victory for the whole nation, celebrated as publicly as the return of sporting gold medallists. (Though Reluctant Dragon, on Belgrade's Trg Republike after Eurovision, couldn't help thinking that some crowd members who were 'chanting nationalistic slogans were nonetheless 'the same people who would probably beat her up in the street if they suspected she was a Gypsy or if it turned out she actually was gay.')

Vote, Vote, Vote, Vote, Vote For The Winners

Congratulations to Marija Šerifović for winning Eurovision 2007, as predicted and celebrated by the Serbian blogosphere. Šerifović said after the show that she 'hopes that next year in Belgrade it will be a music contest again' although - given the rock-chick and chain-mail aesthetic that dominated Eurovision this year after Lordi's victory in 2006 - don't be surprised if it takes on its own sideshow of a contest in fine tailoring and pseudo-lesbian dance.

Outside 'the region' itself, the prevailing frame for remembering this year's Eurovision is likely to be the east/west problem. The geographical spread of points is made particularly graphic at Diamond Geezer, but it's worth remembering it takes 42 countries to make a board-sweeping on such a scale. True, the Saturday top 10 of Serbia, Ukraine, Russia, Turkey, Bulgaria, Belarus, Greece, Armenia, Hungary and Moldova is another all-eastern, all-the-time extravaganza (assuming one is happy to amalgamate such an expanse of overlapping cultural markets and musical influences into one 'east').

If East had really outdone West by sheer weight of bloc-led numbers alone, there might be aerious cause for concern, but it's more than a case of one bloc being structurally empowered to always outvote the other. Of the seven western European finalists, none finished higher than the Finnish hosts at 17th, and few even received significant support from their neighbours: no Belgian votes for France, no Andorran votes for Spain, and outside the transnational schlager union of Scandinavia the majority of western countries voted for a predominantly eastern slate.

What can't be accounted for under any nationally-based voting system is the effect of increased migration from eastern to western Europe: organised diasporic voting campaigns are one possibility, but so is the prospect that Poles, Serbs, Armenians and so forth in (say) the United Kingdom might be more likely to watch the show than the host population. (Or even than their compatriots back home?) Again, though, east/west isn't the only axis where this factor operates (those regular Spanish points to Germany mostly come from somewhere).

Nonetheless, it's perceptions that make policy, and the broadcasters who feel as if they have the most to lose are those from the former western European powerhouses of 1970s and 1980s Eurovision who don't have the Spanish/French/German/British advantage (or disadvantage?) of automatic qualification to rely on. Countries such as the Netherlands, Norway, or Sweden, the home country of Eurovision's current scrutineer Svante Stockselius, whose task before Belgrade 2008 is to balance the demands and sensibilities of the 'Big Four', the not-so-big half a dozen, the enthusiastic newcomers and a band of countries who would be horrified to find themselves on the eastern side of any permanent geographical division.

Given which, one can only wish him the best of Swedish luck...

Pre-Eurovision Blog Roundup

Now that Serbia's Marija Šerifović has negotiated the Eurovision semi-final and seems among the favourites to win full stop, the local blogs have a direct interest in tonight's final: Reluctant Dragon is encouraged by the semi-final performance, and Belgrade Blog fancies its chances of being on the spot of a Serbian-hosted Eurovision next year.

Elsewhere, Dirrty Pop is noticing the east/west issue, Czech Out is in Helsinki, and World of Chig isn't.

The Morning After The Semi-Final Before

Among the eight 'eastern European' participants not to benefit from the apparent eastwards slant of the Eurovision semi-final was Croatia: in the same week as the death of the composer responsible for Croatia's first Eurovision entry as an independent state in 1993, Croatia missed out on an appearance in the final for the first time since then.

While Serbia's Marija Šerifović enters the final as joint favourite with a ballad not so unlike Croatia's own entries from the mid-1990s, Dragonfly and Dado Topić didn't stand out from other straightforward rock entries (Iceland and the Czech Republic), none of which made it through.

Several readers' comments on the relevant Jutarnji list article seem to have it in for HTV head of entertainment Aleksandar Kostadinov, who strongly associated himself with the uncharacteristic Dora winner from the outset. Eurovision's importance to HTV - dating from the days when taking part offered a symbolic confirmation of Croatian statehood - is such that not qualifying for the final is the entertainment equivalent of the Croatian (or the English) football team not making it into an international tournament: should anyone be held responsible, the chances are it would be Kostadinov himself.

HTV's head of contact (interactive) programming Mario Sedmak might be among the favourites to replace his current line manager Kostadinov, now that the Strictly Come Dancing and Just The Two Of Us imports have given him two successful music shows to his department's credit. Web portal Index's solution is simpler: bring back Tonči Huljić, the populist pop producer responsible for three (or maybe four) of Croatia's six top ten finishes (and whose pan-pipe-inflected song for Jelena Rozga was widely supposed to be the Dora favourite this time).

Yet despite Eurovision's current affinity for folk-pop, when it comes to Croatia it seems you're still damned if you do and even if you don't: glancing over the ten qualifiers, there are at least two which Croatia could have matched while keeping its cultural values reasonably intact. If Bulgaria's ethno-techno percussion is qualification material, so too might be Mojmir Novaković's work with Legen and Kries, and if Georgia can incorporate sword dancing into a Eurovision performance, could anything be done with Korčula's renowned Moreška? Ultimately, however, it depends on national folk-music establishments: Bulgarian percussionist Stoyan Yankoulov might be happy to co-operate, but Novaković, for instance, has been much more sceptical about folk music compromising with showbusiness.

Croatia is nonetheless tangentially represented in Saturday's final: Alenka Gotar's Slovenian entry Cvet z juga (Flower from the south) has been written by Croatian songwriter Andrej Babić...

Showbusiness Ethnopolitics: Eurovision Voting Redux

From Riga on the Baltic to Piran on the Adriatic,* there's one thing the ten qualifiers from last night's Eurovision Song Contest semi-final have in common: Belarus, Macedonia, Slovenia, Hungary, Georgia, Latvia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Turkey and Moldova can all be found to the eastern side of them. At least in the non-qualifying Dutch camp, there are hints of a feeling that the current structure of the contest is over-representing central/south-east European countries and new entrants from the former Soviet Union.

Booing from the arena audience as the final qualifier was announced hasn't helped matters, although the word on the Helsinki street is that the reaction had less to do with an east-west axis, more to do with the Eurovision press and fan corps having massively taken to Andorra's skate-pop boy band Anonymous during rehearsal week.

Complaints of political/neighbourly voting aren't quite the root of the problem: the ex-socialist and eastern-Mediterranean participant countries tend to be smaller, often recently fragmented, and (decisively) more committed to a high-priority eye-catching presentation. For the moment, at least, ethno-pop and folk-dance choreography (culminating this year in a Georgian sword dance) come across as more original than drag acts and tired soul music, although that might not be the case after several more years of the Eurovision Banging Drums And Shouting 'Hey' While Wearing Leather/Fur/Chain Mail Contest. Moreover, take a large multi-national state with a common music market, split it into six or more nation-states with a shared musical past, and any entry which resonates with the populations' musical tastes ends up six times more profitable on the scoreboard than it might have been.

Tempers may be assuaged by 2009, when the Eurovision Broadcasting Union plans to hold two semi-finals to replace the current system that relegates most finalists and all non-qualifiers into next year's semi-final. In the meantime, it would ease political strains a little if some of the four annual qualifiers - France, Germany, Spain and the UK (the four biggest financial contributors to Eurovision) - could contrive to place in the top ten and free up an extra finalist's position or two.

* Poland didn't make it, and Italy have stayed away from Eurovision since 1997, hence the mangled quotation...

UPDATE:: More from the Helsinki street (with bonus commentary from the Icelandic representative).

Showbusiness Ethnopolitics (Or Not): Eurovision 2007

From an ex-Yugoslav perspective, the Eurovision Song Contest has come around quietly this year - compared to 2006's ethnomusicological controversies in Croatia and the collapse of the last joint Serbia-Montenegro entry. For a proper Severina-style row over visions of national identity and the right image to present to Europe, one has to turn to Ukraine and drag queen Verka Serdyuchka, whose character of a kitsch village housewife resulted in protests - although further Verkanalysis is the province of the experts.

Potential scandal two involves the Israeli entry, Teapacks' Push the button (another song channelling the overworked spirit of Gogol Bordello), depending on whether it's taken as referring to Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmedinajad or to a generic nuclear madman of one's choice (after all, there are a fair few around): however, the lyrics have been approved by the European Broadcasting Union, despite its rules against 'political propaganda' which caught out Ukraine in 2005 when they entered the anthem of the Orange Revolution.

Climate change being the nuclear disarmament of the noughties, it's no wonder the theme seems to have made its way to Eurovision. Apparently in the green corner: Andorran teen skate-pop band Anonymous (result of a school trip to An Inconvenient Truth?), and possibly Ireland's Dervish (They can't stop the spring), although the Gazette might be thinking of Rachel Carson there. Inadvertently in the other one: the Easyjet-worshipping, innuendo-loving Brits. (Britons who don't agree that Scooch are a perfect snapshot of the national character may have an alternative, for once: Wikipedia currently states that Greek representative Sarbel was brought up in London.)


While Romania has high expectations after several years of showstoppers, Croatia's low-key rock entry by Dragonfly and Dado Topić hasn't attracted the euphoria that surrounded Severina in 2006, but not very much would: indeed, the suspense this time round isn't whether Croatia might win the thing but whether the country will maintain its perfect record of qualifying for every final since its debut as an independent state in 1993. More HTV heads may roll if Vjerujem u ljubav breaks the chain, but otherwise the most newsworthy thing likely to happen in Helsinki from a Croatian point of view would be for the public televote to give maximum points to Serbia again (the Croatian dvanaestica to Željko Joksimović in 2004 made headline news).

This may be immortalising a hideously bad prediction, but the Gazette won't be surprised if the Croatian public develop a sudden affection for Montenegro instead, or rather, for Stevan Faddy's Ajde, kroči. Whatever the European public at large may think of the formula of folk-song-style lyrics plus electric guitar, it's tended to do well in Croatia: ask Siniša Vuco, or Marko Perković Thompson, or for that matter Bijelo Dugme, who started it all in the first place.

Especially after the Severina case, though, it's hard to picture Croatia selecting it for Eurovision...

Glembays And Vampires Revived (But Not Kasandra)

While Severina herself is starring in Rijeka's much-publicised production of Gospodini Glembajevi (where her co-star, Galliano Pahor, was half of a duet competing in Dora this year), Croatian musicians - at least the ones Jutarnji list spoke to this week - have been assessing Dado Topić's chances for Eurovision in terms which aren't particularly favourable to Moja štikla.

Mišo Kovac is expecting a top ten or even top five finish for Topić on the grounds that 'all in all, we've got good-quality assets up our sleeve, unlike last year when we sent turbo-folk into the world', and Vladimir Kociš Zec, late of Novi fosili, is inclined to agree: 'Last year Croatia sent a folk song [narodnjak] into the world wrapped up as fake pop-etno, and this year it's playing fair.'

Returning to Gospodini Glembajevi, it's no ordinary production of the Miroslav Krleža classic, which begins to answer the question of what Severina's doing there. The play's turned into a semi-musical, Severina and Pahor swap roles for some of the action, and Baroness Castelli's death is staged in a way apparently recalling actress Ena Begović's fatal car accident. However, Severina's theatrical engagement has been controversial enough to be the subject of Mirjana Hrga's talk show Epicentar at the weekend. After coming in for severe criticism from musicologist Jagoda Martinčević, Severina acquitted herself rather more honourably than, say, Bora Dordevic (a previous recipient of the Epicentar treatment) - telephoning the studio to challenge Martinčević.

Leave it to the Swiss, meanwhile, to take the task of succeeding last year's horror-costumed Eurovision winners Lordi as literally as they could: summer hit merchant DJ Bobo will be presenting Vampires are alive, with the usual Colonia-type dance beat and also, one morosely supposes, the predictable staging. At least one of the Gazette's family is likely to pedantically point out that vampires are disqualified from being alive by virtue of having already been rendered undead, or to ask whether [insert name of teenage female contestant from Estonia, Moldova etc.] is supposed to be Buffy.

Any obvious connection between Severina and Vampires (alive or undead)? No; but that might be different if early-1990s dance star Kasandra hadn't abruptly vanished from the Croatian scene with several of her contemporaries. While Severina was still being marketed as the brunette Tajči, her then rival Kasandra was playing the sex symbol card, dressing up as things (including the vampire-themed video of I've Got A Feeling, post-Thriller but pre-Backstreet Boys), and celebrating the 1994 launch of the Croatian currency, the kuna, by posing for the centre spread of Globus draped in nothing but pine martens (kune in Croatian).

Wonder who'd do that sort of thing today?

Montenegro Where You Least Expect It

Place one: in flag form, hanging from every other official flagpole in Zagreb (the other 50% are waving Croatian ones), but it turns out it's to do with an upcoming state visit.

Place two: This week's issue of Croatian women's magazine Tena, which would have coincided with the Folk Revija concert if it had actually gone ahead tomorrow, includes a not unsympathetic six-page report on 'Who are the turbo folk queens?': Stoja, Indira Radić, Dragana Mirković, Donna Ares, Goga Sekulić, Olja Karleuša and Maja Marijana. (Wonder if somebody commissioned an article a little bit too early?)

Tena seems to have heard somewhere that Sekulić, a Swiss passport holder, apparently submitted a song to the Swiss Eurovision pre-selection but had it turned down. As a Montenegrin, she might have been better off looking closer to home: TVCG received a total of 16 submissions for the 10 slots in the Montenegrin final, and three of them had to be disqualified anyway because the authors weren't actually Montenegrin.

But not place three: Looking across the Drina, Dado Topić provided the interval entertainment at the Serbian Eurovision pre-selection in the company of Marija Šestić, Alenka Gotar, and Karolina Gocheva - in their capacity as the already-selected Croatian, Bosnian, Slovenian and Macedonian participants. Absent, however, was the Montenegrin representative Stevan Faddy, suggesting that even now the Montenegrins aren't themselves on hand to cause a fuss during Belgrade's final, Belgrade is perfectly capable of making a fuss out of them. Wouldn't it serve all concerned right if Montenegro and Serbia exchanged 12 points in May?

As for the Serbian contestants themselves, Belgrade Blog has been keeping an eye on those: the handful of audience-drawing pop-folk singers, headed by Mira Škorić, dropped out at the semi-final stage (seemingly one thing one can always rely on at Beovizija: even, or perhaps especially, Jelena Karleuša came bottom of the semi in 2004) and the final - ongoing as the Gazette writes - is being contested between various cod-Latino numbers, ambitious ethno (Slobodan Trkulja and Balkanopolis), and the fans' favourite Marija Šerifović with yet another Lane moje rehash. Which is by no means a disadvantage, thinking of the success of Hari Mata Hari's Lejla in 2006.

Although, chances are Šerifović wouldn't make it on to Croatian radio half as often...

UPDATE: Stevan Faddy has joined the interval mini-reunion. Not that the Sava Centar audience seem particularly happy with it, but if they've been patient enough to sit through Mambo jumbo serbiano...

Dora 2007: The Votes Are In

So it's Dragonfly and Dado Topić to represent Croatia at Eurovision in Helsinki: an uncontroversial enough choice, although Topić's intention to sing entirely in English might have been unthinkable a few years ago.

One really can't find much fault with T-Portal's assessment of the result: 'If Eurovision were a football tournament, we'd all agree that the manager had chosen a defensive formation with few ambitions to attack.' That sounds awfully like several years of England teams at the turn of the decade, and we know what happened to them, although with Eurovision's current ethno-schlager reputation, you could see the Topić-Dragonfly combination as a bravely experimental selection (a la Terry Venables' famous 'Christmas tree') which will either carry the team to the final or knock them out in the group stage. (At least there aren't any penalty shoot-outs in Eurovision for them to lose.)

The biggest disagreement between this year's Dora jury and the audience was (as ever?) in the field of what (not) to do with folk music. Podravina ethno-musician Miroslav Evačić (featuring vocals from Istria's Livio Morosin) took high marks from the jury but hardly anything from the telephone vote; the opposite happened to Klapa Maslina, performers of the pop-Dalmatian mega-hit Da ti mogu pismom zvati, even though they can't have got many votes from the public in Slavonia.

Various competitors would have been forgiven for feeling slightly aggrieved on Saturday night: Ivana Radovniković, who was placed into the same semi-final as Feminnem despite their both appearing with a big-band song and Charlestonesque choreography; Jelena Rozga, whose romantic ballad might have benefited from minimalist Lane moje-type staging rather than the fairytale cast it ended up with; and Danijela Pintarić, whose well-placed performance of Moj svijet recalled Croatia's string of top-ten Eurovision results from the mid-90s - but who entered the competition as a reserve entry too late for the song to be included on the official Dora CD.

Indeed, there's already an internet petition to send Pintarić to Eurovision instead - although somehow, unlike last year, it's probably not going to be talk-show material.

Dora 2007: Anything But Štikla, Including Peter Pan

The spirit of Natalija Verboten, or more precisely of her meticulously-rehearsed on-stage chaos, lived on in this year's Slovenian Eurovision selection and is likely to be revived yet again at the Croatian version (Dora), thanks to favourite (or 'favourite'?) Jelena Rozga promising Jutarnji list that she'll be escorted on stage by Peter Pan, Snow White and/or Little Red Riding Hood. (It's only thanks to the small matter of copyright that viewers were spared Harry Potter and Gandalf too.)

While Verboten's effort SOS owed a lot to the Swedish schlager school (perhaps an awful lot, for viewers who had already encountered Linda Bengtzing's Alla flickor), Rozga's is musically located closer to home. Ilko čulić's Dora preview article in Globus this week (headlined 'The crusade against nightclub-singers [cajki]'), confirming the impression of the 2007 line-up as an anything-but-Moja Štikla affair, saw Rozga's song Nemam (I haven't got) as 'some sort of Balkan folk-pop mix in which Thompson’s Dinaric pastorals rub up against the old hits of Neda Ukraden'.

There's surely more than a hint of the Lane moje-Lejla axis too - a technique which has resulted in second place for Serbia-Montenegro and third place for Bosnia-Herzegovina, both of whose delegations were sensible enough to opt for a minimalist performance with no interference whatsoever from the collected cast of classic Disney movies. (Eurovision rules restrict groups to six members - a rule which has already caused difficulties for some members of the twelve-piece Klapa Maslina in Dora - so audiences are at least unlikely to be treated to an entire complement of Lost Boys or Seven Dwarves.)

East Ethnia and, naturally enough, Anti Turbo Folk are both on top of the Folk revija story - with the latter pointing out that Croatian impressions of the genre, outside the folk subculture itself, are likely to be formed for the immediate future by whatever happens, or doesn't happen, at the Zagreb Velesajam in a couple of weeks' time. Just as the January 2006 nightclub shootings cemented the relationship between turbofolk and violence in the public imagination (in contrast, there was little sign of any impending moral panic when shots were fired at the Zagreb alternative club Gjuro on New Year's Eve), or Jutarnji list's poll of teenagers last March made it proverbial that '43% of teenagers listen to narodnjaci', expect another round of agenda-setting to come out of Zagreb's first non-nightclub folk concert in the history of independent Croatia.

For the moment, the fact that articles on Folk revija are appearing in the metro section rather than the showbusiness pages already seems to suggest that the ideal reader isn't necessarily supposed to be treating it as a source of enjoyment...

Votes From The North, Flower From The South

When Croatian televoters gave a maximum 12 points at Eurovision to Serbia-Montenegro's representative Željko Joksimović in 2004, Jutarnji list headlined one of its articles with the apparent paradox that 'Hrvati vole narodnjake' ('Croats love folk songs').

With the victory of a song by a Croatian composer in the Slovenian Eurovision pre-selection this weekend, it might be worth keeping an eye out for headlines along the lines of 'Slovenci vole Hrvate' ('Slovenes love Croats') - a situation which, from the point of view of Slovenian foreign minister Dimitrij Rupel, would be every bit as paradoxical.

Rupel, embittered by a series of pedantic border disputes with Croatia which resulted in an exchange of diplomatic notes a few days ago, went on record earlier in the week as stating that 'Croatia needs us more than we need them' since Slovenia will have a say in Croatia's entry to the EU, and the vice-president of the Slovenian Parliament, Marko Pavliha, called on Slovenians to holiday at home on Triglav rather than on the Croatian coast.

Summer will prove which option turned out to be more attractive for Slovenians, but it turns out almost immediately that at least 44,000 of them (judging by the figures in the final round of voting) either think a Croatian songwriter can do a better job at Eurovision than his domestic colleagues or couldn't really be bothered either way. More precisely, that's Croatian songwriter Andrej Babić, who travels to Eurovision with opera singer Alenka Gotar and their song Cvet z juga (Flower from the south) four years after sending Claudia Beni to Eurovision for Croatia and two years after girlband Feminnem represented Bosnia-Herzegovina on his behalf.

In the meantime, Babić has concentrated his efforts on the Slovenian pre-selection EMA, composing songs for Saša Lendero in 2005 and 2006. Both the Babić-Lendero efforts scored highly with the public televote but poorly with the expert jury in the 50:50 weighting system employed by RTVSLO until this year (likewise other folk-pop and turbo-polka acts such as Atomik Harmonik, Rebeka Dremelj and Natalija Verboten), leading to suspicions that either Babić's nationality or the 'southern' flavour of his music might have counted against them. (The songs themselves both ended up translated into hrvatski for festivals in Montenegro and Croatia.)

However, this year's televote-only system - potentially to Rupel's and Pavliha's chagrin - produced a convincing victory for Gotar and Babić over the nearest rival, Bitka talentov casting-show winner Eva Černe, and 12 other contenders for whom spectacle was the order of the day. (Gold flags, red dresses with ">metres-long trains, a guest appearance by the Phantom of the Opera, vaguely lesbian dancers, and a song apparently set in a nuclear plant...)

Clearly, Cvet z juga hardly hides its southern inclinations, but a glance over the last few EMAs would suggest that the heart of Slovenian pop in general is currently being drawn - as in the old Doris Dragović hit Srce vuče južnom kraju - to 'southern parts', whether Croatian or even further south and east.

Severina's old Eurovision and pre-selection routines? Ask Rebeka Dremelj and Steffy (who cleverly turned up with a brass band months before Seve's album with Bregović is even due to be released). 1940s costumes and a list of as many European capitals as Flamingosi could fit into three minutes (before their pre-selection dissolved into chaos, but that's another story)? That'll be Don Corleone, third-placed this weekend. And the 'turbo polka' of Atomik Harmonik and their rivals Turbo Angels? Surely not too far away from turbo folk...

EMA quote of the evening, however, belonged to co-presenter Mario Galunič, explaining the task ahead:

'We need a song that Europe can't ignore. So that they will say "Very good! Very interesting song from... Slovakia!"'

Dora 2007: He Will Rock You?

There's no sign of Goran Bare, as it happens, but the list of contestants for the 2007 edition of Dora, Croatia's contest to choose a representative for Eurovision, is still verging towards the upmarket - albeit the usual sprinkling of complete debutants and reality TV show cast members.

Several of the performers have Eurovision experience, including Vivien Galletta and Naim Ayra (both members of Put in 1993), Claudia Beni, Goran Karan, and Feminnem, who competed for Bosnia-Herzegovina in 2005. There's a fair smattering of swing (the Sick Swing Orchestra and Marko Tolja), and a couple of names who interpret 'folk music' in quite a different sense to Severina's Moja stikla: Klapa Maslina (responsible for one of umpteen versions of the Dalmatian standard Da te mogu pismom zvati) and Miroslav Evačić, an ethno musician who mixes blues and Podravina folk music, making him the mid-noughties answer to Istrian-jazz doyenne Tamara Obrovac.

In fact, the list as a whole might look like two and a half dozen attempts to define the antipode of Štikla if it wasn't for the incongruous inclusion of a certain Sinisa Vuco - a singer whose association with 'turbofolk' is even more ingrained than Severina's. Vuco's repertoire, with emphasis on the pleasures (or otherwise) of drinking, sex and supporting Hajduk Split, musically might not be too dissimilar to Marko Perković Thompson's, only with less historical mythology and much more accordion. (In fact, here are the two of them in the company of Dalmatian diasporic singer Dražen Žanko.)

In all other respects, though, the two singers have taken paths as diverging as the average Jeffrey Archer plotline - Thompson inclining towards the patriotic (and vowing never to perform in Serbia), while Vuco has since signed for Lepa Brena's Grand Productions and regularly appears on TV Pink or duetting with Serbian-based singers. (They include Vesna Zmijanac, Neda Ukraden, and Mitar Mirić, with whom Vuco covered Queen's We Will Rock You as Volim narodno - I love it the folk way.) For much of the 1990s, indeed, Vuco claimed that his music had been banned by the then management of Croatian Television (HTV) because of its similarity to folk from Serbia and Bosnia.

However, it looks like Vuco's performing with a 'rock composition' by Fedor Boić, rather than with one of his more narodnjački compositions. Which might be just as well. Would HTV really want to go through that again?

The Race Is On, Don't All Rush At Once

While the Gazette was drafting its first post of the year about the Croatian pre-selection for Eurovision yesterday, the thought occurred to it that if Morrissey was really talking about Eurovision with the BBC (as if it hadn't all got improbable enough when Lordi entered), then anything's possible. Gibonni? Darko Rundek? Goran Bare?

Now it seems that Večernji list has got there first as far as Goran Bare is concerned. And one can safely say the concept of Goran Bare showing up at Eurovision is every bit as improbable as Morrissey doing the same thing.

All in all, the potential names being mentioned for this year's Dora so far include Tina Vukov, Luka Nižetić, Vanna, Feminnem, Raspashow, Emina Arapović, Ivana Radovniković, Damir Kedžo, a trio of Mladen Burnać-Davorin Bogović-Ivanka Bolkjovac (two rockers and an opera singer), and Kraljevi ulice (the 2006 runners-up) in the company of Sandra Bagarić. Respectable pop or rock musicians (or at least internationalised-talent-show graduates) the lot of them, without a trace of what one might call 'localised musical content' but would probably call either 'ethno' or 'turbofolk': suggesting that Lordi have had just as much of an impact on HTV's thoughts as, two years ago, did Željko Joksimović's second place for Serbia-Montenegro did. (One suspects that whatever the final Dora line-up is, it might as well be titled 'People the Jury Thought All Sound the Least Like 'Moja štikla'.)

Wait till Eurovision itself, and it may well turn out that Lordi's victory owed less to their position as a credible metal alternative and more to their rocking up on stage with monster costumes, battle-azes, pyrotechnics and expanding wings - a level of stagecraft which would even outdo Darko Rundek.

Who might count as too 'ethno' these days, anyway...?

High Heels And Falcons

Might the Štikla momentum die down after Severina's undignified Eurovision experience? Perhaps; or perhaps not. Severina's forthcoming album will continue the collaboration with Goran Bregović which arose from Štikla, suggesting a change of tone from her 2004 comeback CD, the R&B-influenced Severgreen.

More immediately, Štikla is finding an afterlife or two - in a club remix that was completed too late to be sent to Eurovision, and in its first version with patriotically-themed lyrics which were rejected when the song was rearranged in February. (And given the potential for politicised readings of an entry like that, it might have been just as well.)

News of the first version, then called Hrvatski sokole (Croatian falcon), first broke around the time of Dora, but the song was only played today on Zlatko Turkalj's Turki party radio show - with Turkalj considering that Moj sokole (My falcon) would have the potential to be a hit in its own right.

In the meantime, Jurica Pavičić in Jutarnji list reflects on the significance of Štikla itself, reaching the conclusion that 'tonight in Athens one epoch for Croatian culture is coming to an end, and another is beginning.'

Not only was Severina's song 'the most commented-on and disputed song in the whole history of Croatian pop music' (and the Gazette doesn't need much convincing of that), but it would be hard to overstate its importance in a redefinition of Croatian culture:

'A song which in its first line contains a motif of trade (a high-heeled shoe), and then immediately a rustic-peasant motif of grass and a lawn, served as a collective catalyst which enabled the vast majority of Croats to let out their own cultural traumas. To all those who have suppressed the Balkans into themselves for 15 years, who took care not to be heard listening to narodnjaci, for their neighbours not to see them coming back from the village, to all those who suppressed their štokavski accent and tried to speak the city way, Štikla brought them all collective therapy. Thanks to Štikla, Croats could finally - to use gay vocabulary - "out" themselves: for the first time, they could admit to themselves and others that they were from the Balkans.'

How Štikla might be (re)assessed after its result in Athens remains to be seen. As Pavičić pointed out in his article published on Saturday itself: 'If it does badly, conservative Croatia will say "We told you so". If it does well, the same "common sense" will say "Look what Europe wants from us, folklore and folk singers [cajke].'

And if it finishes slap in the middle of the scoreboad? Wait and see.

Moja Štikla: Let The Hindsight Begin

Severina's štikla may have come to a disappointing halt on Saturday, but now anyone who had an opinion on the song first time around gets to make sense of its thirteenth place.

There'll likely be more of this in mid-week once the showbusiness supplements come out, but for now the commentaries and excuses mainly centre around the prominence of ever more extreme spectacle at Eurovision - to the extent, claims Merita Arslani in Jutarnji list, that the Finnish winners Lordi were in 'complete opposition and mismatch to Eurovision'.

The music critic Zlatko Gall, meanwhile, feels that Štikla was ultimately too specific to its own region to capture the pan-European audience:

'Perhaps Štikla and Severina are an ideal product for us and our neighbours, but not for something else. If Štikla is a reflection of Croats' taste, then hard rock is Scandinavian heritage. [...] Europe can swallow something like Štikla once or twice, but not forever. However high Severina's Štikla was, it isn't the standard of Europe..'

Gall is typically no fan of Severina, but Severina's team seemed to have anticipated these reservations themselves when they introduced a dance routine into her choreography for Eurovision, as if admitting that simply relying on national costume from Lika and Dalmatinska zagora - as provocative as it was in the context of Dora - wouldn't itself have the same impact on Eurovision viewers as a whole. (Not least because Albania's Luiz Ejlli had attempted much the same thing in the Eurovision semi-final: for ganga and rera, read four-part southern Albanian Lab iso-polyphony.)

Štikla's domestic connotations, then, failed to be transferred into what Dragan Jurak, also in Jutarnji list, sums up as 'the deconstructive trend of the 51st Eurovision', which has begun to ironise the showbusiness kitsch of the event - be it 'the classic Abba kitsch of Eurovision, standard Irish Johnny Logan kitsch, unexpected sevdalinka kitsch a la Seid Memić Vajta, and the usual variants of dance kitsch, Cher kitsch, urban hip hop kitsch, reggae kitsch or ethno boy band kitsch'.

Indeed, Severina herself was apparently a target of the Icelandic comedian Silvía Night - who opened her song Congratulations by sliding down a giant pink štikla.

And judging by the result, it seems one did have to be an ex-Yugoslav - or Monégasque - to understand that Moja štikla was about more than taking off your skirt while shouting 'Afrika, paprika'.

For my part, it took a conversation with a taxi driver on the subject of 'that woman from Poland or somewhere' to realise that what Severina, Novković, Bregović, Kostadinov, Dora voters, Dora viewers and the Gazette itself all think of as ganga, rera, linđo and so on and so forth could just as easily have been interpreted as 'singing out of tune'...

Tamo Gdje Je Stala Njena Štikla...: The Weekday After

High heels, an 'Afrika, paprika' striptease, and excerpts of linđo and kolo dancing were clearly no match in the spectacle stakes for Lordi, whose monster outfits and Hard rock hallelujah brought Finland their first victory at Eurovision. While Hari Mata Hari achieved third place for Bosnia-Herzegovina with Lejla (and applause from the audience after each of his longest notes), Severina finished only 13th with 56 points - two places down from her composer Boris Novković's effort last year, and no better than Ivan Mikulić's placing in 2004.

More revealingly, the breakdown of her score shows the high points coming exclusively from the ex-Yugoslav successor states: 12 from Bosnia-Herzegovina, and 10 each from Slovenia, Macedonia, and Serbia-Montenegro. German and Turkish viewers accounted for another 6 between them, while the only indication of any wider appeal came from Monaco, whose jury awarded Severina an unexpected quatre. (Anything to do with the fact that the Monégasque representative was herself called Séverine?)

There's every chance that the media attention attracted by Lordi's stage presentation - itself indebted to the US band GWAR? - brought one-off viewers to the event who might not have considered voting for any other song; at the same time, take away the costumes and the rock guitars, and what you're left with - according to the Swedish schlager composer Thomas G:son - still resembles the schlager pattern of far more inoffensive Eurovision entries, ensuring its acceptability for a more 'traditional' Eurovision audience.

Dragan Antulov's commentary in Index points to the strength of 'the northern and post-Soviet voting blocs', with first place going to Finland and second to the Russian entrant Dima Bilan. With the debut of Armenia, a post-Soviet factor did seem that more apparent in this year's event (would an independent Montenegro redress the balance?); more significantly for Severina's chances, Andre's song and staging, likewise based on various 'ethnic elements', is likely to have competed directly, and more successfully, with Štikla.

It won't be much consolation to Seve and her team, who were expecting to win the thing last week, but the Norwegian application of the same 'essentialised folklore' principle, Christine Gulbrandsen's Alvedansen (The elves' dance) finished directly below Štikla, even though this too had been tipped as a pre-contest favourite. If Armenia's Andre called to mind Toše Proeski, Christine's performance was - even visually - definitely reminiscent of Tonči Huljić's Dora work with Andrea Šušnjara. (How about a Scandinavian candidate to be the next lead singer of Magazin?)

A final thought: if Štikla really was as close to turbofolk as the domestic consensus on the song seemed to think, surely it should have been much better received in the wider Balkans?