Like previous years, ESC COVERS will again share a blog post from Morten Thomassen of OGAE NORWAY with his views on the positions reached by all 35 2026 entries. ESC Covers google translated it from Norwegian to English.
With today’s rules, no country can finish in the same place, so even though Armenia and Latvia received the same score in their semi-final, Latvia was judged ahead. I choose to believe that it is because Latvia received the most points from the audience, because the best individual score received was received by Armenia. The Australian jury thought that this was the best song of the semi-final.
Could it be because the song simply woke them up, remember that the jury over there on the other side of the world does their jury duty early in the morning and then they might not have had enough coffee to think clearly?
This is a powerful, but at times very tiring song and when the artist is almost chemically free of charm on the TV screen it becomes difficult to like this and it doesn’t make matters any better that what I assume is supposed to be English could almost be any language, here Simon should probably have taken a few lessons in better pronunciation because it was mostly just “Paloma Rumba” that we understood from what he sang.
A lot of time and money has undoubtedly been spent on the stage show, but like many of the contributions where so much has been spent on the show, one could wish that a little more money had been spent on getting a better song, which is probably the main reason why it didn’t go better than it did.
And to think that one of the people behind this work is Rosa Linn, who made waves on charts around the world with her song “Snap” a few years ago and is perhaps the best proof that you don’t have to win ESC to win over the audience who will take your music with them afterwards.
If our Armenian friends are going to take anyone from this year’s competition, they should be more careful with their song selection, because they clearly have artists who can perform, the show Simon gave us showed us that, but you still can’t make gold out of musical rubbish.
Featured image – ESC Covers