Life is sometimes about lucky accidents - there I was, sitting in the Accessible area of the Eventim Apollo at the UK NF, watching Eurovision : You Decide elect Lucie Jones as the UK's entry for Kyiv this year. I was not expecting to be anything other than a fan at the event, no blogging paraphernalia on me at all. Being in that area meant that myself and my partner were next to two people really backing Nate Simpson - I found out at the end that it was because they were the wife and son of Pete Barringer, one of the directors of DWB Music Ltd (the guy in the middle in the picture above). I briefly found out about their involvement in the UK NF and also through a brief chat with Christopher Wortley, one of the company's songwriters. After the event, I sent a FB Messenger post to the company, really more as a thank you for the chat and mentioning that I was likely to flag up their contribution to this year's Contest:
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I have to say that I didn't really expect anything other than a standard polite 'thank you' message that you might receive from most corporate concerns. What I did get was a response direct from one of the other directors, Greig Watts (the guy on the left of the lead picture) and we proceeded to chat about his songwriting team's acts and songs, in particular those in Poland and Czechia, the entries in Kyiv that were both written by members of his firm. I picked up lots of information along the way and Greig suggested that I could conduct an interview with him about DWB Music's vision for the Contest. He has been obviously very busy, what with helping out Kasia and Martina with events in the UK, especially with The London Eurovision Party and its associated press event, where I got to meet him and use his help to get an interview with both Ms Moś and Bárta. Just before he is due to fly out to Kyiv on May 3rd to be with some of his songwriters accompanying the two delegations, he gave me an interview that focussed on DWB's involvement with Eurovision, the UK NF and how he sees his company being involved with the Contest in the future. Again, we chatted over Facebook Messenger - it was a very interesting and insightful chat...we started with the place I met some of the team (my questions are in blue):
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A little titbit for later on to explore about next year and the UK but I wanted to stick to 2017 at this point:
Just to interject here, Greig realised that he meant Slovenia when he said Slovakia...
Having covered Kyiv, I moved onto other matters - 2018, other current artists and their other NF work:
And that song is from Levina's excellent album "Unexpected", with a
acoustic version available on the ARD website.
That was going to be about it as far as the interview was concerned but Greig sprung a little surprise on me:
An extremely interesting and informative interview, I'm sure you'll agree! Compared to the the 5-7 minutes I got with each of the artists in London on an audio interview, this seemed like a very long piece! I was personally amazed that I got to chat with such a prominent figure within a songwriting firm and get a real insight into what their current and future strategies for Eurovision are. I hope that just getting to Kyiv is not the end of the story for DWB, Kasia and Martina this year and that we get to see one or both of the artist in the Saturday Final. Whatever happens in Kyiv, it sounds as though this is another step on DWB's quest to push Eurovision songwriting forward within the UK, perhaps even being the team that writes next year's UK entry. I have to say one thing:
It'll be the first time that I will recognise someone other than an artist sitting in the Green Room at Eurovision!
