Back in 2013, I voted during my first ever ESC Top 250...
Nine years later and I actually have my first all-time top ten...
But we still got the same winner!
New Year's Eve 2021 and most of us listened to at least some of the ESC Top 250 broadcast by ESC RADIO (great job as usual), playing the 250 most popular songs as voted for by almost 8500 Eurovision fans and collated by songfestival.be. As this week's show was just four days after the chart aired and it coincided with the only gap in the National Final schedule before the end of the second week in March, I thought 'what the hell'...
Let's have an entire show dedicated to the 2021 chart!
So if you didn't hear it live, here it is:
And here is the playlist...
"Better the Devil You Know" - Sonia
"Blackbird" - Norma John
"Dime" - Beth
"Non ho l'eta" - Gigliola Cinquetti
"Cleopatra" - Efendi
"Rock 'n' Roll Kids" - Paul Harrington & Charlie McGettigan
"Viszlát Nyár" - AWS
"De Eerste Keer" - Maxine & Franklin Brown
"Ring-A-Ding Girl" - Ronnie Carroll
"Funny Girl" - Laura Rizzotto
"Hi" - Ofra Haza
"Fiumi Di Parole" - Jalisse
"1944" (instrumental) - Jamala
"Give Me Your Love" - Fame
"Hasheket Shenish'ar (The Silence That Remains)" - Shiri Maimon
"Illusion" - Krassimir Avramov
"Attention" - Ulrikke
"Kruna" - Nevena Božović
"Ik hou van jou" - Maribelle
"Ella no es ella" - Alejandro Abad
"L'oiseau et l'enfant" - Marie Myriam
"De Mallemolen" - Heddy Lester
"Come Back" - Jessica Garlick
"Adieu" - Jahn Teigen & Anita Skorgan
"Euphoria" - Loreen
"Undo" - Sanna Nielsen
Now as I said above and on the show, this is in reality the first year I have voted and done so using my Ultimate Eurovision Top Ten. Having gone of the 'Eurovision From The Start' journey with Lisa-Jayne Lewis, I have now watched/listened to every single Eurovision entry from 1956 through to May 2021 and can safely say that I now know the ten songs that are the top of the tree for me. If you are still unclear (they are highlighted above!), it is these:
No matter how refreshing it might have been to have a new winner of the ESC Top 250, I just have to watch that Melodifestivalen 2012 SF1 performance again and remember why I knew that "Euphoria" was going to win in Sweden AND in Baku right after watching that! It also makes me remember why this entry IS SO POPULAR for so many fans and why it will take something as earth shattering from the go to displace Loreen from the top of the ESC Top 250 chart in 2022. She is never going to move my #1 though nor the other nine entries in my top ten:
And I did talk about the blog article about Marie and "L'oiseau et l'enfant" - it was all the way back in August 2016 and here is the link...
Hope you enjoyed the show, my top ten and the other entries around them! If you want to have a look yourself at the incredible work that songfestival.be have done this year (as always) then click on these links:
So that was show 178 - next week is back to Eurovision 2022 and after having a ten day break from when FiK 60 finished in Albania, we are up and running with the rest of the National Final season! Show 179 will catch-up with that result in Albania, reveal the Montenegrin artist plus have more selection process entries from around Europe. That means that you will eventually hear "Sekret" on the show:
Just keep in mind that this is likely to be the only time you hear this version on the show...
The Albanian revamp machine is kicking into gear already!