United Kingdom 2024: Olly Alexander - Dizzy

Left you Dizzy?

  • Total voters
    42
I’m really not sure what we’re gonna be able to do now. We got away with it with Mae because we were the host nation and she was inexperienced, but we sent a pretty big name this time, and I’m not sure we’re going to be able to get anybody with a half decent career to touch it. I think we need to play it safe with a ballad aimed at the juries. I mean look at fucking Germany. They’ve managed to get out of the doldrums with a fucking awful song.
 
Kaleen said:
I’m really not sure what we’re gonna be able to do now. We got away with it with Mae because we were the host nation and she was inexperienced, but we sent a pretty big name this time, and I’m not sure we’re going to be able to get anybody with a half decent career to touch it. I think we need to play it safe with a ballad aimed at the juries. I mean look at fucking Germany. They’ve managed to get out of the doldrums with a fucking awful song.
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Michael Rice says otherwise.

God that was gross, but then we outgrossed ourselves with Newman.
 
octophone said:
So, what next for him? Can he just go back to a normal Years and Years record? Bit more acting would feel like a good move.
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I don't think it's impossible for him to have a recording career again, but yes, if I was him I'd be thinking I may focus on the acting for a while. I don't think any potential 'tarnish' should affect him there.

Dizzy was the first release put out under his name, wasn't it? Presumably he still can choose to use Years And Years if he wants to, as he was using it as a solo act for the last album and things like the NYE show and the Kylie duet.
 
Every single good result we've had in 25 years has been with a decent singer competently performing an average ballad - Jessica, Jade, Lucie and Sam (Blue the only exception, which was our best pop song/performance combo I guess in that time frame). I mean fine, take risks with our entries, but the fact they forget (or just ignore) the key ingredient as to what you need to do well, is infuriating.
 
Who cares, it’s just random who does well each year. It’s not like the UK at Eurovision is some breathing entity that we have to train or like there’s some long-standing selection process that needs to be re-thought. It’ll be Clare Richards on a whim next year and she’ll come 7th
 
Olly is actually a good, if appalling, preformer. They took a risk, did something new and stunning. It failed horribly.
Lesson: Don't hump in peoples faces for 3 mins. Have a clear target audience for your performance.

The song was meh, worse than last year. In this case it's most likely bad luck as they had a bunch to choose from. Perhaps it stood out compared to the rest of his catalogue but they didn't seem to have looked through the pile of Melfest rejects for alternative options.
Lesson: Have more people and more songs involved in the song selection process.

Olly is a passable singer. Sweden and Azerbaijan has sent worse singers and gotten top placements.
Lesson: Know your weaknesses. Make sure to drown out questionable vocals if needed.
 
The lesson should be SEND A BETTER SINGER. You shouldn't need to start with knowing you have a weakness in something so fundamental and deciding how we're going to cover it.
 
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lolly smitten-downes said:
I don't think it's impossible for him to have a recording career again, but yes, if I was him I'd be thinking I may focus on the acting for a while. I don't think any potential 'tarnish' should affect him there.

Dizzy was the first release put out under his name, wasn't it? Presumably he still can choose to use Years And Years if he wants to, as he was using it as a solo act for the last album and things like the NYE show and the Kylie duet.
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I would expect his next music to be Years And Years, for sure.
 
I liked Dizzy on first listen but I've not felt compelled to play it much since, it doesn't really go anywhere as a song and I'm not surprised the voters didn't reward it. Apart from the rotating part of the staging, which they should've done more with (like Switzerland), it was just mediocre. Lithuania did the stylish, cool electronic dance number much better.

I did actually think we would finish last again after hearing Ally's reedy crow vocals in the semi final, so avoiding that was a small consolation at least.

In hindsight the dirty sauna shower room setting and general dead-eyed whore vibe might have been a little off putting to the general public.
 
lolly smitten-downes said:
The lesson should be SEND A BETTER SINGER. You shouldn't need to start with knowing you have a weakness in something so fundamental and deciding we're going to cover it.
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Particularly when you chose the bloody singer! It's not like a public vote lumbered us with Mae or Olly.
 
Kaleen said:
I’m really not sure what we’re gonna be able to do now. We got away with it with Mae because we were the host nation and she was inexperienced, but we sent a pretty big name this time, and I’m not sure we’re going to be able to get anybody with a half decent career to touch it.
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Plenty of incredibly talented "nobodies" go to Eurovision and do well - we need somebody who can actually SING. The name and the career is secondary.

I feel bad for Olly. We tried something new and it didn't work. It's deflating as a fan yes, it sucks. But as always, the advice should be press on, don't give up and find someone with actual LUNGS.

And if that means playing it a bit safer next year and going back in a MOR direction to lean into that jury love then so be it.
 
National final or internal selection - I don't care....can they sing?

I mean christ on a bike if that tortoise with a moustache can get Germany back on the left hand side of the scoreboard surely we have options?
 
I think it’s all a bit of an over reaction.

As per, the UK just didn’t strike a cord enough to encourage someone to pick up their phone and pay to vote for it. Olly was relatively fine, most people at home aren’t analysing his vocals or any of that.
 
This is an even bigger fuck up than Mae. Everyone knew from the start that Olly is a fucking awful live vocalist. But the staging was just the icing on the cake. It just alienised the majority of the public.
 
It's just so bloody annoying when you see wankers posting on social media about how Europe hates us, it doesn't matter what we send etc - then pointing out that Sam Ryder disproved that, only for our internal selection to choose to seemingly disregard the main reason for his success.

Olly is undoubtedly a better performer than Mae, even if it seems fair to say that the performance didn't work. But why hasn't the biggest lesson been learned?
 
Sam Ryder single handedly got more points than every other UK entrant 2012-2024 combined :D I don't think it's rocket science based on that (and seeing what France did so well with in '21 and last night) - people want a big voice and some British music stereotypes in the song
 
Kaleen said:
When it comes down to it, Olly’s vocals were APPALLING. Utterly embarrassing for us to do this yet again. I can kind of get it with Mae as we tried something different but for us to do it two years in a row - we need to ditch the team and get in fresh blood.
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Also "I Wrote a Song" lended itself nicely to a drunk-karaoke-in-the-club style performance. "Dizzy" simply didn't.
 
It wouldn't surprise me entirely if it was another internal selection next year, someone like Natasha Bedingfield who is having a mini career revival, or Sophie Ellis-Bextor ( :eyes: )
 
Smaller committees make better decisions - too many people in the mix is always a bad idea. Remember when you mixed every Playdoh colour together and instead of a beautiful megacolour, you got a mid-brown sludge?
 
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So we didn’t finish any higher than 14th with any country, which came from Ireland. Over half of the countries put us in the bottom 5.
 
My godmother and the friend whose place I was watching at wouldn't stop moaning about how they didn't like knowing what the audience could or couldn't see
 
lolly smitten-downes said:
It's just so bloody annoying when you see wankers posting on social media about how Europe hates us, it doesn't matter what we send etc
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I know this will be unpopular on here because of the cognitive dissonance, but those people are have a correct underlying point that the foundation of the contest is political and that to a large degree the songs sent are irrelevant. Lots of countries start with a strong baseline of votes regardless and so would never end up in the UK’s position
 
Suomi said:
I know this will be unpopular on here because of the cognitive dissonance, but those people are have a correct underlying point that the foundation of the contest is political and that to a large degree the songs sent are irrelevant. Lots of countries start with a strong baseline of votes regardless and so would never end up in the UK’s position
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I get that - and I do think most people accept that we are at a disadvantage, for a variety of reasons.
 
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Penelope Will Rave said:
My godmother and the friend whose place I was watching at wouldn't stop moaning about how they didn't like knowing what the audience could or couldn't see
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‘but what is the audience seeing right now?’ was said at one point here as well. Though does that really have an actual impact on how well a song does in the end? Nah.
 
I'm not sure it's all quite as arbitrary as Suomi has appeared to settled on, I suspect for his mental health, so good for you. However there are genuine factors that go into point allocation, some which evolve, some which stay the same, some which you don't expect.
 
Poor SertAg (39) said:
We were musing out loud, last night WHO WAS THE TARGET for that performance? If the answer is fans of Triga porn, that manages to be too niche, too general and wildly inappropriate, all at the same time.
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It was transparently obvious that an AUTEUR of some sort conceived the performance to have some porn-based artistic inspiration. It was ART, but it was also NOT ENTIRELY APPROPRIATE
 
Bringing peak soft porn gay to the audience might be a “brave” thing to do but it was not going to provide mass appeal.

In a weird way, it’s a “oh the Eurovision is SO GAY” misfire in the same vein of Scooch being selected cause “Eurovision is SO CAMP”. It’s calculated and doesn’t reflect the audience actually voting.
 
Dark Carnival said:
‘but what is the audience seeing right now?’ was said at one point here as well. Though does that really have an actual impact on how well a song does in the end? Nah.
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Same here, but I took it as them being curious about how it all worked behind the scenes. Some laughed throughout the performance, some whined and looked away in disgust. The common denominator was that not one mentioned it again until the lines were closed and the jury voting began.
 
The thing is plenty of people were praising the staging for being daring the other day. It’s only now that in the cold light of day, people are changing their minds when it’s clear that it didn’t work.
 
I think it's fine to praise something because it appeals to you, but recognise that it may not have played well widely after the event.

If you worried too much about how well everything was going to do at the time, you'd rip most of the joy out of the contest.
 
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