List of your views on EACHNot sure what to say though. Ask and you shall receive
I was very unlikely to go (or be able to go) this in depth, so carry on! There's usually plenty to write about for most of these Greek performances at the contest itself either way
. I have no idea how Sarbel ended up here from London and how he got involved in the music business. He basically emerged just before Ya sou Maria in a duet that he did with Irene Merkouri, a girl of Romani descent (who I wished to see in Eurovision someday) on a cover of a folk Tunisian song where Sarbel sings the arabic parts (he's half Lebanese). The song was this one: and the guy who wrote the music to My Number One (who originally is a singer/songwriter). I didn't vote for Sarby and was severely pissed when he won. Not about him who I thought was adorable but about the song that I thought was incorporating every bit that was found to be successful in the previous entries and exploiting it in a pimped manner to the point of death and unintentional parody. But what did I know? Little Sarbel brought home another top 10 managing to maintain the strike. So while I actively hated the song when it was released, when I watch it now it just makes me giggle throughout. And sometimes not everything has to be about quality and all that. There's value in having some shameless fun. And I think this one did just that.
And who can blame them. You just know Turkey wants its mitts on some of the Aegean islands. I blame Hadise.
. So she went on to have a smashing teen pop first album and following that she was in the next NF winning it with a landslide not only because she had the catchiest song, but because people already loved her. Hopes and expectations though were really low, because at the same time everyone thought that the only award she would be coming home with, and this at the very best of chances, would be the Miss Congeniality one. So it was a big and pleasant shock when she went through her semi with that confidence because all in all she was still basically a kid and one of the least established and totally inexperienced artists we've ever had. The same pretty much applies for the Final, I mean there was growing optimism, but 3rd place was beyond everyone's wildest dreams, a totally unexpected result and I will never understand how, but she made it look easy. Maybe it was because being an American meant she was clueless about how big this was. The blissfulness of the ignorance sort of thing. I don't know. On a personal note I find her remarkably kind and cute as a person. Sadly she is not very active for many years now, she went back to the US and got married and had 42 children. But she's still very young and she has said repeatedly that she wants to give it another shot and that she's keeping a song just for that. We'll see.
songs to send. I don't remember any of the other two songs at all, which is a testimony that they were even worse, so This Is Our Night won. While I think technically this is a much better song than Shake it, there's something about it that just leaves me cold. I don't remember if I liked it back then, but I find it to be among the most unmemorable of the lot. Not to mention that it probably lead to the long run of endless Kontopoulos entries we get to see year after year. I think the expectations were high for this back then, not only because the local media always exaggerate the possibilities but because Sakis really wanted it badly and I think you can totally see it through his performance, it comes through. But it wasn't meant to be. My personal opinion is that it actually did better than it deserved to do, possibly because he did a good job at selling it. Am not sure if it was right after this, but then Sakis tried to be an actor too, and he co-starred in one of the early movies of the "greek weird cinema", the movie is called Chevalier if anyone's curious, I still haven't found the courage to watch it after all these years.