“We’re off to the races!” declares Graham Norton as the camp action gets underway at Basel’s St Jakob arena in Switzerland. And thus it falls once more to Eurovision to sashay into the bloody-toothed geopolitical scrum, plonk down a boombox playing the Vengaboys and try to get a savage world to sing about saunas for four hours.
The ‘Vision, with its post-war ideals of unity through cheese-pop, wasn’t made for violent division within its ranks, nor at all ready for it. In recent, turbulent years it has become as much an international PR exercise as song contest, pinioned by its supposed non-political ethos as its participants make it ever more overtly political. This year, as in 2024, the main source of controversy is Israel’s involvement in the event through contestant Yuval Raphael.
You might call it war-washing. You might argue that a global TV audience of 180 million should sense the level of solidarity abroad for the suffering Palestinian civilians, even through the TV feed’s “audio-sweetened” crowd noise. But there’s a sour note to what Norton calls “a mixed response” of cheers and jeers for Raphael herself on the night – a survivor of the October 7 terrorist attack on the Nova music festival who was selected by public vote as something of a national heroine.
The song given to her by committee, “New Day Will Rise”, might even reflect the hopes of the general Israeli public for compassion, peace and renewal. “Everyone cries, don’t cry alone,” Raphael sings amid much Broadway bombast and slashes of Middle Eastern strings. “Life will go on… darkness will fade, all the pain will go.” That said, to sing it on an opulent, crystal-drenched staircase while our newsfeeds are full of emaciated Palestinian children in bombed-out homes still feels like a provocative move. “New day will rise,” great. But for everyone?
Thankfully, producers have put Raphael on fourth, allowing plenty of time afterwards for viewers to pack their brains into cold storage and revel in the bombastic anguish and madcap pop schemes of the continent’s many regional The Voice rejects. Another major relief is that there’s been a significant scaling back in the sort of occult folk horror presentations that, since Sweden’s xenomorph crossbreed Loreen won in 2023, have made recent Eurovisions prime recruitment drives for Golden Dawn.
The only serious hold-outs are Latvia’s Tautumeitas, six fire goddesses full of smiling menace, singing of “curses and hexes” and nature consuming the modern world, then growing monkey tails. The title of their glitch pop chorale “Bur Man Laimi” might translate as “A Chant for Happiness” but it sounds like an ominous evocation for Dead Can Dance to rise again and claim our souls.
Instead, a sci-fi fantasy vibe prevails. Opening the evening, Norway’s Kyle Alessandro resembles Elliot Page starring in a musical Dune, roaming an Arabian pop volcano in post-apocalyptic warlord garb, flanked by hand-spinning mercenaries. Ziferblat, Ukraine’s elven village of an entry, resemble a Legends of Zelda game having come to life and become obsessed with the band Yes. And Poland’s Justyna Steczkowska and her crew of moon-worshipping S&M savages are even strafed by a fire-breathing dragon as she sings the song of the goddess Gaia herself, “creator of your DNA, your soul’s destruction and your salvation”. And an eternal deity who’s made it here having previously placed 18th in 1995 and co-hosted Polish Dancing on Ice.
The theme for 2025, it seems, is The Elements. Fire and ice pyro and visuals abound, and there’s an entire nautical themed section an hour in. Austria’s impressive soprano JJ – looking to replicate the opera-pop success of last year’s winner Nemo – sets sail into stormy ballad waters on a boat made from bedroom detritus, giving his “Wasted Love” big cologne advert energy. Then Iceland’s Væb – dubbed the Viking Jedward – offer up some cheerier, cheesier seafaring fare with a song about rowing to Greenland on a Minecraft boat beneath leaping Lego dolphins. Later, Greece’s bespectacled chanteuse Klavdia sings of a mother mourning her daughter on the haunting “Asteromasta” while standing on a black pier above burning water. Ahab pop ahoy?
In more traditional Eurovision quarters, The Netherlands’ Claude is the sole representative of the once ubiquitous overblown soul-pop balladeer, his “C’est La Vie” a poignant tale of his asylum seeker mother singing to him as a child, performed to his younger self in a mirror.
The pop divas put on a strong fem-power showing. Luxembourg’s Laura Thorn, a marionette in a retro-futurist treehouse operated by giant CGI hands, delivers a superbly catchy cartoon twist on Sabrina Carpenter’s biting showgirl feminism. Malta’s Miriana Conte might have had her cunning ploy to slip the queer culture phrase “serving c***” into Eurovision foiled when the BBC insisted the easily-misheard original title of her entry “Kant” be changed to “Serving”, but she injects copious “queen energy” into its rap-pop celebration of forging one’s own riotous path. And, who knows, maybe the line “Why should we let other people decide when we could be having the time of our lives?” might somehow further the Europe-wide case for Universal Basic Income.
Denmark’s Sissal seems to be singing the goth-flecked EDM of “Hallucination” from the depths of a K-hole meltdown – all blurred vision, paranoia and lack of control. Yet, love being her drug, she trips jubilant balls throughout. And Erika Vikman, representing both Finland and the more specialist corners of OnlyFans, is a Teutonic rave rock dominatrix whose (ahem) rousing “Ich Komme” is basically a Euro-“WAP”. Having already promised “my gates are open” and “I’ll dance with you even a wedding waltz, but naked”, she ends up riding a giant, spark-spewing golden microphone stand howling a simultaneous orgasm of a chorus like a phenomenally horny Andrew WK: “I scream out loud ‘I’m coming’ and together we come”. A harsh lesson in watching Eurovision with your parents and the subtitles on.
After which, the understatement of Switzerland’s Zoë Më seems a refreshing Eurovision revelation: just her, a beautiful swell of chamber ballad and an arena of phone lights. France’s Louane also knows that less is amour, singing her touching ode to finding purpose in motherhood “Maman” (having lost her own parents in childhood) from inside a simple egg-timer set. These are certainly welcome feminine contrasts to Armenia’s none-more-macho PARG, running across the stage to the Imagine Dragons-aping “Survivor” looking like he’s fresh from a fight to the death atop Mad Max’s battle tanker.
It’s a premium year for rock entries too. Lithuania’s Katarsis are probably the finest austere grunge goths ever to brave this arena of garish gimmickry. And Italy’s Lucio Corsi – a cross between 1973 Brian Eno and a malnourished Scarlet Pimpernel – brings probably the best song of the night in “Volevo Essere Un Duro”. It’s a Ziggy Stardust glam rock cracker played on a mile-long piano. There’s even an enlivening rock-off between previous rave metal entrants Käärijä and Baby Lasagna in the pre-voting interval. A kind of Eurogonks Assemble.
But what, you ask, of the nutters? Well, the less said about Estonia’s rubber-limbed, coffee-loving Tommy Cash and his flapper cabaret catalogue of Italian cliches the better, but “Bara Bada Bascu” from Sweden’s besuited sauna bros KAJ is hooky enough to stand a chance of becoming the first novelty track to ever win. Even our own Remember Monday do us proud, strutting around a wonky chandelier like Frozen doing a Queen medley about owning your most Hasselhoff-sized blackouts.
They hold their own in the jury voting too – receiving douze points from a creepy Italian mouse puppet will rival Churchill’s most stirring speeches in our nation’s proud history – even if the baffling public votes rob them of the showing they deserve. Against the odds, and thanks in large part to Switzerland’s three mildly demented presenters being so proud of their country having invented LSD, for the best part of four hours the joyous Eurovision spirit prevails and the unruly world seems a glittering neon curtain away. Until, in what Norton describes as “the most tense voting we’ve ever sat through”, a huge public phone-vote turnout for Israel makes for a highly charged final stand-off between Israel and Austria, and politics once more intrudes upon this formerly big fun pop lark.
Ultimately Austria’s JJ prevails, the second successive opera-pop winner. Expect future Eurovisions to be awash with tracks resembling rave remixes of Tosca. And for the event to become ever more about optics than earworms.
