(Photo by FPVmat A on Unsplash) You want music that sounds like it will playing in your head for days, weeks, months, and quite possibly, years? How about if it’s produced by artists with a distinctive look, sound and sense of musically artistically self? Also good right? What about if Continue Reading
Eurovision Song Contest 2023
Eurovision under the shadow of war: how the 2023 contest highlighted humanitarianism, empathy and solidarity
In 2022, Ukraine won the Eurovision Song Contest in a landslide victory. Traditionally, the winner hosts the following year but due to the significant security issues posed by the ongoing war with Russia, Ukraine was unable to host. As the 2022 runners-up, the United Kingdom stepped in to assist with hosting Continue Reading
Put your platform shoes away and get up from the stage: The Eurovision Song Contest wraps up for another year “united by music”
(courtesy Eurovision.tv / Corinne Cumming / EBU) What another amazing year of musical togetherness! With the Eurovision Song Contest have run its unifying course for another year, and Sweden having been crowned the winner with Loreen becoming the first woman with her atmospheric song “Tattoo” to win the contest in Continue Reading
Eurovision 2023: why the stage itself is the silent star of the contest (curated article)
(The stage of the 67th annual Eurovision Song Contest at the M&S Bank Arena in Liverpool. Adam Vaughan/EPA Images) This week, Liverpool stages one of the world’s largest live televised events, the Eurovision Song Contest. I grew up watching it as an annual family get-together. Now, as a lecturer in Continue Reading
#Eurovision cultural festival 2023 book review: Grey Bees by Andrey Kurkov
War, it almost goes without saying but it likely still needs to be said given the plethora of present horrific conflicts around the world, is a horrifically terrible thing to live through. But what is it like to live war-adjacent? This disorientingly strange limbo of normal is affectingly explored in Continue Reading
How to win Eurovision: the secret code of the contest’s winning lyrics (curated article)
(The Eurovision Song Contest stage. Review News/Shutterstock) The Eurovision Song Contest is one of the few remaining examples of event TV – and UK audiences lap it up. With 8.9 million viewers in 2022, Britain formed the largest audience of all Eurovision markets. And this time around, there’s even a Continue Reading
#Eurovision cultural festival 2023 UK movie review: Limbo
Severing someone’s connection to time and place, to the world which makes and sustains them is a catastrophic act that understandable generates a cascading wall of trauma that never really abates, unless, of course, by some compassionately selfless act, they are given the opportunity to reconnect in some other meaningful Continue Reading
#Eurovision cultural festival 2023: Songs, songs and five Ukrainian singers worth listening to
Over the last year or so since it was violently invaded by Russia, Ukraine has sadly come to be associated with war, blasted buildings, disrupted lives and a great deal of sadness. In the midst of all this suffering, pain and destruction, it’s easy to lose sight of the artistic Continue Reading
#Eurovision cultural festival 2023: British sitcom Extraordinary
When it comes to people getting superpowers, we are habitually used to two key constants: Looks like, rather happily it should be added, that no one sent the memo to Extraordinary, which explores a world in which superpowers have magically been dispensed to everyone and they are so much a Continue Reading
Road to Eurovision 2023: Week 7 – The Big 6 – France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Ukraine and United Kingdom (Grand final)
What is the Eurovision Song Contest?Started way back in 1956 as a way of drawing a fractured Europe back together with the healing power of music, the Eurovision Song Contest, or Concours Eurovision de la Chanson – the contest is telecast in both English and French – is open to Continue Reading