Life after Helsinki 2007 Eurovision

Ermal Meta & Fabrizio Moro are already Italy's 8th duo in the Eurovision song contest over the years. That counts also then happily married Al Bano & Romina Power who did it twice, and another stilL happily married couple, Alessandra Drusian and Fabio Ricci aka Jalisse, while the other duos have been formeD for Sanremo, or Eurovision song contest in mind. And the interesting fact is they all ended up in top-10! This is as good an eXcuse to relisten and watch all these beauties.... 1975 - Wess & Dori Ghezzi - Era - 3rd 1976 - Al Bano & Romina Power - We'll live it all again - 7th 1984 - Alice & Franco Battiato - I treni di Tozeeur - 5th 1985 - Al Bano & Romina Power - Magic oh magic - 7th 1987 - Umberto Tozzi & Raf - Gente di mare - 3rd 1989 - Anna Oxa & Fausto Leali - Avrei voluto - 9th 1997 - Jalisse - Fiumi di parole - 4th 2018 - Ermal Meta & Fabrizio Moro - Non mi avete fatto niente - ?

We are about to start the 64th Sanremo festival. I will blog and comment live so please tune in. Allegria! 20.35 The preshow has started with Pif. We have a quick lesson of Sanremo; it's people, food, sights and all sort of useless facts.... Quite useless even if quite funny at times. The festival itself could have started at 20.30 instead of 21, as it will drag on way past midnight anyways.... 20.51 Sigla Eurovision!  20.53 Technical mistake to start with, the curtain didn't open! LOL. Fazio needs to improvise the opening..... remembering the events in Italy resently, train accidents, floods... and then it seems there are protesters in the theater shouting to be heard.... to Fazio to read their letter... Oh dear, this is going to be a loooong night! 21.01 Fazio gets their letter on stage and intends to read it. The guys are escorted down from the ceiling. They seem to be workers with problems from Naples and Caserta. Social networks are already in fire. Is this p...

Sweden's ABBA won the 1974 Eurovision with Waterloo and brought the contest for the first time to Sweden, where it was held in Stockholmsmässän on March 22, 1975. I don't have any first hand memories of this as I was only 8 back then and have seen the video only later. But the Eurovision fever was very different in the country back then apparently and the final was held among protests and anti-Eurovision demostrations, something that sounds rather funny today! One of the main things to remember is the voting system launched that year, the very same used still today and created by Finns. The first ever "12 points" went to Luxembourg btw, and the winning the Netherlands got six out of 18 possible. A total of 19 countries present when Greece withdraw for Turkey invaded northern Cyprus in 1974 and was present. Also Portugal mixed politics with Eurovision. The presenter Karin Falck mixed most everything and totally lost it in the voting . And here . Or she was lost ...

Wess or Wesley Johnson has died in New York. He represanted Italy along with Dori Ghezzi in 1975 with Era , one of the most memorable Eurovision songs ever.