Life after Helsinki 2007 Eurovision

  Poor girl. The pressure will be huge. This has been coming for years waiting for her to be of age and the whole X Factor seemed a bit nonsense since the start as it was pretty clear Destiny Chukunyere (17) was going to win it. She did. The Junior Eurovision 2015 winner meantime tried her luck in Britain's Got Talent finishing 6th. Last year she got her taste of the Eurovision bubble being one of Micgaela's backing singers.  Destiny owns her surname and exotic look to his Nigerian footballer father. The song for Eurovision will be picked up for her later. She is a vocal power house but without a right and good enough song she won't go that far. The fan hype could play against her, too, as for the wide European audience she's a nobody like most everyone. But good luck!

  The rumors running wild the past few weeks have been confirmed tonight: Stefania will represant Greece in Rotterdam 2020 Eurovision song contest. She doesn't have to travel far as she was born and lives in the Netherlands. Her song titled  Superg!rl will be released in coming weeks, She had three songs in the running and the chosen one is by the usual Dimitris Kontopoulos, Sharon Vaughn and ARCADE team.  Stefania Liberakakis (17) has already a lot of experience despite her young age. She took part in The Voice Kids in 2013 in the Netherlands. Three years alter she was part of girl trio Kisses, that finished 8th in the Junior Eurovision with Kisses and dancin '. Since 2018 she's been releasing solo singles, acted in tv-series and movies.  Below are some of her previous songs ...

What a mess. The new voting system gave us very weird results. Apparently also the voting during the show didn't work and failed totally when the votig platform crashed. In the end Russia won despite being  2nd with juries and only 6th with online vote. Georgia won with the juries but in online voting finished only 12th! And 2nd overal. Australia did a solid third with both and also in the final result. The Netherlands won the online vote but after finishing 9th with the juries ended up only 4th. Now I'm happy this nonsense is over for another year.... 

Tomorrow the revamped Junior Eurovision song contest takes place in Tbilisi, Georgia. Quite frankly this blogger can't get at all excited about this affair this year either, and actually I'm listening the songs for the very first time while writing this  post. Once again there are artists that would fit into ESC rather than JESC (Belarus, Macedonia, Poland), all of them girls as always, balanced by a couple of baby boys (Malta, Georgia). Rather bland but solid set of songs this year but none really getting me interested. I kinda liked Macedonia as whole even if very unoriginal and heard about a zillion times before, and Poland is maybe the best of them all, not very JESC but good singer, good song. The best combination thinking this is JESC is maybe (again) the Netherlands: the song fits the guys, it comes across as real and not as manufactured and let's show some talent as some other (Eastern) entries. I once again I sadly remember songs like Bzz ... That was real kid...

After Sanremo Giovani hopefuls ( see previous post ) it's time to reveal the ones who has made it out of over 800 submissions to the shortlist of 145, wherefrom a selection committee will choose 2 to Sanremo 2018 festival's newcomers category. The auditions take place before the end of the month and the artists will perform their new unreleased entry for Sanremo for them.  Also here some familiar names from Junior Eurovision winner Vincenzo Cantiello, winner of Festival della canzone Italiana in New York Rita Manelli and a few previous particiants from various talent shows. If qualifying for the festival is hard in Sanremo Giovani, this one's even harder. In total this year there has been nearly 1500 submission for the newcomers selection, and only 8 will make it all the way to Teatro Ariston next February....  Check the list after the jump....

  Only twice Eurovision song contest has managed to reach the record number of participants, 43, in 2008 and 2011. It seems every time since when 43 has been announced something has happened and it has dropped to 42. Be it Bosnia-Herzegovina wihdrawing or Romania being kicked out. This time it is Macedonia. It's pretty safe to assume Macedonia was in RTP's list of 43* they confirmed last week before EBU made public it has cut off MRT of its services including news, sports etc and of course Eurovision song contest due to a debt of 0,5-22 million euros depending on your source. This recalls the Romanian affair of 2016, only that it happens well ahead of the contest unlike then when Ovidiu Anton was already packing his bags to go to Vienna wheh he and Romania was stopped. This time Macedonia's participation in Junior Eurovision song contest 2017 goes on as planned but Eurovision 2018 itself is a no go, unless the debt is paid or solution found.  *It would be real su...

After Italy revealed its team on stage ( here ) it's the Mount Titan's turn. SMRTV has revealed The Peppermints  as Valentina Monetta 's and Jimmie Wilson 's backing group on stage for Spirit of the night . The group will be missing though it's leading star Anita Simoncini who's busy elsewhere in her career but the four original girls Arianna Ulivi, Rafaela Perniola, Greta Doveri and Sara Dell'Olio have taken up the challenge to be on the grown ups Eurovision stage. The girls will bring on their youthful dance moves and vocals to create a real discotheque feeling on stage in Kyiv and party it away! Read the official statement by SMRTV here . Now that's a lot of Eurovision and Junior Eurovision stage experience in one act! *The original group broke up in sumner 2016 and only Arianna has been keeping the name alive with two new girls, Alixia Mistral and Sofia Casieri. 

Georgia wins the 14th Junior Eurovision song contest with Mariam Mamadashvili's Mzeo . It's their third win already. She took a strong lead with the adult jury and despite placing only 6th with the kids jury she kept her lead and eventually won. Armenia was second and Italy third.  This is the result fo the grown up jury. A very convincing lead for Georgia....  Christer gave Georgia 5 and his 12 to Belarus....  ... Jedward gave their 12 to Russia and Georgia 6..... ... Mads gave Georgia only 1 and his 12 to Italy.... ... but Georgia kept its lead and wins by 17 points over Armenia, the kids favorite. You can rewatch the whole show below:

Mediterranean Conference Center in Valletta hosts tonight the 14th Junior Eurovision song contest. Ben Camille and Valeria Vella will be leading the show with last year's hostess Poli Genova and last year's winner Destiny Chukunyere performing as interval acts. This is the one show I just can't myself to excited or so much interested in. So many things are wrong with in my opinion (I pretty much prefer the Nordic original version of it where kids are kids and singing kiddy songs instead), This said I did have a listen, and watched the first rehearsal video recap and the ones I kinda liked in no particular order are Macedonia, Ukraine, Serbia, Italy, Israel enad Belarus... I won't even try to guess who will win.... This year the voting system has been changed. Instead of a televote there will be 50-50 professiona-kids juries in each country, and all this topped ny three professional jurors Christer Björkman, Mads Grimstad and Jedward.  Ireland - Zena Donnelly - ...

Three cities in Ukraine have candidated for the Eurovision song contest 2017. It seems though NTU and EBU are settling for Kiev for all obvious reasons as other candidates Lviv and Odessa may be up to requirements from suitabel venue to hotel capacity and international trave connections. The work in Ukraine has already started and Viktoria Romanova, Head of delegation in Stockholm, hopes the people's fear of not having enough money to organize it will soon turn into joy and source of pride but the fact is they need some additional funding, and that's the main problem to be resolved. We can expect the decision where the contest will head to next May within a couple of months, before the end of summer at latest.  "With regard to the budget there are no restrictions, but we have a moral feeling within ourselves that we should avoid luxury and sparkles purely for moral reasons, since after all the country is still in a war state" - NTU's General Director Alasania ...