GREECE

The Greek Final was held on March 11th at the Acro Music Hall in Athens. After amalgamating the televoting (50%) and jury (50%) votes the winning song was "Rise up" performed by Freaky Fortune featuring Riskykidd.

I was able to watch the majority of this show in the internet. At first I thought I had missed most of it but as it happened the first half of the show was nostalgic Eurovision padding with appearances from Elpida, Anna Vossou, Kalomera and Kati Garbi (amongst others) performing more modern versions of their Eurovision entries. The standard of entries was quite good and 3 of the 4 were worthy of winning the title. As it happened, once the 4 entries were done and dusted the voting did not go on long.

 

The staging of the whole show was very simple with just a basic stage with lighting and a small screen at the back. The DJ in the band was centre stage on a small plinth whilst the two vocalists stood either side but moved around on the bulk of the stage. The performance needs lot more direction and interaction but a lot of this was stymied by the simplicity of the stage and the lethargy of the audience to get involved.

 

The song is a modern, up-tempo dance song with brass sampling with a Balkan edge. The song starts off slow with Riskykidd doing a small rap. Then the singer joins in with a chorus followed by an instrumental break. It is a very modern song and has lots of interesting rhythms and earworms. The chorus repeats the title numerous times and the instrumental brass breaks are really quite infectious and appealing. Although I think that the rapping is sometimes superfluous it does give does give a modern edge to it. The false ending is actually very clever and will fool a lot of people.

 

As you can tell with the tone of this review, much needs to be worked on with the visual performance of this song. I think with much more freedom of movement, lighting and more vibrant video screens. Also with more varied camera shots they will be able to sell the song more to the viewers at home. I don't think they need any dancers as I think the stage could be made busy enough with just the three of them, although they may need a backing singer to help with the repetitive parts and help with the end chorus.

But the big question is - can Greece afford to host Eurovision at this time?

Do they REALLY want to win...?

 

This was one of my favourite songs before the show stared and I am so pleased that it won. In addition it was good to see that their vocal performance was quite strong and not too dissimilar to the recorded version. This will easily qualify and I think this will be an almost definite top 10 if not top 5.

 

Artist - Freaky Fortune featuring Riskykidd

Song - Rise Up

Music - Nick Raptakis, Teo Pouzbouris

Lyrics - Nick Raptakis, Teo Pouzbouris, Riskykidd
 

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