PORTUGAL

The Portuguese Final was held on March 15th at Convento do Beato in Lisbon, hosted by José Carlos Malato & Sílvia Alberto. Before the final there was a semi-final where the field of 10 was reduced to just 5. The televoting window for voting ran from March 8th-15th. The winner was Suzy with "Quero ser tua".

                                                                                                                         

I was able to watch both the semi-final and final live on TV thanks to RTP International Europe. I have to say I am not quite sure what the point was of having a semi-final when there were so few songs to begin with and I feel that a final of 5 is much too small a field. I would rather have had two small semis of 5 each where 3 go through so we had a final of 6, or just a straightforward final of all 10.

The staging of the song is very similar to that of Ryan Dolan last year. Suzy is centre stage with 2 female backing singers at one side and Behind her are 2 male dancers who also bash about two very large vertical drums. In addition she has a topless singer/mobile drummer who is drawn on with multicoloured body paints. On this stage the effect is OK but may benefit from much stronger background colours and some more effective costumes which for this performance are mostly in black.

The song is a happy, dance party song with aspects of carnival about it. It has a very sunny Mediterranean feel about it of which there is nothing like in the contest. The song also sounds a lot like "Lambada" which was recently sampled by Jennifer Lopez. The chorus lends itself to audience participation with 'oh-oh-oh' parts. The song seems to be quite within Suzy's range but the end part shows her upper range during the last key change. However the song, as it stands, it all in Portuguese and I feel that a slight change in this could make the song even more accessible.

There is a lot that can be improved with the performance. They either need to ramp up the background screen so that is is really colourful and bright OR they need to have a plainish background but with really OTT colourful outfits. They need to sell the carnival aspect of this. I don't think the dancers work - the drums are very old hat and the dancing with the wings just looked awful. Maybe they need some scantily-clad Rio dancers instead... who ideally can sing too? Plus, ideally they need to make some of the song, possible the last couple of choruses into English

However after the final there was a lot of disquiet. It seemed like the audience in the hall were not pleased about the result and neither were many of the tweeters. There have been rumours of some sort of vote fixing but with less than 48 hours before the songs have to be presented to the EBU. I doubt this choice will be changed to the second place act, Catarina Pereira's "Mea culpa".

This was the best choice in a poor and very old fashioned field. The song and singer have some potential but without some big tweaks this will not make it to the final. I would suggest this is a non-qualifier.

Artist - Suzy

Song - Quero ser tua (I want to be yours)

Music - Emanuel

Lyrics - Emanuel