“Loreen, you will go down in the history books,” said British presenter Graham Norton at the presentation of the glass microphone that belongs to the Eurovision Song Contest. Just like in 2012, the 39-year-old singer Loreen comfortably won the 67th Eurovision Song Contest for Sweden on Saturday evening. She became the first woman to win the European song festival twice at the Liverpool Arena. Only singer Johnny Logan won the Eurovision song contest three times on behalf of Ireland. “Surreal”, said the singer after she had performed her winning song ‘Tattoo’ again in the particularly beautiful stage setting: lying, sandwiched between two LED screens that she could push further and further upwards ‘liberated’.
Lorine Zineb Noka Talhaoui, Swedish with Berber-Moroccan parents, has been the top favorite for weeks. Her meticulously thought-out Eurovision song ‘Tattoo’, a swelling catchy trance track about love and hope, is high in the international charts and has over 58 million streams on Spotify. That Loreen won with a considerable amount of public votes – although Saturday night did not sound the tightest version of her song – was hardly a surprise. The European televoters voted en masse for the passionately singing singer who incited the dance movements of her hands with centimeter-long nails, even though Finland suddenly became Loreen’s biggest competitor at the end of the announcement. Rapper and singer Käärijä, in his green Hulk sleeves, had not only stirred up the hall, but also the televoters at home with his ‘ChaChaCha’.
The country juries, who handed out their points on Friday after seeing the dress rehearsal, also saw the most in her. Italy’s intense ballad and Israel’s fiercely proud dance act also went down well.
Sweden’s seventh win
It is the seventh victory for Sweden. The previous winner was Swedish singer Måns Zelmerlöw with the song ‘Heroes’. The spiritually minded Loreen had experienced everything less stressful than in 2021, she said at the press conference afterwards. She was less naive now, ‘less girly than then’. Her Eurodance track ‘Euphoria’, which was regarded as a ‘mysterious performance’ in 2012, had been ‘in the moonlight’. ‘Tattoo’ was now ‘full in the sunlight’. She was proud that everyone “had gone along with her story.”
It was an attractive final night in Liverpool. Host country Great Britain had pulled out all the stops for a fuchsia, yellow and blue tinted show full of zest for life and creativity in which Ukraine, last year’s winner by Kalush Orchestra, was allowed to shine. At the spectacular opening, you first saw the hip-hop formation perform in the metro station in Kiev, which long served as a shelter during Russian bombing.
Then it was switched to singer Sam Ryder, second in the previous edition, who stood on top of Big Ben with his guitar. British stars such as Joss Stone and Andrew Lloyd Webber as well as Queen drummer Roger Taylor made musical contributions, after which the biggest surprise came in ten royal seconds: Princess Kate Middleton at the grand piano.
The intermediate act in which former winners honored the musical roots of the city of Liverpool was also nice. Few Beatles in The Liverpool Songbook – strange. Duncan Laurence released a very subdued version of ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’.
Inflated field of participants
The competition itself this year, like the two previous semi-finals, was a pretty pumped field with 26 performances full of flavor enhancers. Everything that made a song their own seemed extra visually blown up this year with meter-high visuals of flames and waterfalls, unicorns and sloping slopes.
Many singers opened their song lying down, like on top of an ‘Eiffel Tower’ of light (France). They did a kind of total theater from a burlesque nightclub, a fantasy heroine story, satire-wrapped anti-war rhetoric to a dystopian nightmare. And for viewers it was a lot of switching between very different music genres, from dance pop to flamenco, from traditional to folklore to hypnobeats to fiery rock.
The German Lord of The Lost, the pastiche rock act ‘from hell’ in red patent leather eventually finished last. For the duo Mia Nicolai and Dion Cooper that came out for the Netherlands, it already ended on Tuesday. They could not live up to expectations in the first semi-final with ‘Burning Daylight’.