The Long Road to Oslo

Be grateful if you don't live in Sweden! Every Saturday evening for the next few months we have to endure the selection heats for the Eurovision Song Contest. (That is of course when we are not watching the Winter Olympics.)

Eurovision is enormous here and (if we are to believe the hype) greatly loved by the Swedish people. Crap songs, apalling costumes: what's not to like? Certainly, if you don't like it, you are considered as some kind of social misfit by the Euro Cosy Nostra.


Kai has got wise to this and has made it very clear that we would be depriving him of a basic human right if we did not allow him to stay up to midnight every Saturday evening and consume vaste quantities of crisps. Zoe loves any music with a good beat she can dance to, so he's get her full support on this one.

There was an amusing article about this in this morning's Dagens Nyheter by Fredrik Strage who compares it all to The Blob in the horror film of the same name.

This week's talking point is that there is a singer-songwriter, Anna Maria Espinosa, who is actually quite talented and is liked by the In Crowd. She's had a lot of stick from The Talibans of Cred for actually being involved in the whole thing.

She argues that she's a songwriter and would like a lot of people to hear her songs.You don't get a bigger audience here. And if I have to sit through it all, it's a mercy that there's a least one good song.

Kai and Zoe and thousands of other kids are being deluded into thinking that this is what good music sounds like.

Shame really! there are so many wonderful Swedish artists. Here are some candidates for a great Swedish Eurovision show:

Fever Ray
Jens Lekman
Philemon Arthur and the Dung
Ale Möller & Lena Willemark
Suburban Kids with Biblical Names
Jenny Wilson
Doctor Alban
Taxi! Taxi!
Lykke Li
The Field
A Camp
Wilmer X
Adam Tensta
Dungen
Thåström
Backyard babies
Peps Persson
Teddybears Stockholm
Laakso