Day 2 - Barbed wire and the ace of hearts

God Moron!  That's not an exclamation about an inept person, it is Swedish for "Good Morning", and it's pronounced "maw-ron".

So, day 2 in the press centre brought us the unbridled joy of Austria, the power and passion of Cyprus, the absurd banality of the Czech Republic, refugee chic from Bosnia and the cloak of doom from Malta...

Let's start with lovely Zoë from Austria.  She is quite the most charming young lady, and her smile is just glorious.  She took to the brightly lit stage in a peach dress and delivered a perfect performance of her jolly little French language ditty.

Compared to the lady from the Czech Republic (or Czechia, as everyone is now calling them), who delivered a sterile peformance of her bland ballad and then stood stone faced at the photo session after her press conference and asked "does my hair look good" without so much as a smile...  "yes, Dear, your hair is fine - it's your torn face that needs a bucket of water over it".

Cyprus, on the other hand, gave the performance of the day for me.  Full on energy and a real powerhouse performance.  I was wearing my Cyrpus icon t-shirt so managed to grab the gorgeous Francois, their lead singer, for a quick selfie after their press conference.

Bosnia may be in a bit of trouble... In a contest that makes a point of being apolitical, and has very stringent rules about political statements being disallowed, the Bosnians are singing about the Refugee Crisis and appear on stage wrapped in foil blankets standing on either side of a barbed-wire fence.  Hmmm, if that's not political then I'm not sure what is.  It's obviously a very emotive subject but I'm not sure a camp and frothy pop contest is the platform.

I'm also not quite sure what's going on with Deen's trousers either... dicky tummy?

Juri from Estonia is a very earnest young man, so imagine our surprise when he delivered a peformance combining Joe 90 and Paul Daniels...

And then we had plucky little Malta...  Where do I begin?  Yes, she sings it well enough, but I just find it such a drab and bland offering for something which is billed as a big show-stopper.  The peformance starts with Ira's face projected onto the cloak of her backing dancer before the focus then shifts to a mud brown coat and cape that she is wearing which has flickering gold lights projected onto it as she walks around in circles.  Heavens above!  It's tenuous...

So, this is the bit where her dancer attempts a RuPaul-esque death drop, and goes arse over tit.

So, that's Semi 1's contestants all rehearsed and for me the standouts so far are Armenia, Russia and Cyprus.  No huge surprises (apart from Armenia, which I didn't rate at all prior to coming here).  Malta and Czechia may well also qualify, even though I am less than enamoured with either. I think Austria is safe, as is Hungary.  Douwe Bob should qualify for The Netherlands assuming the risky 10 second break works.  Of the others, I love the Azeri song, but her performance was ropey.  She's bound to go through though.  If I was asked to chose one final one I'd plump for Iceland.  Again, I'm not keen on the staging, but it's decent enough, and I love Iceland - so let's have them.

Semi 2's songs have started, but more about them and our adventures in Eurovision land later...

* Stage photos ©EBU