samedi 13 mars 2010

Eurovision season begins with this year's UK entry by Stock & Waterman

Now that I have watched & listened to every youtube performance of the UK Your Country Needs You yesterday show (where people voted for their winner to go to Eurovision in Oslo this year), I can say that I really think Josh was the strongest (out of the six ones) performer of the show. They all performed a Stock/(Aitken)/Waterman classic before making it (or not) to sing the new Stock & Waterman song and try win the show :


- Uni5's girls were just ok and the guys did very bad with their short parts of Last thing on my mind : the overall perfomance was utter shit! Steps must have gone to hell in that 2 minutes time...

- Karen Harding's What do I have to do didn't suit her pale vocal at all and she sounded breathless from the very start...

- As I didn't know the Miss Blitz girls from their previous show, I am not biaised and I must admit their rendition of Better the devil you know did nothing to me...

- Alexis Gerred's version of Never gonna give you up was fine enough in comparaison to the previous ones but his vocals turned out to be a little thin in some places although he was the most good-looking UK chance of the night : he's cute and he's got that talent to take the camera on him. With some more vocals lessons or auto-tuning in studio he might get well in the charts someday or the other... Same applied to his rendition of That sounds good to me but the song didn't suit his voice at all so I don't regret he failed.

- Esma Akkilic's both performances showed she is good looking and has a good voice but that she cannot keep the distance when she needs to keep a high note, particularly on the ending of This time I know it's for real. Her forgetting the lyrics of That sounds good to me must have led her out for sure too. It is such a shame!!! If she had liked the song, she would have known it by heart so NO REGRETS.

- Josh Dubovie, finally, really knows how to push his voice where it needs to go and it suits the Stock/Waterman song well for me ...but he doesn't have the look of a winner : he lacks that appeal Alexis got : he'll be perfect for stage performances on musicals but not for the charts I'm afraid. I'm satisfied though that it is him who got to win yesterday as he was the most vocally gifted to do justice to the song in Oslo.

The song, That sounds good to me, itself is nice, with the slow start then the pop arrangements, cross between Steps & Scooch, sounding very retro 90's, very old fashioned eurovision too (schlager) with the ending high notes SO I LIKE IT A LOT but I very much doubt it can finish in the first ten places in the Eurovision contest. I hope for a top20 UK chart placing too but it is not guaranteed.

What it needs now on its CD release is a polished studio version, a remix for us fans (either retro by Pete Hammond or Almighty/7th Heaven/Mark Jason) and a more trendy one (Cahill, Bimbo Jones, Moto Blanco), in full length extended as well as radio edit, plus an acoustic version to get some MOR radios airplay too.
It may be S&W last CD release so for sure I'll buy me this CD and I want it to be the perfect package!