United Kingdom

Even If Andy Abraham

If there is one fail-safe way of ensuring that you don't win Eurovision, it is to copy the previous year's winner, even in the broadest of musical terms. The Czech Republic made its debut in the semi-final in Helsinki last year with harder rock than the Finns strolled to victory with in Athens and received the wooden spoon for their efforts, while the hosts fared less than impressively themselves in the final. However, the fact that the contest even has a place for the likes of Leave Me Alone in it these days shows that it no longer exists within the narrow boundaries that countries strayed beyond at their peril as little as a decade ago. All manner of music and performances are welcome, from ethnic to electronica and everything in between. However, one genre in particular seems to have become the other fail-safe way of ensuring you don't win Eurovision, or even getting close: anything retro. This would be bad news for any country who had plumped for the style, but it is especially so for the United Kingdom.

2007 more than any other year underscored that audiences simply are not voting for retro entries at Eurovision. Be it glam or disco, they're not having it, as the poor showings of Belgium in the semi-final and Sweden in the final showed. It is not an isolated phenomenon: the Finnish entry in 2002 and the Dutch entry in 2003 shared similar fates, for example, although in both of those cases the immediately preceding commercial breaks may have figured in their demise. Indeed, the reasons why televoters are shunning songs like One More Night and The Worrying Kind may be many and various, even if they are well-performed. (Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that Eurovision is seen as being cheesy enough without throwbacks to the era that started it all.) Whatever they may be, it suggests that Andy Abraham would be facing an uphill battle in Belgrade even if he wasn't directly qualified for the final.

In fact everything seems to be working against him. Since the introduction of the semi-final in 2004, those that have qualified from it have generally done much better than those who find themselves in the final from the outset. Moreover, with diaspora voting exerting greater and greater influence on the results, the bottom half of the scoreboard is largely becoming a dumping ground for automatic finalists from the West – and specifically to the extent in recent years that the Big Four (France, Germany, Spain and the United Kingdom) have come to be dubbed the Bottom Four. Conspiracy theorists claim that the UK has been unfairly exposed to a political cold shoulder in Eurovision since the nation's involvement in the Iraq war, the 'high' point of which being the famous nul points achieved by Jemini in 2003; realists tend to point out the relative weakness of their entries in the face of the competition. Either way the result is the same.

The irony the United Kingdom may face in 2008 then is that while hardly the most modern three minutes of music it has ever entered, Even If is arguably its best entry since 2002's Come Back, with a very solid performer in Andy Abraham, and yet has nary a hope of achieving the same kind of result. Its arrangement and composition are more than merely capable, but lack the edge that would get viewers saying “ooh, that's worth voting for”. It might not be able to strip Cry Baby of its unique 26th and very last place without a point to its name, but coupled with the lack of exposure in either of the semi-finals, plus the fact that 23 other songs will follow it in this year's line-up, it may well deliver the UK an even worse result than expected without deserving it at all. If so, I would hope it is the wake-up call the country needs to return to the days – not all that long ago – when it was one of the few in the contest to consistently pioneer contemporary music. For as competent as Even If may be, it is almost certainly not going to return them to the top of the scoreboard.