Hungary

Dance With Me Zoli Ádok

"It's an overload in a disco fantasy..."

There's only so long you can plough the same furrow at Eurovision before you realise it's not bearing any fruit. You can keep sowing the same seeds, or you can accept that the climate's not right for your chosen crop. You might have produced a pair of prize pumpkins over the years, but the rest have been lemons, and you're faced with a market that wants something you're not giving them. So what do you do? You follow Hungary's example: instead of the old turnip no one wanted, you offer them something the young'uns might go for. When you're told you're not allowed to do that, you revert to type and proffer something more traditional for the grown-ups. And when that's withdrawn from sale, you finally grasp that what your market wants is something altogether fruitier. So that's what you serve up. In musical terms, it's known as gay disco. In ESC09 terms, that means Ádokzoli and Dance With Me.

Described by a friend of mine as "more of a sound than a song", the Hungarian entry for Moscow is a surprisingly apt choice in a contest known for its fruity following - all the more so for the fact that it was broadcaster MTV's third. Having clearly decided to abandon the prim, old-fashioned path they took in 2008, they originally signed up twink Márk Zentai - Hungary's answer to Zac Efron - to perform the teen-friendly How We Party before being alerted to the song's having broken the rules for being sung by someone on Swedish Big Brother in 2006 (or something; it doesn't really matter what), at which they duly appointed their second choice Kátya Tompos as their Eurovision representative. Turns out the singer of the worthy if sombre Magányos Csónak would be too busy in May though, and the song was withdrawn, leaving MTV and the rest of Europe scratching their heads. With their pop departure and arthouse options squashed, where would they go next?

It's probably true to say that few people would have expected it to be the camp and kitsch route the contest has gained such a reputation from. Taking their time on their third and final reveal, MTV made sure that Dance With Me fell within the bounds of originality How We Party had not and that performer Zoltán Ádok would not be having his chest hair trimmed or his teeth bleached for those two weeks in May before unleashing the song on the world. Most people's reaction to it was positive, impressed by its expensive preview video in particular, but tempered by the fact that however original it was in terms of the Eurovision rules, it remained hugely derivative of the genre. This, combined with the retro feel of the song and Hungary's no-friends status in the contest (which would have made Magányos Csónak the perfect entry for them), has led most punters to doubt the song's chances.

I'll concede that Dance With Me is not the kind of thing that will necessarily do well at Eurovision, but I'm not as ambivalent about its potential as a lot of people seem to be. Ádokzoli comes across as the consummate performer, and in a run of uptempo songs where he finds himself in competition with Greece's Sakis Rouvas I'm at a loss to explain why so few people believe in his ability to pose a threat: there's no evidence he can't sing live, which we all know is Sakis' Achilles heel, and Dance With Me is not all that dissimilar to This Is Our Night. Both are as queer as folk, but at least Zoltán has no qualms about playing the role of "whopping great poofter"* the song demands. He can sing and dance at the same time, and he puts the 'Aryan' in Hungarian in a come-hither way that makes you go 'woof!'.** If that's not enough to sell the song, I don't know what is. I mean, if beanpole queen Deen could qualify in 2004 with the zesty In The Disco, what's to stop our Zoli?

*...as said friend of mine put it :)

**He may well put the 'hung' in Hungarian, too, but that's not for here ;-)