Ireland

Et Cetera Sinéad Mulvey & Black Daisy

"I've heard that oh so many times.."

You should never underestimate the importance of knowing your audience at Eurovision. A phenomenon with a disproportionately large gay following it may be, but the core of the target audience in an era where televoting holds such power is the text-addicted teenage market, predominantly girls. With the reintroduction of the juries, composers now also have to take the arguably (or at least preferably) more mature tastes of music professionals into account, or provide them with something they'll feel relatively comfortable with. Striking a balance between the two cannot be easy, despite the permutations, but the team behind this year's Irish entry Et Cetera have done a pretty good job of it - giving the kids a song with all the appeal of High School Musical and going totally eighties on the rest of the audience at the same time.

A crossover entry in a number of ways, Et Cetera has a world-weary pubescent attitude to it that will nevertheless resonate with anyone ever jilted in their formative years (especially if they coincided with the female pop/rock explosion of the mid-to-late 1980s). Given a fun, confident performance by Sinéad Mulvey and the slightly dowdy, slightly wooden Black Daisy - one which flicks a great big 'whatever' in the direction of all two-timing arseholes everywhere - the audience may just urge them on. Quite apart from which, there is enough about Et Cetera to also grab your average Eurovision fan, with a simple melody that sticks in your head almost instantly and a quintessential key change.

And yet they are the very reasons I'm doubting its chances. As competent as Et Cetera is, it is far from groundbreaking, and it is the kind of song that could very easily fall flat if it doesn't come together in precisely the way it should. Ireland haven't been helped by the draw either, coming this early on and followed immediately by the just as noisy but more offbeat Latvian entry. The fact that one third of the ESC line-up of Black Daisy is Lithuanian might secure the song double digits from Vilnius (repaying the compliment for once), but thereafter support may dwindle. It will come down to how well attuned Et Cetera is to its Thursday night audience, and how sympathetic they are to its plight. It is, after all, a song we've heard many times before.