Belgium 1999: review
placings given in form (actual placing/my placing)
The songs can be heard at Eurovisionary, and there are pictures of the singers at Belgian Eurovision Union, in case you're thoroughly flummoxed by now.
Eurovision may have changed almost beyond recognition over the last few years, but some things will always stay the same. Malta will bring their candles along. Somebody from eastern Europe will screech. And since the days of Sandra Kim, Belgium will send a young girl singing her happy song. No, I don't know what happened with Frederic Etherlinck, unless Dana International wasn't as ground-breaking as she was made out to be.
Of course, we're not talking just Eurovision here, but national finals, and so there are some more items to throw into the pot, or perhaps the cauldron. Stir it a little, add some pepper and salt, don't forget the Spice, and you've got yourself a full-scale Eurodrama. The blazing row where somebody threatens to pull out, usually blamed on something as insignificant as 'what they said about our Pierre at our Sylvie's wedding'. The silly song that makes you want to hide under a rock when you hear it, and feed your Belgian passport to the animals in the zoo in Brussels (no, we're not talking about the European Commissioners). Then of course there's the girl who you hoped would win, should have won, but ended up with less points than Tor Endresen could count on five fingers.
Belgium started off on a good foot by deciding to have three heats, each with seven songs, in their preselection, which would then lead to a final round with eight songs. Four 'big-name' Belgian artists were invited to the final round; the three heat winners also went through, along with the best runner-up in the three heats. Four radio stations, a professional jury and televoters awarded points, 9-7-6-5-4-3-2-1.
The first heat on the 7th of February began with Splinter (5/4), a light-rock group, with the song 'Als schepen verwelken', 'When ships die'. The first of many Titanic cash-ins, perhaps? Fé (2/1) provided the first dance song, 'Love me'. I'd never have described Belgium's specialty as dance until this year, but 'Love me' turned out to be only the first of many. Fé, or Wendy Strubbe as she's known to her mama (heyah, mama), had very short spiky dark hair, and has frequently contended for Miss Belgium. Even though she turned up to this heat in a rather strange silver Lurex outfit, I should still hope so too.
Piece of Cake (6/3) are a two-piece boyband who sang 'Do it again'. Unfortunately, they didn't get a chance to, which was perhaps a shame. Ivan Vermeer, one of the lads, is studying to be a hairdresser. I hope, in that case, he didn't have too much to do with the neo-Elvis styles he and Stefan sported, otherwise he may just have ruled himself out of a career. Belle Perez (2/7) then gave us 'Hello world': the worst title, and almost the worst song, I've ever heard. The Belgians thought Matadi (7/5) were also up for that accolade. Certainly this wasn't your ordinary Belgian ballad: Matadi are a multi-ethnic group whose song was in heaven knows what language, and their lead singer took the stage dressed in an air hostess uniform to sing 'Wo-y-yé' about, it seemed, airline destinations. And little else. Controversy erupted before the show when their ex-lead singer took them to court for dropping her (she must have been awful...) and it even seemed at one point as if they'd be disqualified for not having kept the same line-up as when they submitted their song.
Vanessa Chinitor (1/2) is a young blonde, in a red latex Thing for the heat, who looks very like another Belgian singer Dana Winner (oh what a name), and also like another young-ish blonde whose name is spelt rather like Ms Winner's, but with an extra I. Vanessa's song, 'Like the wind' (but is there a candle in that wind?) was tipped to win, and did. In fact, she almost paralysed the Belgian phonelines doing so. Margriet (4/6), unless it was Chiara moonlighting from Malta, closed off the night with 'Ik var met je mee'.
Heat two, on the 14th, was opened by Bjorn and Joery (6/6), two brothers who gave us 'Je doet wat je doet'. Bjorn comes from a rock group called Triple Nipple, but this song failed to live up to the cringeworthy possibilities of his background. They were followed by Matiz (3/1), a far more satisfactory specimen of the male sex. At least, he is if you're a teenage girl living in Belgium, in which case you're no doubt infatuated with the boyband EnZo. Matiz sang 'Negentien', the catchiest song of his heat, even though the introduction owed rather a lot to the Italian DJ Robert Miles. He nearly didn't participate at all, after a professional juror was rude about Fé (no doubt saying something like: 'That hairline can't really be natural...') and her manager threatened to pull his other client Matiz out.
Laurena (3/4) sang 'Diamond in heaven', a rather slow ballad that I still liked, despite myself. If she'd only screamed a bit more at the end, she might have done it. The same couldn't be said for Voice Male (2/5) - the a cappella group's 'This is my life' finished as best runner-up overall and went into the final on the 28th. It's not my life, is all I can say.
Dave Gilles (7/7) sang 'Waar ben jij?', 'Where are you?' At last count there were four songs in the various national finals with this title, but possibly the Belgians realised how unoriginal it all was. He was followed by Wendy Fierce (1/2), a young blonde in a dress as short as that one, who eventually won the heat with 'Never give up', and by quite a large margin. (A pattern emerging, perhaps?) Frank Galan (5/4) terminated proceedings with 'Dame tu vida', sung in Spanish. It wasn't a bad song, only awful...
The third heat, on the 21st, seemed to have the highest concentration of people you'd actually heard of. Martine Foubert (2/4) wasn't one of these, and after 'Come with me', I knew why. Possibly there's been a little book going the rounds of the Belgian songwriters called 'How to win a Belgian preselection', as this was a song about, that's right, how wonderful it would be if everyone loved each other. Yves Seghers (6/7) with his song 'Recht vooruit', 'Go straight ahead', obviously hadn't read the book.
Then it was time for the highlight of the whole Belgian preselection, Alana Dante (1/1). 'Highlight' would seem to be the operative word, as Alana, the most popular Flemish-language female singer, does look as if she's just stepped out of the 1980s, and used a vocorder (the thing in 'Believe' that makes Cher's voice do that) in her I song. Notwithstanding that, if she got to Jerusalem she'd certainly have picked up the full 15 in her Collective entry, and that includes the five beauty-points. She seemed to have everything you need for a successful Eurovision dance song, including the unique command of English. 'Get ready for the sunsand'? Whatever you say.
Nadia (4/3), the mother of one of the boys from Piece of Cake, chose that moment to tell us all 'I'm in heaven'. The same might not have gone for Marijeke Spijkers, her backing singer, who at least scored more points than she did in 1997 when she formed 20% of Mrs Einstein and therefore presumably had one point to call her very own. Ricky Fleming (7/6) did less well, coming last with 'Door jou'. Dominic (3/5), a seventeen-year-old girl, sang 'Tonight's the night', even though it wasn't the night for her, before K3 (5/2) wrapped things up with 'Heyah mama', an insanely catchy little number that has been stuck in my head ever since. This is one to either like, or loathe. Likewise the three women 'd'un certain age' who formed the band.
The final round, with eight contestants, took place on the 28th of February and was opened by Wendy Fierce (2/5), who came awfully close to never giving up. She had given up the dress, however, and was wearing an iridescent creation that was a different colour depending on which angle you looked at it. The same more or less went for her hair, which was red-with-blonde-highlights, frighteningly reminiscent of Ginger Spice. Natural High (7/7), the first of the invited entrants, were a trio composed of the singer Isabelle A and two dancers who were meant to be younger, although if VRT's biography hadn't told us, we wouldn't have known; 'Finally', which claimed to be a dance song, was only marginally less enticing than the song from Voice Male (5/8).
Medusa (8/6), a seventeen-year-old, was the second invited entrant, backed by the far more famous band Astroline. They might have done better leaving her at home, as 'Come into my life' scored only three points more than the minimum. 'Come into my life' is also a song by the Italian singer Gala, who Alana Dante (3/1) is very like. For this performance she did without the vocorder, which seems to have been a mistake, as she scored very low points from the radio listeners.
You're always in for something out of the ordinary with Petra (6/3), the Belgian Madonna, familiar to Eurofans for her previous Belgian-final appearance in 1993 with 'Ga door', when she dyed her hair silver. This time she and her dancers began the song under a large white sheet (don't say that's where she should have stayed...), and her song, 'Diep in mijn huid', also lived up to the Petra-expectation, switching between languages halfway and in a style that defies definition. Which could also be said of Vanessa Chinitor's outfit (1/2). The 25-song, 4-week event was finally wrapped up by another young girl Sarah (4/4), whose guitar-led 'He's the one' sounded just a little like Poland's Sixteen last year, but evidently not enough.
It seems every single Belgian, except perhaps the ones who work for the telephone company, wanted Vanessa to sing their song, as she came out with only four points short of the maximum. Even the professional jurors, who were rather fond of making their opinions known, had only nice things to say about the girl from Dendermonde.
Now what I want to know are why my placings usually coincide quite well with the way things actually turned out. After all, I'm the one who predicted that song would win in Birmingham. Damn, maybe I'm living in the wrong country...