Following their absence in last years contest and their return to this years’ , Cyprus have decided to gear up a notch this year, and have had probably the largest broadcasted selection in Europe this year. A total of 54 songs went through audition rounds and semi finals in order to choose the best representative for Cyprus. It ended with a national final consisting of 6 songs.
Before I will get to the winner, I will briefly review the other 5 candidates:
Hovig – Stone in a River : Hovig is from Armenian descent, and would have probably gained some extra points for that. The song is actually a nice ballad, but Hovig provided a very amateurish performance; being out of tune, mixing some lyrics and with horrible English. No big loss here. (Result: 4th).
Doody – Magic : Doody has a long connection to Eurovision as he is the younger brother of Constantinos Christoforou, who represented Cyprus before in 3 different occasions, and also have written this song. Some criticism within Cyprus was raised as Constantinos had previously performed with former Eurovision participant and judge in this selection, Despina Olympiou. Doody’s song is quite a generic pop song, his singing abilities are quite bad, and he can’t even pronounce the title of his song properly. Definitely would have been the worst choice in this selection. (Result: 5th).
Panagiotis Koufogiannis – Without Your Love : This was actually the televote winner, that finish 5th with the juries. The song was too much of a cliche Eurovision ballad, and despite Panagiotis being quite good vocally, he lacked any charisma to pull off this king of song in a good way. (Result: 2nd).
Minus One – Shine : Not much to say about this one, it’s basically just a typical rock song, nothing special, nothing horrible. The performance was below average, dull not in tune and very uninspiring. It won the jury vote, but finished last in the televote, says it all. (Result: 3rd).
Nearchos Evangelou & Charis Savva – Deila den agapo : The song not to be performed in English, it is performed in Greek and some sort of dialect of French ;). Despite not understating what they’re singing about, its quite a heartbreaking ballad, and they are both excellent performance with great chemistry. However, these type of duets seems to not do so well in Eurovision for some reason. Charis is also not a stranger to the Eurovision stage, as she was a part of the act who represented the country in the Junior Eurovision Song Contest in 2008. All in all this could have been a good entry for Cyprus, however with little chance to succeed in Vienna. (Result: 6th).
This leaves us with the winnier, Giannis Karagiannis, or John Karagiannis as he will probably be known around Europe. The song finished 2nd in both the jury and televote, and since the lack of consistency between the two with the other songs it ended up winning the whole thing.
The song is a little mid-tempo song that develops quite well. The first thing I thought of when I head this song is its resemblance to Cyprus’ Eurovision 2004 entry, ‘Stronger Every Minute‘ by Lisa Andreas. This is not a coincidence as Giannis co-wrote the song with Mike Connaris who is the man behind the latter song. Giannis provides a clean performance, vocally very good and also manages to create some sort of intimacy with the viewer.
This song can easily achieve a nice result for Cyprus, with the same effect that gave Belgium’s Tom Dice success in 2010, and of course seeing as its the male counterpart to Cyprus’ 2004 Eurovision entry it can only bode well for it. So far this is probably a very likely qualifier, but we’ll just have to see how it fairs against the other songs which are still not chosen. Cyprus did well by choosing their entry this year, as this is definitely the one with the most potential in the contest.
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