Eurovision Song Contest 2023

National Final season starts today, so time to get the thread underway.

Will be hosted in Liverpool, England as Ukraine obviously aren't able to fulfil hosting duties.

37 countries will partake this year, which is the lowest since 2014. Bulgaria, Montenegro and North Macedonia have withdrawn, whilst Russia and Belarus are obviously still expelled.

Semi-final 1: 9th May 2023

Semi-final 2: 11th May 2023

Final: 13th May 2023

As usual, this calendar from Eurovision World is a handy resource to have to follow National Final/song reveals throughout the season.

Here's to hoping for a less politically charged contest in 2023 😬

Eurovision 2023.

Interesting article about the Irish approach to next year.

Says our National Final will be a part of the Late Late as usual but the studio panel won’t be allowed to vote this time. They’ll also be encouraged to give their honest opinions after last year’s nonsense. Says RTE has received about 330 songs, which is currently being trimmed down. Michael Kealy is certainly saying all the right things, just remains to be seen whether we’ll end up with the same old shíte as always. In a year where Wild Youth and Cruachan have expressed an interest in taking part, I’ll be very disappointed (but ultimately unsurprised) if we end up with the usual cast of either reality tv rejects or people connected to RTE.

Ukraine

Surprised they picked this. It's two minutes and forty seconds of.. nothing really. Ukraine always sell the hell out of their entries though, so it'll look and sound a lot better in Liverpool. Surely this isn't winning though... right?!

I tuned in about halfway through, had no idea this was supposed to be on tonight!

It varies every year, much of it depends on the floor plan of the arena and when the staging/green room/camera placements have been decided.

Previous years:

• Eurovision 2022: 7 April 2022
• Eurovision 2021: No public sale
• Eurovision 2020: 12 December 2019
• Eurovision 2019: 18 February 2019
• Eurovision 2018: 30 November 2017
• Eurovision 2017: 14 February 2017
• Eurovision 2016: 26 November 2015
• Eurovision 2015: 15 December 2014
• Eurovision 2014: 29 November 2013
• Eurovision 2013: 26 November 2012

So keeping an eye on social media, the Eurovision fan sites and signing up to Eurovision email updates are really the only way to go!

There's also a snippet of Down In The Rain on YouTube, but the full song is on Spotify

Just sounds like a generic rap song you'd see on pretty much any Spotify playlist to be honest.

I think the Adgy song is the best of the potential entries released so far. That's if the above list is true of course, we see a lot of false rumours posted online every Eurovision season, but they were correct about the Norwegian songs so seems reasonably trustworthy.

Seems like Wild Youth are definitely one of the contenders then so. It seems the songs are being unveiled on Ryan Tubridys show throughout this week.