2017 Eurovision Review – Greece

Greece had such a great qualifying streak in Eurovision, however last year, Greece missed out on the final for the first time since semi-finals were introduced in 2004. This year, with the hope of bringing Greece back to the final, they internally selected one of their biggest acts, Demy, and they announced that there would be three songs commissioned for the Greek audience to choose from. All three songs had the music composed by Dimitris Kontopoulos, and lyrics written by either Romy Papadea or John Ballard. One song dominated both the televoting and jury voting, and the song This is Love is the song that Demy will be performing on the Eurovision stage. Is this what Greece needs to return to the final?

I think Greece will return to the final, but I don’t believe they deserve to. From their national final, all three songs were abysmal, and This is Love was the best of a bad batch. Demy has a voice I’m not really a fan of, but being friends with someone who follows Demy’s career, he assured me that none of the songs suited her voice. Having the same three people work on all the songs is a risky move – they could either all be of a great standard or they could all be lacklustre, and unfortunately it’s the latter of the two. If other songwriters were commissioned, we might have seen some variety but it was not meant to be.

The song itself I find to be tacky, cheap, predictable and boring. If this song was in Eurovision 10 years ago, this would have done incredibly well, but there is nothing in this song that is making me love this. The lyrics are so cliché that they could have been written by a kindergartener and I would have believed it. There is nothing unique or attention grabbing about these lyrics, or the song in general. Sure, it builds from a more ballad style to more of a pop song but it’s all the things we’ve heard before. The pop part of the song sounds like Germany’s 2013 entry Glorious, and that didn’t work even in 2013. Honestly, even if this had better lyrics, I could deal with it, but the music and lyrics combination is so awful that it pains me to even listen to the entire three minutes of the song.

The video clip for the song is shot in incredible locations, and Demy is a beautiful girl, but they cheapen the whole video by adding lyrics into the video in a font found in Microsoft Word. Between the first version and the final version, they also changed the lyrics in the chorus from ‘Rain falls from above’ to ‘reaching out for the stars’ and this makes zero improvements. From one cheesy lyric to another, equally as bad.

I don’t like being negative towards a song but I need to call a bad song a bad song. Everything about it screams ‘budget’ and there is really nothing I like about this song at all. If I could have my way, this wouldn’t be qualifying to the final, however, it’s semi-final 1, which I feel has less competition, and it’s also Greece, and it has a certain following already from Eurofans – which I cannot relate to! All I hope is that a great song from semi-1 doesn’t get left behind because this took the spot.

With all that said, I’m sure you don’t expect a high score and you’d be right. I’m giving this a 2/10, brutal I know, but if there’s a song I don’t feel the urge to listen to, it’s not a song I can give a high score.

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