2018 Eurovision Reviews – United Kingdom

It’s safe to say that the United Kingdom are flailing a bit when it comes to Eurovision, and at the turn of the 21^st Century, the nation have barely managed to escape the bottom half of the results table. Despite that, they have been trying to turn things around albeit with varying degrees of success. For the third year now, the Big 5 nation has chosen to use a national final format to select their artist, and this year the winning artist was SuRie with her song Storm. Will it cause a storm in the voting, or will the voters rain on the UK’s parade once again?

Rewind back to the national final for this year, where there were a total of six competing artists with admittedly six pretty bland entries. It’s the curse of the UK, where you feel that they’ve put effort into holding a national final to pick the best entry, but ironically none of the choices would be good enough to shake things up at Eurovision. It’s picking the best of a bad bunch, and sorry to say, but I don’t even think they managed to do that this year.

Going into the national final, my favourite was RAYA with Crazy by far, but even that was a fairly generic pop entry that would have also failed to make an impact at the contest. Despite that, what we’ve ended up with is SuRie, a charismatic and passionate artist who has been to the contest before as a backing artist, and now gets her chance to shine on the Eurovision stage front and centre. It’s just a shame that the song absolutely does not do her justice.

We saw at the national final that SuRie has a fantastic voice, and her Eurovision experience will give her an edge on some of the other participants, but after performing backing vocals for Loïc Nottet and being involved with Blanche’s Eurovision entry last year, surely inspiration could have been taken from their songs to allow SuRie to compete with a song to the standard of those two?

It baffles me that we’ve ended up with Storm, as it feels like such a dated, but still generic pop entry. We saw with the revamp of the song that they’ve added a more ‘current’ beat to try bring it into the 21^st century but realistically it’s done nothing to improve this. We’ve got some classic clichéd lyrics in some of the competing entries this year, but Storm manages to use every cliché in the book, and because of that, there’s nothing about this song that sounds original.

I hate to be the one to rain on their parade, and I always like to see the positives in things, and the big positive is SuRie as a performer. The song might be average, but the appeal in this entry is definitely her. She’s had an active presence on social media, engaging with fans, and she is compelling to watch, and that presence might translate on the Eurovision stage and score the UK some much needed votes.

All aboard… the express to the final train!

The United Kingdom have the privilege to be automatically in the final, but at times it feels that the opportunity is taken for granted. Knowing the styles of music coming out of the UK outside the context of Eurovision challenges me, and a lot of other fans too, as we know that the nation is capable of good song writing and good performances.

Despite that, the song is getting some good reviews on the official YouTube music video, so maybe this has more of a chance than I’m led to believe. For me, I just don’t see this getting out of the 20’s on the result table, and it would be a shame for the UK, but I don’t think it matches the quality of most of the other competing entries.

Our Rating: 4/10

If you support the UK at Eurovision, make sure to vote for SuRie in our poll! Watch her official video below, and follow our Eurovision 2018 playlist on Spotify.