Iz様 🌟

great to have a third top 20 in a row! <3 shame Ennea dropped but loved this entry from them, east rukahavian doing good, sovarasma doing 'fine' (but really not 'fine' enough )

Scotland 2 far too low whaat

thank you !!! and elgornio and the good old glorious nips! (get me back in that top 10 pls thx)

thank you nine & sabrewulf and thank you our glorious host neliönoir for an 18 omg!

thank you dan and josh! Very pleased to be getting such consistent points so far. 'fine', 'johnny kitagawa', 'let me be open', 'sky land, star land' and 'dimly lit cadaver' made up an incredible top 5 that ran the gauntlet of most of the styles I love seeing here, all need to be doing better, as do all the rest of my votes x suppose 'let me be open', 'snap' and 'rolling face' in the top 10 is a good start x

thank you for the 18 Mack!!!

WAH humu humu

wow thank you chez, julian and matto and chris in those last 2!!!

thank you dhwe and Harve, great to see high points from both as a start here <3

I feel like I know precisely nothing about how this is going to go despite reading the entire odds thread, I don't have many predictions to offer either. bring it on!

I like the changes to car parking fines that Burnham's pushing through, that and the £100 fine for headphones, a pretty deliberate strategy to tackle all the small little annoyances that end up grinding people down. Good strategy.

voted some very good alt coming out of semi 1 I mean rock I mean there's also good pop out of semi 2 I voted for, and also pop from semi 1 and maybe some alt from semi 2 also I gotta redo those alignment charts j00p asked me about

Texas - Summer Son Fontaines D.C. - Favourite Bananarama - I Want You Back Depeche Mode - Never Let Me Down Again Sade - Kiss of Life New Order - Regret another strong outing for the groups, especially fun Bananarama song and two of Texas and Fontaines' best.

Darin - En apa som liknar dig Gary Numan & Tubeway Army - Down in the Park Naughty Boy feat. Sam Smith - La La La Tom Grennan - Little Bit of Love Calvin Harris & Disciples - How Deep Is Your Love Sam Fender - Will We Talk? living for Darin lighting up this category still

Kate Bush - Wuthering Heights Robyn & Kleerup - With Every Heartbeat MARINA - Oh No! Sophie Ellis-Bextor - Murder on the Dancefloor Adele - Skyfall Zara Larsson & MNEK - Never Forget You 'Oh No' is one of my favourite Marina songs and she's on average my favourite artist in this lineup so for it to be 3rd (and I was considering 'Murder...' to go ahead of it too) is insane. 'Wuthering Heights' and 'With Every Heartbeat', utterly gorgeous songs and both revelations of their time. 'Skyfall''s a good Adele song too, just what a monster of a round - 'Never Forget You' is hardly bad either just a little bit more average radio pop compared to everything else in this round.

Difficult one. We need a public broadcaster, we just need a way of funding that that doesn’t piss off so many people. Not just a problem unique to Britain either, very familiar with the horror stories of Japan’s NHK trying to fund itself. also a wish for all streaming services to die in a fire until they provide consistent catalogues and reasonable ways to access their stuff - I’d be fine with a legacy content subscription (allowing that the most up to date stuff probably needs funding in a specific way) that I keep permanently like I do my music one, I don’t want to be jumping around services hunting for a specific movie or TV show that’s decades old at this point

I don’t know Agnes’ music really as well as I’d like, I shall have to check out all of these suggestions as definitely her earlier songs were very impressive. With Jonjo’s question, I suppose Leona was in quite a bit of danger with me (I think her best is Better In Time and possibly any dramatic film stuff she’s done I don’t know about) but yeah so were Zara, Adele and SEB from the start.

Does it make it worse or better for Agnes supporters if I make it clear ‘Here Comes The Night’ was bottom of my rank

Also envisaging that gamu round getting tougher and tougher to decide between

First of all, incredibly tough round to choose from - artists I wasn’t expecting to save choosing great songs - and no real weak links, but I did jot down my thought process so you can have that: As Calum suggested, I chose which two artists to eliminate and which six to save based on both the songs that were submitted for the round, as well as some nebulous decision making on how well the artist had done so far (I added up the rounds’ points to see this!) and my opinion on how much potential they’d have to go further, including whether or not they brought something different or skilled to the competition to leave it as interesting to as many people as possible. I think to avoid too many meta factors and perceived unluck for the eliminated ladies to have gotten me as a judge it’s best, and this is pretty much the truth, to imagine it as me submitting a ranking of the songs for that round but also with some slight weighting (that I chose not to actually quantify and it’s difficult to say for even me whether it changed anything) all the while considering that this rank was going to eliminate two artists and so to not be too frivolous with it. So effectively a lot of my personal opinion - but I tried to balance it a bit. For instance the mentor of Zara made the best choice they could have by choosing ‘Symphony’ as I think that’s by some distance the best song she’s ever been on, and I couldn’t eliminate her after that. Adele may have been the stereotypical target of my wrath as I do generally think she’s super overrated especially given she’s been doing very well round so far - though in this case I thought ‘All I Ask’ was a lovely understated song and she has a lot of potential, but there are certainly songs she could have submitted that I’d have no problems removing her for. Would have probably never eliminated Marina or Robyn, but both gave two of my favourites of theirs anyway (LOVE Mowgli’s Road and The Girl and the Robot), Kate Bush gave one of her best and I also enjoyed SEB’s a lot this time around. Yes some of these were features but the artists in question were the principal vocalists throughout - so I treat them much like their solo songs here. Probably before song choices I’d have considered seriously between Adele, Zara, SEB, Leona and Agnes. Afterwards… I enjoyed Agnes at the start and was interested to learn more of her songs but her last few song choices, including this one, didn’t feel special enough. As for Leona, I think ‘Footprints’ is an okay rousing ballad but it’s not amazing and in my opinion she had been dragging for me for a few rounds. Both felt like they were being outclassed in the lanes of Swedish pop and British balladeers respectively. To the mentors of Agnes and Leona Lewis, apologies for falling foul of this process, I tried to make it as fair as I could.

I wasn’t too enamoured with the Y&Y choices but iamamiwhoami were near the top of most of my group votes - excellent consistency throughout

(I guess revealing myself as a judge / sort of already revealed by the judge name I chose to keep does mean indeed I don’t have an act - I think it would be against the interests of fairness were I say M83’s mentor and they won the Gamu) In all honesty my not having an act comes down to me not checking the forum as much as I should and only finding out it was about to open right as I was in the middle of prepping BJSC semi results and so I had no time to prep one act let alone 3 potential ones. Entirely my bad but that’s pretty much why. Calum offered me to judge again soon after it started which was very lovely as I enjoyed it last year. As with rogue, see you in s4 maybe Plus lots of acts I had seriously considered to go for after last time aren’t European so my vague plans were thrown into chaos - I could have mentored M83 I guess had I thought of it (and a few acts still in!) and was indeed trying to act as if I were their mentor for a bit to sow up confusion.

I think Calum should encourage everyone to listen to the songs submitted during the results. Some great ones were submitted in my category.

I can’t speak for the other judges but the decisions I made were partly personal opinion (the songs made a difference) and partly what I thought would be best for the competition. Will explain fully after the results x

Incredible streaks for Leww and Rob both, sorry to see them go, admittedly on this occasion I did not vote for them (guessed this might be coming with the draw as it was) but both had incredible runs with many great entries among them particularly Rob with over 7 years of qualifying! Gutted to see The Mountain Goats out with Trifoski and Lentyll with Ina, thought Lentyll might struggle but didn’t call Trifoski in danger at all. Jadakissnia too among those near to my votes. Pool Kids from semi 1 were a great live band, sad to see them out too but somewhat expected also. excellent thread to read this evening blacksquare <3