dandy*

That sounds horrific 😕 what a horrible way to go

#10 in the mids for week 3 is way beyond my expectations, incredible result!! 🤩

The first three were fantastic, definitely watch them! Although no idea whether they will seem as good now in retrospect if you don’t have the nostalgia of seeing them at the time… hopefully they still stand up though

The Mint Royale / Laverne track is great - but who thought that January was a good time to promote it?!!! It always had Summer written all over it

Yes that made me howl as well 😂

I really enjoyed this. There are a few bits that made me laugh, but largely I just really enjoyed the feel of it.

I find Will.i.am quite intriguing as a personality, he seems very quirky and appears to have pretty decent taste in things... difficult to believe that he typically made such generic sounding music, of which that one is a perfect example. Although it goes beyond generic to quite cringy in his own parts, especially when he's asking everyone to say hell yeah etc.

That's only one aspect though. It's one of the reasons I still choose to buy music I really love, even if it's only a digital file... but for most people buying music isn't good value for money, they could spend £30-£40 on one vinyl (or let's say £10 on a CD?) and then also buy the kit to play them on; or they could utilise their phones they already have to just listen to anything they want to for a comparatively small amount a month. There's clearly so many valid reasons for a lot of people to love streaming, even if you personally don't.

I'm not watching so I can't judge properly - but my view when I heard what they were planning was that it was completely unnecessary and very likely out of sync with what football fans would want.

Favourites: Frankie Goes To Hollywood - Two Tribes this has grown on me so much over the years since I first heard it, I always used to think it was second best to Relax but now I think it's much better Bronski Beat - Smalltown Boy one of the best synth tracks of the decade, also one of the first songs I can remember hearing that had such a prominent LBGTQ+ theme Grandmaster And Melle Mel - White Lines (Don't Do It) One of the first rap tracks I can remember hearing and loving Nik Kershaw - I Won't Let The Sun Go Down On Me Another track that's really grown on me over the years Cyndi Lauper - Time After Time Gorgeous, one of the best ballads of the 80s Almost there but sadly no room: Alison Moyet - Love Resurrection Tina Turner - What's Love Got To Do With It Bruce Springsteen - Dancing In The Dark The Smiths - Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now

Ain’t Nobody should have won that tie break! I’ve not visited this thread for a while but will try to remember to vote again ☺️

The Bravery is the best one here! Gah!

I’ve finally taken the plunge and ordered a copy of Tori Amos’ From the Choirgirl Hotel. It gets more expensive each year and she’s indicated that a rerelease is really unlikely so I’ve just bought one from Discogs. I’ve paid more than I’d have ideally liked but it’s one of my grails so it’s okay Just the slightly nervous wait now for it to arrive as I’ve ordered a NM copy and I won’t want it to be anything less!

Agree with that one, very annoying and whiny!

Oh I completely missed this, sorry! Will try to listen if I can ☺️

I really like Rise, I think it's definitely Gabrielle's best single. It deserved #1 and it is great to see it increased sales in week two as more people discovered it. I think I probably was one of them. Both Glorious and The Great Beyond are also really fab singles. I think I bought Andreas Johnson's album as well as the single, sadly it didn't live up to the promise of Glorious.

I don’t remember Turn Up The Music at all, not inclined to change that. Sing is absolutely diabolical. One of the worst songs to top the charts so pretty confident that would hold last spot for me this year. Impossible is kinda okay. Not heard it for a very long time but I don’t think I hated it as much as I normally dislike the winners songs

Tourist was the song I already knew that I thought had the potential to attract lots of voters… so we’re sort of in agreement after all Rich!

I like that one, I’m a sucker for that type of combination as well

I don’t really understand why so many people get their hopes up so much for each tournament when essentially every country ends up disappointed aside from one. I always go into it assuming we won’t win and maybe one day I’ll be pleasantly surprised instead.

Erasure making the top 50 is great to see, especially as their real hits of the decade were all in the lower sales period. They had a near perfect run of singles between Sometimes and the end of the self titled album. In My Arms wasn’t bad either.

Oh and I was going to send something from this to the next contest so they could have been entered twice in a row! But I just thought I’d share the album here anyway as I don’t feel like we talk about new indie enough atm

Hurrah! Glad someone else is enjoying this... I really do feel like the early singles fit well with this album though and wish they'd just included them. For ease for anyone else who wants to listen, here's the playlist I have for it with the earlier 3 singles included as well.

It's a lot easier to take losing if you feel like you didn't actually deserve to win the match (in the assumption that the unlikely event of them levelling occurs!) - and that's the case here really. They've done well to get this far but to my untrained eye they've looked like they've struggled a lot today.

I don't think anyone would say they didn't deserve to score tbh - they have been much better than we have been since the opening goal