BillyH

Out of nowhere a ton of tickets for the Afternoon Rehearsal of the Grand Final suddenly appeared today for about £70 each, so that’s my first tickets secured since Turin 2022! (they’re high up and still crazy prices for a rehearsal compared to a few years ago, but I’m fine with that as I can just go back to my Copenhagen hotel that evening if needed to watch the real thing!)

LadBaby has reversed his promise and announced "Fairytale of Sausage Rolls" as a tribute to Shane. not really

I feel like every year I make a have I/haven't I got tickets post, and I hoped that this time it would be a bit more relaxed (just as Stockholm 2016 was) as we're finally back to a November release after a few years where the tickets were put on sale much closer to the contest, but...yeah, no. 172,000 in the queue at 9am UK time and I'm only just below 100,000 now. It really does seem like the 2010s days of just casually getting a ticket on the day they go on sale and flights and accommodation still being normally priced is a thing of the past now. Admittedly two of the easier years I got everything I wanted were when it was held in Ukraine and Israel (both in a safer environment than now) but even for Stockholm and Lisbon it was never this much of a scrum. I've got my flights and room booked so I guess I'll be watching from a Eurovillage in Malmo - or even better if there's one in Copenhagen so I don't have any problems getting back to my Danish hotel at whatever time it finishes!

When did Wham overtake The Pogues, was it the second half of the 2010s? During the iTunes days it seemed to be AIWFCIY and Fairytale of New York being the main battle each year.

This is such a welcome change from the dark days of the late 2010s when it looked like streaming had killed off any hope of a Eurovision top 40 hit - was it just the Eurovision audience taking a while to move from downloads to streaming, or a lack of songs that crossed over to the UK public? There’s definitely a link between TikTok and chart success in recent years here which started with Think About Things, followed by Arcade (a year older but it didn’t go top 40 until two years after release) and then the really successful last few years. Admittedly it’s gone in waves in the past, there were long runs in the physical era when even the UK entry got ignored and rarely would you see a CD release here of anything else, but in the download era and especially by 2014 it looked like that was finally starting to change only for streaming to come in and another lull begin. Hopefully it won’t now fizzle back out into the occasional low top 75 hit again from next year and great to see those four top ten hits.

I spent most of the night sitting at home annoyed that I’d completely failed to get anywhere near Liverpool and never had a chance (no tickets, which were too expensive anyway, and no trains able to get me there), and the end of it watching almost all my favourites completely die a death with the voting - my top 3 came 9th, 19th and last respectively. Loreen was in my top 10 but I can’t find myself particularly excited about a country who last won 8 years ago with a singer who already won 11 years ago, similar to how underwhelmed I’d have been had Russia won in 2016. I’ll be streaming the hell out of Solo anyway in the days ahead, the great 1998 summer hit that never was.

Same, although I did hold onto two £490 hospitality tickets for as long as possible in my basket (not even for the live final but the jury final) until I wisely saw sense and released them! I can't complain too much as I've been to five of them from 2016-22 and for many this will be their first opportunity. I already have my accommodation and train tickets sorted so if extras become available then great, otherwise it's very easy this time to pop back home from Liverpool to watch it at home instead. The days of €130 standing Live Grand Final tickets seen as recently as Lisbon 2018 seem pretty gone now, unless a country like Moldova win. Now watch loads of people who didn't get tickets cancel their hotel bookings they nabbed months ago and hopefully make them a bit more available and affordable!

I remember reading a few articles over the years of others who did this but I presumed this became impossible after 2008 when #1s gradually stopped being released physically - there was a lot of buzz and media interest when Crazy by Gnarls Barkley reached #1 just on downloads, but this was really only due to the rules changing at that time which allowed a song to chart a week before physical release which was still needed at the time. Coldplay’s Viva La Vida was the first with no physical release in the UK (but got one abroad) and Leona’s Run the first with no physical anywhere, neither of which got noticed outside of chart forums like this. My main physical single years spanned 2007 to 2010, I had a fair few from that time but they later got left behind in a house move. I’ll be gutted if any are worth anything now but given the amount I still see for pennies in charity shops I’m guessing not.

As a Londoner, Liverpool is brilliant news, far cheaper by train than Glasgow would have been. The hotels are already insane but I’m hoping for some extra late night trains/buses to London, or what happened in Turin when everyone cancelled their refundable hotel bookings after they failed to get tickets and after that there were loads of cheap options available. The accommodation being crazy/full from the *day of* the city announcement really has been a recent thing in this decade, as late as Tel Aviv (and Lisbon, Kiev, Stockholm before that) everything just stayed the same price and you could book easily at any time. Makes things much more annoying when planning.

A couple of years ago I did a test with my parents (born 1967) when I picked the most well-known song from every Now album and asked if they knew it or not. They knew everything from the 1980s with ease. They also knew the 1990s but a few only after listening to them rather than just reading the title & artist name. They finally reached a blank at about the year 2000 (Now 46 I think) when they’d have been 33, and only the occasional one or two after that. Having just turned 34 myself there’s at least one song in this thread that I haven’t heard at all (Easy On Me) and a few I only recently heard years after they were released (Perfect, Despacito, Someone You Loved) - this can seem absolutely baffling to those much more connected to recent music, but Random Music’s post is a good overview of how songs that can seem all conquering and unescapable do in fact escape quite a few when it isn’t part of their daily life. For me songs become much less recognisable in the last five years with the exception of Eurovision stuff and the occasional movie hit like Shallow or Greatest Showman songs. I’d agree with Valerie (the Amy cover) and Shape of You, along with the 21-era Adele tracks. Probably Happy as well, I would have said Rather Be a few years ago but not sure anymore.

It’s a bit confusing this year (and tbf every year) as there’s only a small standing area and it wasn’t put on general sale, it just went to the OGAE pre-sale etc - the seated tickets for the grand final were as high as €350 which is slightly insane. In perspective Lisbon 2018 was €120 for standing and that was a massive floor open to everyone, which subsequently shot up by about £200 the following year in Tel Aviv and hasn’t gone down that much since. I’ve just gone for the jury final the previous night which I was able to get pretty speedily yesterday, happily soon after a ton of cheap hotel/guesthouses in Turin suddenly became available again presumably from people cancelling their bookings after not getting tickets. Flights were booked at Christmas when they were really affordable (into Turin and out of Milan) so looks like I’ll be at Eurovision for the first time in three years - even if it’s just jury final and Eurovillage!

I predict this to reach #2, have a few years of underrated status, be used in a successful 2030 romcom film, and finally top the chart in 2047, just before One More Sleep finally gets there too. In all honesty I love this, I actually heard it a few weeks ago when Ed performed it at my workplace (with strict instructions not to film/record it!) and I thanked him for writing a new classic which he seemed to appreciate. Will happily have this become a new festive fave which only seems to happen about once a decade these days.

It really is less "these are the biggest songs of the year" these days and more "here's who we could get to show up". I don't think anyone on either special is in the YTD top ten? Ideal lineup would include Ed, Adele, Maneskin, Lil Nas X, Dua Lipa, Maneskin, Olivia Rodrigo and Maneskin, but I suppose getting them to show up in a cold studio in Elstree to do a couple of takes of their hit single/s and leave is too much work.

Adele feat. Ed Sheeran - Fairytale of New York (with Elton on piano for the hell of it)

Amazingly I was at this and it won’t be a surprise to say the atmosphere was euphoric - seeing them in a 800 capacity venue will be nice to compare to their Brixton gig in February which holds almost 5000! Mammamia got a crazy reaction and with the release of the video I’m hoping it’ll be another top 40 hit for them.

I sold my copies of Now 53 and 58 on cassette last summer on eBay and was genuinely shocked by how much they went for after some bidding wars - one for £28 and one for £41!! One was bought in WHSmith in 2007 for £3 (the last time I saw cassettes on sale for years) and the other cost just 30p at a car boot sale in 2008, so that was a heck of a profit! Presumably the 2000s releases are quite sought after as there can’t be many of them.

Ok, so the 21 year old me absolutely loved this to the point where me and a few other Buzzjackers predicted at the time it would be the first #1 of the 2010s - it was one of the very last songs I bought on CD single along with ‘Bad Romance’ at the end of 2009! Annoyingly the radio edit cuts out the best bit of the song that’s intact on the video version (the long build-up at the start) so to make the video mix you’d have to edit it in from the full version which I never bothered to do. I’ve seen Wiley “live” twice (V2012 and Reading 2017) but he just mimed to the original songs which was a bit underwhelming and the crowd was pretty toxic. I’ll probably bow out of this thread by around the end of 2014 as the start of the decade was peak clubbing era for me (when they’d play I Gotta Feeling about three times a night and tease the opening riff at random points between other songs) but once I turned about 26 I know less and less songs and my social life changed. But I’m more than happy to revisit the first half of the decade and if the next song is what I think it is it’s a proper evocative banger!

I don't know if this would work the other way around as US hits that did nothing chartwise in the UK seem to eventually be known here anyway - see 'Baby Got Back' (#1 US, #56 UK) and T-Pain's 'Buy U A Drank' (#1 US, #DNC UK) as two examples of that.

Trying to think back to the last time it was this open in terms of winning contenders on the day of the final, maybe 2011? Euphoria, Only Teardrops, Heroes and Arcade were clear favourites by now, Rise Like a Phoenix and Amar Pelos Dois had zoomed up the odds since rehearsals, Toy was in a close battle with Fuego, and 1944...well, that was a bit of a surprise as it was all about Russia v Australia but they were definitely expected to do very well. And last year had it happened looked on course for an easy Iceland win bar any surprises. I really have no idea this time, I’m sad not to be at the contest itself (having attended from 2016-19) but still looking forward to it and I’m hoping to be there again in 2022!

For any archivists, Switzerland were the initial odds favourites, only to be overtaken by Malta who were strong leaders for a while, and then France and especially Italy made huge gains once the rehearsals started. Malta's back up to #2 since they qualified and Ukraine's had a significant increase too.

I think it's incredibly concerning that pubs can open indoors and we can legally hug people again next Monday. The virus has clearly evolved over the last year and the new variants could cause massive illness and deaths within days of contact, maybe even as far as 1.9 metres apart. We could have horrifying scenes shown live on the news of bodies being lifted from restaurants within hours of opening and stories of children hugging their grandmas only for her to suddenly fall to the ground dead in front of them, traumatising them for the rest of their short lives until they too succumb to this demonic pandemic. We MUST all stay indoors at all costs and potentially never leave our houses if we want to live like we did in 2019 again. I worry that death zone countries like India could be wastelands by Christmas, just acres of abandoned ghost towns like Chernobyl and that evil young Instagram influencers could go over and take selfies there only to bring the deadly variants back to the UK and cause total destruction across the country. The very air that we breathe could "test positive" and start contaminating even the double-Pfizer'd of us, burning through even the most expensive of face masks and leading to stampedes as we all try and run away from each other only to reach the other side of the planet and collide in the middle. Drivers of cars could slump over their wheels and motorway pileups could lead to huge petrol explosions, steadily growing until uniting into one massive blast that completely blows a hole in our planet and causes the great 'reverse bang' of our solar system, wiping out all life and the few survivors suffocating from lack of oxygen as they float around the vastness of empty space without masks. Millions of years could pass until Covid levels reduce to a safe amount and the evolution of our species from the tiny slugs that remain on this earth can start again, only reading about Covid in history books and old posts on Twitter, worshiping as a religion the mythical figure of a blonde, scruffy-haired man who sacrificed himself to try and save the world. But I think as long as we keep washing our hands we'll be fine.

I had my first vaccine dose on Tuesday, I just went to one of the local centres around 6pm and they were giving out spares at the end of the day to anyone who wanted them - I’m 32 so could have been waiting a while longer otherwise! It was the AZ one so still restricted to 30 and above, and I was able to book my second dose online for the first week of July. Worth giving it a try as long as you time it right, they said I was one of the only first doses they’d done all day as they’re generally doing seconds right now. But had I not been there it would have been wasted so I didn’t “steal” it from anyone who needed it more.

Quite impressed that I know all of these from 1967 to 2017, and vaguely/know of them after that. Easter 1999 was when we got The Box and I started really getting into music for the first time!

Some friends of mine in their early 20s were genuinely surprised to learn recently that Mr Brightside is from 2004. They thought it was some old 70s/80s song that had been around for many more decades than it has. (to be fair I used to think the same about Jet’s Are You Gonna Be My Girl)

There were several times where I'd hear the intro for Shape of You in a club and get all excited thinking it was Sia's Cheap Thrills.