ForoESC

Buckle in, it’s time for Finland’s Windows95man to rehearse No Rules! It’s still early in the rehearsal schedule, but we’ve had our coffee and are ready for a reboot.

Fans of their winning UMK performance will be delighted to hear that the Denim Egg Show has made it to Malmö, along with the ‘just within the rules’ nudity (a thong, we can confirm, hopefully secured with more than a couple of Clippy paperclips), tiny jorts and Henri Piispanen’s high notes. In fact, this pretty much a cut and paste of their UMK staging, but with even more processing power and a cloudy LED wall that’s giving 90s screensaver.

Listeners to the Official Eurovision Podcast will know that the backing dancers in this performance are inspired by Teemu’s love of Gina G’s Ooh Aah…Just A Little Bit. So Windows 95, inspired by Eurovision 96. We live for this kind of fun fact.

Pyro rehearsal coming soon - it's reasonable to assume that smoke and fireworks are incoming...

PYRO UPDATE: can confirm that the handheld fireworks and eggy smoke have returned. Photos coming soon!

Iuris escribió:Imagino que en Eslovenia todavía falta el humo para ambientar, pero de momento reina finalista

How do you follow Windows 95? Well, with Windows 98, technically - but instead let’s watch Moldova’s Natalia Barbu rehearse her song In The Middle.

This is 11th in the running order for the first Semi-Final, or the thirteenth song we’ll hear if you count the United Kingdom and Germany. So not actually right in the middle, but close. It’s also not Natalia’s first time at Eurovision - she competed for Moldova in 2007, where she finished 10th.

The staging has the static routine that we saw at Etapa Națională, the Moldovan national final – with hand claps and armography and a white violin – but Natalia is no longer flanked by backing singers – she’s entirely alone, in front of a beautiful backdrop of seascapes and trees and flowers and butterflies.

During the violin section the LED wall turns to huge wings, so when viewed from the front Natalia looks like an angel. It’s completely different from anything we’ve seen on this stage so far in 2024, and really clever – and of course, Natalia hits every one of those high notes.