As you might have noticed, escgo! is a Eurovision chat website. What does it mean? Many things, but among others, it means that every year during the national final season, many of us gather in a virtual room and watch all the national finals together. We’ve been doing so for many years and there are many national finals, so we thought our chatroom saw pretty much everything. And then this happened.

<PoLLe> WHAT???
<!FelixK> OH MY GOD
<PoLLe> WHAT??
<!FelixK> OH MY GOD
<PoLLe> WHAT????
<!FelixK> OH MY GOD
<Art> DRAMA 😛
<PoLLe> WOOOW??
<Holgermat> DRAMA

Sure, we might be a bit of drama queens at times, but this reaction? Never happens.

But that’s what you get when a national final ends with a winner who is handed a microphone to say a few words and then proceeds to renounce his title in front of a stunned audience, host, and chatroom – and an equally stunned runner up who found herself losing the national final but winning the ticket to Vienna anyway. Say hello to Ann Sophie!

Ann Sophie is a 24 year old newcomer from Hamburg, who like last year’s German representatives won her place in the German national final by winning a wild card round. She competed with that same song she won the wild card with in the national final, but will be representing Germany in Vienna with her other song from that final, Black Smoke.

Confused? Don’t worry. They are, too. But complicated system and scandals aside, Black Smoke is a catchy, slick and contemporary pop song penned, among others, by Ella Eyre (who had a #1 and #4 in recent UK charts as guest vocalist) that is often ignored by the hardcore Eurovision fans. One might suggest a case study in psychology here. Ann Sophie might have been the underdog in the national final, coming from the Wild Card round, but she ended up not only with the ticket to Vienna, but also the very heavy title of the one “who didn’t actually win her national final” – and this will play no role for the general audience in Eurovision. Another problem was that as the last participant to join the national final line-up, she received Black Smoke shortly before the final, and it was clearly the least rehearsed song in the final (and yet, was good enough to finish second behind the initial winner).

It might sound a bit redundant to say this, because what song doesn’t, but Black Smoke really relies, for better and for worse, on Ann Sophie as a performer. She has an identifiable voice color that can appeal to some and deter others, and a lot of character that is apparent in every expression and movement she makes on stage but treads carefully on the line between a bit of spunk and just being too theatrical.

My verdict? Black Smoke faces one of the biggest staging challenges of this year’s Eurovision line-up. Having a unique voice and a lot of character is a double-edged sword: it makes you memorable, but it also makes it easy to overdo it.

In the few performances that we’ve seen of Black Smoke so far, it was noted that it came across a little pale. The ingredients were there, but something was still missing. My feeling is that those performances just didn’t really use what Ann Sophie does best – audience and camera interaction. She eats the stage and can reach the audience at home and tell them her story, but she needs staging and camerawork that will let her do that, otherwise this can easily look lost on a big stage. In addition, she’s a good vocalist, but her color can make the song feel a bit thin at times. She made use of a big group of backing vocalists in the national final, who will also be in Vienna with her, but they will need to get the balance right and give her the depth and warmth the vocals of this song need to make an impact.

Also, when your song name includes both a color scheme and a stage effect, you better use the stage well and create the right atmosphere!

All in all, there’s a lot that needs to happen to make this song really work, but on the other hand, I don’t have a reason to believe it couldn’t happen – and therefore this is my bet for that one song that will go under the radar until at some point during the voting people will be surprised to find it doing nicely on the left side of the scoreboard. (There’s always one.) Otherwise, it’s a mid-table song – nice enough and with an appealing enough performer to not completely disappear, but equally not the kind of thing that can do a lot of damage.

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