Australia: Jessica Mauboy – We Got Love

Felix: My first reaction to Australia 2018 was positive. I thought “oh, this is nice!”, I noted my relatively high mark, and moved on with other songs. But now, a few weeks later, “We Got Love” is nowhere near my personal top 10.

The thing with the Australian song is it’s so safe that it’s not safe anymore. It becomes invisible, the last thing you want to achieve at Eurovision. Don’t get me wrong, this is a totally fine entry. It’s catchy, she is a good performer, it’s uplifting and positive like hardly any other song this year. But it’s also so damn generic and replaceable.

And this is the risk: Your song can be perfectly fine at Eurovision, but if it’s “just” that, and if you don’t stand out in any way, then you won’t get any points.

I gladly don’t have any bad words for Australia, at least not worse than “nice”. But that’s not enough for Eurovision, and it will struggle on its respective night(s).

Martin: I get that, yeah. In theory this should do very well, especially in this line-up. The components are all right. There’s even a path to victory for Australia, I think. But they could just as easily end up somewhere in no man’s land, ignored in favour of songs with stronger selling points.

Shi: During the promo concerts she came across as a much more engaging and comfortable performer than I gave her credit for, but the song is generic enough that while it could do really well, they will probably be helped if they ditched their X Factor stagings for something that is slightly cleverer.

video and title image source: eurovision.tv