Where is the mushroom?

A review of the 2006 Melody Festival CD album. 

The Melody Festival is the most popular musical event in Sweden. Organized annually, the festival is a month-long contest between 32 songs, with the winner getting the doubtful honour to represent Sweden in the international Eurovision Song Contest (ESC).

2006 was not a very good year for the Melody Festival. Many of the participating artists were involuntarily daft: Roger Pontare doing his Lap shaman act for the nth time, Jessica Andersson and Sandra Dahlberg trying to look pornographically sexy on stage (they both failed, although Sandra's bike was convincing), and Rednex pretending to be...well, rednecks. But then, you have to watch the actual show to see all the fun stuff - this is the CD version, where you only hear the songs! If you're lucky, Youtube might still have some clips from the show.

Many other songs were quite deliberately daft, including "Like fire tonight", featuring the phoney German disco playboy Günther and his Sunshine Girls. Personally, I laughed at the Electric Banana Band, who perform a kind of kiddie rock and were very popular among elementary school kids during my childhood (circa 1978). In 2006, the band members were probably close to retirement age (or over), but they still sounded very much the same...and spouted banana sunglasses. Their lyrics were even funnier than during their golden years: "I'm a kind of chameleon, a mixture of camel and dodo, or something". But where on earth is that gigantic mushroom we kids so loved???

:D

As you may have gathered by now, the number of tolerable songs on this CD is pretty slim. There's BWO's "Temple of Love", "Night of Passion" featuring The Poodles, and the opera pop tune "Golden Star" performed by Elysion.

And finally, there's the winner: "Evighet" or "Invincible", sung by the super-hyper-ultra-diva Carola. She did indeed represent Sweden in the Eurovision Song Contest, in the Greek capital of Athens. At one point, she even climbed the Acropolis, screaming "Athenians, get ready, JESUS IS COMING". The Greek reporters were bemused, and the viewers of the actual contest eventually awarded the victory to a pseudo-Satanist rock band from Finland. But that's another show, as they say.

I can't say I recommend this weird CD to anyone, but I admit that it brought back some fond memories, both from 2006 and from even earlier days.