Rebound (6) Cyprus

The last three winners of Eurovision only got to the contest, after losing in a previous national final first. This year, many artists with a similar track record will try to follow in their footsteps. In this episode we highlight Hovig Demirjian from Cyprus.

Hovig Demirjian is a singer songwriter of Armenian origin born in Cyprus in 1989. At the age of 16, Hovig started performing in various clubs, getting noticed in the artistic community in Cyprus. After dropping out of Marketing Studies, Hovig enrolled in a jazz music course at the European University of Nicosia, starting his musical career.

In 2009 Hovig participated in The X Factor Greece. In 2010 and 2015 Hovig tried to represent his country in the Eurovision Song Contest by competing in the national selection, reaching the final on both occasions.

Epilogi tis Kipriakis Simmetohis 2010

CyBC launched its Eurovision selection process on 5 October 2009 when they released details on the televised national final titled Epilogi tis Kipriakis Simmetohis to be held in early 2010. Until 27 November, Cypriots and European citizens living in Cyprus for more than two years could submit candidate entries to CyBC for the competition.

Hovig was one of the artists to do so, with his song ‘Goodbye’. Valeria Partali wrote the lyrics and music for the song. The song fare well at the contest, finished as the second favourite of the televote in Cyprus and third in the overall score behind Constantinos Christoforou and Jon Lilygreen & The Islanders.

Eurovision Song Project 2015

The Eurovision Song Project was the event to select the Cypriot entry in ESC 2015 in Vienna, Austria. The auditions, the longest phase of the selection, consisted of six shows and began in December 2014. Hovig took part in the fifth audition show on the 5th of January with the Greek 1991 entry ‘I Anixi’.

With his actual Eurovision song ‘Stone in the river’, he made it through to the national final in Cyprus. Out of the six acts that took part, Hovig ended up in fourth place behind the winner Giannis Karagiannis and Minus One, that came in third place. They represented Cyprus last year in Stockholm.

Hovig at Eurovision

This year, broadcaster CyBC internally selected Hovig for the 2017 competition with the song Gravity, written by Thomas G:son.

Thomas G:son, 49, has been a full-time songwriter since 1998 and has written songs for artists such as the Jonas Brothers, Arash, Loreen, Pastora Soler, Edurne, Carola, Charlotte Perrelli, Nikki Ponte, Chanée & n’Evergreen, Minus One, D’Nash and many more. He has written more than 80 songs in different national selections for the Eurovision Song Contest. This is including 47 in Sweden alone! To date he has had 13 songs in the Eurovision Song Contest. Five of those songs placed in the top ten, including Loreen’s massive winning hit Euphoria in 2012.

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