Finland: “A perfect combination of lyrics and emotion”

Finland will be represented in Kiev by the duo Norma John with their dark ballad ‘Blackbird’. Allie Lindo followed the show for us last Saturday and looks back on the show in our podcast Scout Around. Out of all chosen songs so far, this might be the strongest competitor thus far.

“It has the perfect combination of lyrics and emotion,” Allie tells about the winning song. “Also, the pianist of the duo, gave a spectacular performance. You could really tell he gave a lot of emotion in his play. They can still improve the staging a bit, but it is a good song.”

Before the show, Norma John was not he clear favourite, it turned out to be in the end. “I feel like there were a couple of poor performances by people I expected better performances from. So that was a bit surprising. The biggest one for me was Emma. Everybody loved her and there was a lot of buzz around her. But she was not that good. The vocals were not of the level you expect from someone who would go on to represent Finland at the international level.”

Listen to our review of UMK 2017 above! “It would not be UMK if there were not a couple of weird performances!”