Showing posts with label Irland. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Irland. Show all posts

Thursday, August 16, 2007

Johnny Logan - First ever No1 album

Eurovision king Johnny Logan is experiencing a career high across Europe at the moment -- even enjoying his first ever number one album!
"I'm really over the moon. While I have had several number one singles, I've never in my entire career had a number one album. It's fantastic. I'm really chuffed. I'm going to be presented with gold and platinum discs for sales in Denmark and Norway, and it's being released in Sweden in October," he stated.
His new album The Irish Connection has been number one in the charts in Denmark for the past four weeks -- and has also been in the Top 10 in Norway and Germany, where himself and his band are based.
The album features Johnny covering such Irish classics as Dirty Old Town and Whiskey In The Jar, and was recorded with his own band in a studio in just two days.
Three-times Eurovision winner Logan has always been popular on continental Europe, but his success is now bigger than ever.
source:independent.ie

Saturday, June 30, 2007

Dervish in Coruña, Spain

Dervish, the group that represented Ireland in Eurovision Song Contest this year, will perform live in Coruña, Spain.
According to eurovision-spain and the newspaper “La Voz de Galicia”, the Irish group is the special guests of "Festival de Ortigueira", next July 8, 10.00 pm.
This known festival is dedicated to Folk and ethnic groups from all over the world.
source:oikotimes.com

Sunday, June 24, 2007

Online petition for EBU to reveal the back-up jury votes

eurovisionthoughts.blogspot.com reports
To: Svante Stockselius & the European Broadcasting Union:
We, the fans of the Eurovision Song Contest, are not happy with the, currently, unfair nature of the voting system. We feel that the voting result of, not only the eastern countries, but the western nations as well, are being adversely affected by the number of immigrants in each country.
It has become a tradition that Germany will always award Turkey 12 points, this could be interpreted as suspicious as the largest population of immigrants in Germany are from Turkey.
The same is happening in all of the Eurovision countries. Ireland has for the last two years given 12 points to Lithuania in the final.
This is also highly suspicious because the highest population of immigrants in Ireland are from Poland and the second highest number are from Lithuania, seeing as Poland was not in the final (but was awarded 10 points in the semi-final) 12 points to Lithuania demonstrates that Ireland's vote may well have been again swayed by the largest immigrant groups of Ireland voting for their own country.
These are just two exaples of what seems to be skewed voting caused by immigrants voting for their home nation while resident in another competing country.We want the results of the 2007 Eurovision Song Contest national back up juries to be made public so that a comparison can be made between them and the actual televote results.
This petition is in no way against the Serbian win, and we feel that it may well have occurred even if jury voting was still in place, what we are aiming for is to highlight the inequality that exists between competing nations in the ESC at present.
Our final goal is to see thee reintroduction, either in full or partially, of the national juries. Many, so called, 'Western nations' are at real threat of withdrawing within the next few years if something is not done to assuage their and their national viewing public fears when it comes to immigrants hijacking their countries voting ability. We do not feel in any way that this is a racist accusation or indeed a racist measure that we are proposing, we only want each country's vote to actually put across that country's views on all competing songs.

Tuesday, June 19, 2007

Dervish in Yeats Festival

DERVISH are headlining this year’s Yeats Festival in Sligo, which runs at the same time as the Yeats International Summer School.

The Sligo band, who are just back from a tour of Latvia and Lithuania with President McAleese, will play their gig for this festival on Sunday, August 5 at 8pm in the Radisson SAS Hotel.

This week, the Sligo Yeats Society announced full details of the Yeats Festival, which runs from July 30 to August 10 this summer.

Highlights include this concert by Dervish, their first public performance in Sligo after coming back from the Eurovision Song Contest.

Currently in the UK, Dervish will perform in all Big Four countries in the following months, as well as The Netherlands, Italy and the United States.

Stella Mew, chief executive officer with the Yeats Society, said: “We are very excited with this year’s festival. “It is wonderful to have Dervish headlining in their home town. Lovely too, to see them sharing the festival brochure with veteran poets of the calibre of Richard Murphy, while on another night the students of the Yeats International Summer School will take the first brave step towards a public reading."

For the full Dervish Summer Tour schedule, click here.


sources:SligoWeekender;esctoday.com