5. Ann Sophie – Black Smoke (Germany 2015)
Redeeming features?
In a lot of ways this isn’t really characteristic of what you’d expect a nul pointer to be – then again, until this year we hadn’t had any in the modern week-long era of the contest. It’s a contemporary song written by experienced pop songwriters, Ann Sophie gave a professional performance and for me personally I have always said it would be one that I continued to listen to after the contest and it has been.
So what went wrong?
Well first of all alarm bells could have started going prior to the contest when despite the song being generally quite liked, hardly anybody would have had it listed as their favourites, and they’re the ones that get votes. Ann Sophie was also incredibly unlucky to be placed more or less at the start of an incredibly mid-low tempo predominantly female run of songs. All of this points towards a song being forgotten, and that’s just what happened – a look at how middling the jury scores were across the board for Germany will attest to that.
