Cyprus:
Panagiotis Koufogiannis – Without Your Love
There’s not a lot you can criticise Cyprus for, if we’re perfectly honest. Ok, their national final was dreadful, but they managed to select a song that actually qualified for the final. The fact that Greece decided it wasn’t worthy of the usual old 12 points is worrying for the Cypriots.
So how to solve it? Well, going through the rubbish they had in that national final (you didn’t miss much if you didn’t see it at the time), there was one clear stand-out fact in Cyprus: Male vocalists were their way to go. The women were simply not good enough. Besides that, English was also the way to go. Add to that that the ballads were much better than the uptempo and we’ve got the sum of what we need: a male singer with an English language ballad. And that still left us with three choices… Hovig, John and Panagiotis.
I wasn’t a big fan of Hovig’s and John was the eventual choice, so it’s a simple one for me. Panagiotis Koufogiannis delivered a really powerful ballad and he delivered it well. It’s a classic ballad, classic theme, classic instruments. That could be seen as old-fashioned, but I quite like it. Panagiotis’s biggest issue was stage presence (and the fact that the jury killed his chances, making the televoting 12 useless), so here’s the official video.
