An Xtra Happy Birthday; week 50!

December 14th

Small tribute to Poland today since there are two out of five Eurovision birthday stars are from there.

Henri Dès, 78

Switzerland picked Henri in 1970 as their Eurovision representative. His song “Retour” was quite popular and scored enough points to take the 4th place that year.

Guri Schanke, 57

Guri Schanke represented Norway at the 2007 Eurovision Song Contest in Helsinki. She performed the Latin inspired song “Ven a bailar conmigo”, however failing to achieve much success. In the hardest of all semi-finals ever in the history of the contest, she finished 18th out of 28.

Anna Maria Jopek, 47

Anna Maria represented Poland at the 1997 Eurovision Song Contest in Dublin. She finished in 11th place with “Ale jestem”, which still to date is the fourth best result for Poland.

Haraldur Freyr, 43

Haraldur Freyr represented Iceland at the 2014 Eurovision Song Contest in Copenhagen. He did so as pat of the band Pollapönk, who are representatives of the fairly rare musical genre children’s punk. They performed the song “No Prejudice”, a song about how we are all the same on the inside and therefore should stop bullying. In the first semi-final, they finished in 8th place, thus qualifying for the grand final. On the Saturday night, they finished 15th.

Gromee, 40

Gromee brought the party music to Lisbon this year on Poland’s part. He brought his signature snake dance move to the song “Light Me Up”. The song however was short of reaching the final.