Day 8 | Second Rehearsals | Auto-finalists | 🇮🇹 🇩🇪 🇳🇱

Good morning from the Irish extension of the press centre! Sild and myself will bring you live reports of the last day of technical rehearsals, while Jordy is back in the arena taking videos. He's allowed to post a combined total of 2 minutes - if you have any special request, please put them on our message board! (personally I'm hoping for a Blas howling compilation)

🇳🇱 | Netherlands, No Definite Article

Starts off with Jeangu doing his sexy moves and surrounded by two backing singers and it's just fine, and then when he sings the title a red dancer appears very close to the camera quite awkwardly - at first I wasn't sure if they were meant to be there or is just a stage invader / photobomber. Rather confusing.

The dancer in red seems to be still there after a while and even interacts with the rest of the team, so I guess it's intended. I'm sure it means something very deep and important, but I'm not quite sure it's working. 

Vocally I cannot fault Jeangu - he's flawless at every runthrough and sounds very pleasant too. And he's quite charismatic too. If anything's going to save this rather messy staging, it's him.

Third runthrough and I'm enjoying it more, possibly because I knew what to expect. Over to Sild for the next three finalists.

🇩🇪 | Germany

If you take the LED background of La Venda and replace Miki with Plastic Bertrand, this should give you a clear idea of what to expect. It's obvious that Jendrik isn't a professional singer, struggling to keep up with his own song and becoming out of breath, but I guess none of this would matter for the target audience of this. He does have charisma and enjoys it, which is perhaps more important here.

Oh, and it seems he gave up on Dutch and speaks German again. I think.

Despite his best effort, I don't feel hate towards this. I just feel "aww, overexcited non-singer gets to be on a Eurovision stage! How lovely for him! As long as there's just one of these..."

Also, I can confirm that all colours on my rather old TV work. Good to know.

🇮🇹 | Italy

After so many favourites sabotaged by SJB, it's nice to see a performance that's just, well - a performance, focusing on the band's skills that we already know they have. There's a good play of lights (black and white at first, then turning to a red theme during the "parla.." bit, and near the end changing to blue and red again) and silhouettes on the background, but mostly the focus is on the band, as it should be.

Third runthrough and first goosebumps moment for me this year with the pyro. At first it's a curtain and then it's EVERYWHERE... OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG SOOOOO GOOOOD OMG OMG

But anyway, yeah, this should do as well as this song can, whatever that means.