Dansbandskampen was its usual entertaining self last night, more so than usual in fact. Seven dansbands remained, and four weeks in, there seemed to be an air of craziness around. Perhaps that’s what four weeks in Norrköping does to you. But yes, everybody involved was swearing left, right, and centre. There were trannies dancing. One of the dansbands performed a spoof of the rest of the competition. Kikki Danielsson was interviewed – smashed! And Roger Pontare telephoned in for good measure too. You gotta love primetime tv on a Saturday night in Sweden!
The schlager on the night came from Donnez and Wizex. Donnez sang the original Swedish language version of Roger Pontare’s Eurovision entry from 2000, ‘When Spirits Are Calling My Name’. They were joined onstage in the second half, by a Roger lookalike prancing around in a similar costume to the one he wore on the Eurovision stage. This prompted Roger himself to phone in and congratulate the boys on their performance. How sweet! You don’t get Jay-Z doing that for Cher’s slots on X Factor, do you?! Wizex then gave one of the best shows of the night, when they did Kikki Danielsson’s ‘Bra Vibrationer’ in a nautical theme. Kikki herself was in the audience having a dance, and was interviewed afterwards, a little slurry on the words!
Willez were given a traditional dansband classic to sing. ‘Jag Vill Vara Din, Marghareta’ is hugely adored on the dansband scene. Anne-Lie Rydé told us that she would have loved to have recorded it for her dansband album earlier this year, but that she’s straight, and so couldn’t have done the meaning of it justice! Willez did a charming version of it. It would have been a difficult one to get wrong anyway of course, but it served to prove that they can pull off classic dansband, despite their ages. For the second time this season, a Håkan Hellström song was given the dansband makeover. This time, the wonderful Elisa’s took on ‘Kom Igen, Lena’, and turned it into an upbeat and cheesy number – which we loved of course! Elisa’s haven’t put a foot wrong so far this series, they’re everything that’s great about it.
CC & Lee are still our favourites though. Last night they were given ‘Release Me’ to perform. NOT the Agnes song unfortunately, but one by Swedish band Oh Laura. It’s a nice ballad that was kept in ballad form for the competition. But we do prefer the girls when they’re rocking out to an uptempo number. Pure Divine turned in another cracker of a performance last night, another act who’ve yet to put a foot wrong. They sang ‘Efterfest’, but unfortunately their time was up. They got the lowest number of televotes and were sent home from the competition. We’re gonna miss them. The lead singer is such a good performer.
Last, and by every means, least – is Patrik’s Combo. They performed a bizarre spoof of dansband music last night. Singing out of tune, and dressed as the programme’s ”Simon Cowell character”, Thomas Deutgen. And whilst we are fully aware that the dansband genre is ridiculous, not to be taken too seriously, and is RIPE for spoofage, we just thought that their performance left a bit of a bad taste in the mouth. To be doing it as your competition piece right in the middle of the show you’re trying to win, but also taking the piss out of, seemed a bit off. And they just appeared as though they somehow assumed that they were quite arrogantly above it all really. A protest which is somewhat dampened by the fact that they entered the competition in the first place. It was a shame to see another dansband, Pure Divine, who had been consistently great and taken it seriously, be voted out over these guys. Oh well.
Finally, one of our twitter followers, TomKei, tweeted us last night with the suggestion that one of the dansbands should perform a cover of Lily Allen’s ‘Fuck You’ one week. YES! That song is perfect for dansband! It’s such a genius idea. SVT if you’re reading, make it happen!
