News - Eurovision Day 5: Montenegro, Czech Republic, Belgium | Eurovision Song Contest News - 2010 Oslo, Norway 

The fifth day of rehearsals for the 2009 Eurovision Song Contest is underway in Moscow Olympiyski Indoor Arena. The schedule has now started again from the beginning for the second round of technical rehearsals. More artists will now wear their planned outfits and more attention is paid to the sound.

Song 1: Montenegro

Andrea Demirovic had the honour of taking to the stage first today. The blue-lit stage sees only her and her dancer on the stage. She is wearing a short shoulderless dress in black with golden details. The male dancer is wearing a black vest and tight white flares. They do a dance routine on stage, and the backing singers are off stage out of vision. Andrea clears her vocals today with flying colours and this will indeed be a nice and energetic opener for this year’s song contest.

Song 2: Czech Republic

Second off today is Gipsy.cz of Czech Republic. Their Ave romale is an energetic ethnic flavoured romp. We get a full band on stage. The lead singer is wearing a red superhero outfit. The screen projections include parental warnings like on films or DVDs and videos, and comic book art on the superhero theme, which move from left to right slowly. We are served even upside down camera angles in this very happening performance. It  has taken the group three run-throughs today to get their timings and vocals and the presentation right, as there is so much going on this number but it all seemed to be in place in the final one we saw.

We also get a first glimpse of what seems like the semi-final postcards at this point. It seems they are using the graphics of the Eurovision Periodic Table that has been seen all around the Eurovision venues here in Moscow. Unfortunately several factual mistakes have slipped into this table, that is depicting all the participating Eurovision Song Contest countries of past and present (while some like Yugoslavia are notably missing) as chemical elements with the first year of participation, combined with a photo of the artist in turn. If the mistakes are not corrected TV viewers with more than basic knowledge of  the history of the Eurovision Song Contest can encage themselves in a competition of “spot the mistakes” on the semi-final nights as an extra part of their Eurovision parties!

Song 3: Belgium

Third off is the Belgian Copycat in what is a very glittery setup in silver and gold. Still no sign of the promised cat figure seen on the video, even if we see glimpses of him driving past on the video. This performance is all very Las Vegas and is actually paying homage to the late King of rock’n’roll, as lead singer Patrick is a confessed fan of Elvis. There is also a base and guitar player on stage and two female backing singers. Patrick’s voice sound remarkable rough today, hopefully it is just a temporary cold.