Countrified girl group Remember Monday are taking harmonies and a stomping 1970s sound to Basel – and they deserve more than nul points
4/5
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A stop start time switching 1970s musical pastiche performed by a close harmony girl group of British country singers with a background in musical theatre and credited to seven different writers including a couple of Danes… It can only be this year’s UK entry to the Eurovision.
Performed by trio Remember Monday, the song is called What The Hell Just Happened? and that was pretty much my first reaction. It is under three minutes long but manages to pack a hell of a lot into its short running time, starting in a gush of tight harmony, speeding up for verses, slowing down for choruses, shifting from mid-tempo to a complete stops in between and somehow managing to squeeze in screaming guitar solos, barrelhouse piano, cheesy synth horn parts, syncopated harmonic cascades and a general mood of 1970’s soft rock joy.
The lyrics offer a witty account of waking up the morning after a night before in comedic disarray, the sound is a breathless pop pastiche of imperial period Queen with a dash of Elton John singing country with the Andrews Sisters. I don’t hate it.
I do question how I we got here? Who even decides what Britain’s Eurovision song entry is going to be any more? It was once an open competition between songwriters and artists, voted for by the British public, but for years now the BBC has just quietly and completely undemocratically done a backroom deal with a record label, management company or Svengali and let them promote their own talent roster.
Our entrants seem to switch between unknown protégés hoping it will give a shot in their arm to nascent careers (Mae Muller, Joe and Jake, Scooch) or established artists prepared to drink from the poisoned chalice for a laugh (Bonnie Tyler, Englebert Humperdink, James Newman, Olly Alexander). Sam Ryder (who came second in 2022 and squeezed a career out of it) has been the UK’s only Eurovision success story in recent years, and Remember Monday fall into a similar category.
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They have no real presence as actual pop performers despite the gushingly enthusiastic support of Radio 2 DJ Scott Mills. But the trio do have a decent social media following, with over a million TikTok views for elegantly performed tight harmony countryfied cover versions of famous pop songs by the likes of Sabrina Carpenter, Shania Twain and (pertinently) Queen. Indeed, their biggest streaming track on Spotify is a humorous harmonised romp through Queen’s Fat Bottomed Girls, which seems to have been a template for their Eurovision entry – without any reference to body parts or shapes, of course, which just wouldn’t do these days.
Charlotte, Holly and Lauren all went to school together (they declined to reveal when that was during Scott Mills Radio 2 unveiling of the song, screeching “we’re old!”), and have appeared in West End and touring productions of such musicals as Les Miserables, The Phantom of the Opera and Mary Poppins. They essay a pop country style, and what with country enjoying a chart resurgence someone must have decided that there was nothing embarrassing about a British band performing in Europe in an American musical genre. Essentially, Remember Monday are music professionals, they look good, they work hard, they can really sing and (crucially) they’ve got nothing to lose.
The latter certainly helps when you look at the UK’s recent Eurovision record. The trio are credited as co-composers on their Eurovision song, which has principally been created by British production team Billen Ted (Tom Hollings and Sam Brennan), who have previously worked with girl group Little Mix and UK pop star Anne Marie. But two Danish songwriters also have a hand in this – Thomas Stengaard and Julie ‘Kill J’ Aagaard. Stengaard has Euro form, being one of the writers on Denmark’s 2013 winner for Emille de Forest (which was originally written for and rejected by Germany).
When did such a blurring of borders become allowed at the Eurovision? And how many cooks does actually it take to make a euro pudding these days? These are the kind of questions that nobody really cares about any more. All we are interested in is whether Remember Monday can spare Britain its annual ritual episode of Eurovisual humiliation.
I’m going to say yes. The song is fun, its inventive whilst also being familiar, and delivered with zest and pin-point performances. It’s not going to win any prizes for originality, but as long as it avoids the ignominy of scoring nul points on the night it will have done its job.
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