The question for a lot of Eurovision fans this last week hasn’t been about who will represent the UK at this year’s contest in Basel, Switzerland. It has been whether Malta will be able to serve “kant”.
I’ll backtrack if you haven’t got a clue what I am on about. Earlier this week the EBU, who run the Eurovision Song Contest, told Malta entrant Miriana Conte that she would need to tweak her entry, or she wouldn’t be allowed to participate in this year’s contest.
Why? Because the lyrics in the chorus feature the words “serving Kant,” which is the word for “singing” in Maltese. The ban has been because of the word’s pronunciation, which if broadcast on the night it would have given Ofcom a field day and the BBC nightmares.
“We definitely can’t play a clip of it, ever, on the BBC,” Scott Mills joked about the record recently on his Radio 2 Breakfast show.
So, naturally, the song went viral and so have reports about how Eurovision no Kant do. “While I’m shocked and disappointed,” Conte wrote on Instagram, “especially since we have less than a week to submit the song, I promise you this: the show will go on – Diva NOT down.”
It is this environment that the UK entrant all-female country trio Remember Monday has entered the fray, with What The Hell Just Happened? It’s a catchy, and quite unpredictable, vocal ballad, which at times sounds like something you would hear on stage on the West End.
Mark Savage from the BBC describes the song best: “Try to imagine, if you can, that Abba and Sam Ryder have teamed up with the cast of Six: The Musical, got blackout drunk and tried to recreate Bohemian Rhapsody from memory. (This is a compliment.)”
The band co-wrote the record with Billen Ted, who has worked with Little Mix along with Thomas Stengaard, who wrote Only Teardrops, the winning Denmark entry, back in 2013. It also continues the recent tradition, which started with Sam Ryder‘s Space Man, where the UK does more than cobbling together something that sounds Eurovision-y (thank god).
Remember Monday the UK’s entry into the Eurovision Song Contest 2025. (BBC/Rob Parfitt)
The official announcement was accidentally spoiled early, and the record also leaked days ago so this announcement hasn’t surprised any Eurovision fan. So the next, natural, big question: how well will it do on the night?
To answer, I have to go back to Malta again, because some of the best performing songs at Eurovision have either fallen into one of two different categories.
Either they have been genuine pop bangers that stick in your head weeks after the contest ends (like Sweden’s Loreen’s Tattoo and her performance inside a giant panini press), or they are ridiculous and funny anthems that people vote for in their droves because it is unlike anything you have seen on before, like Finland’s Käärijä and his hard rock sea shanty Cha Cha Cha.
Malta’s Eurovision entry Miriana Conte (YouTube screenshot/Eurovision)
You also need a record that impresses both the juries (who traditionally tend to like ballads and hate anything wacky) and the public televote (who vote for their favourite, not their second or third favourite) in order to be the overall winner.
With so many entries and points available, it isn’t always easy to predict the overall winner, but in my view if you don’t fall within those categories, the fun or pop banger, you can end up literally anywhere on the results board. Last year’s UK entry, Olly Alexander’s Dizzy, a Pet Shop Boys-ish record with homoerotic dance moves and the staging of a swimming pool changing area flying through deep space (no, really). It was a decent record, but not the clear favourite. It ended up 18th, out of 25.
Malta certainly could exceed on the night itself as it falls under the fun category (Kant or no Kant), but is Remember Monday’s enough to succeed in the pop banger one?
The final of the Eurovision Song Contest 2025 will be held in Basel, Switzerland on 17 May, 2025.