The run up to the 2010 Eurovision Song Contest has begun. Many countries have already chosen their songs and singers. We know the UK’s song will be written by Dennis Pete Waterman. And this got me wondering: which songs from last year’s competition have faded into (even greater) obscurity and which are still being listened to?

There are a handful of tracks from last year that still come into my head occasionally. The winner, Fairytale; Ukraine’s Be My Valentine; Hungary’s pretty unsuccessful Dance With Me; Slovenia’s Love Symphony; Sweden’s La Voix. But what about the rest of the world who aren’t me?

Fortunately, there’s a way to get an idea. last.fm is a website that keeps track of your listening habits, if you so desire. It has thousands of users and it’s possible to look up the listening figures for any given track. So I’ve gone through last year’s entries and counted up the number of plays each has had in the last six months.

Before I give you the results, there are some caveats. For a start, it’s not going to be an objective measure of the songs themselves as the results of the Contest will skew the figures. The winner in particular had lots more exposure as a result, and the songs that didn’t progress from the semi-finals weren’t broadcast to the same audience as the final. Also, I’m aware that the songs I’ve played have tended to be served up by the shuffle feature on my iPod – so those listens are less about those songs being high quality than not being bad enough for me to have skipped to the next track. Plus, there’s no record of which country these listens came from – most could be in the entry’s home country (they couldn’t vote for it during the show) and the size of the last.fm user base in each country will make a difference.

Then there’s the problem of disambiguation. Not least because of the different languages involved, but also because of the generally inconsistent taxonomies of people’s audio collections, tracks are listed on last.fm under variations of their titles and variations of their artist. And it’s case sensitive. For example, Ukraine’s entry appears separately under

• Be My Valentine by Svetlana Loboda
• Be My Valentine (Anti-crisis girl) by Svetlana Loboda
• Be My Valentine! (Anti-Crisis Girl) by Svetlana Loboda
• Be My Valentine! (Anti-crisis Girl) [Ukraine] by Svetlana Loboda
• Be my Valentine (Anti-crisis girl) by Светлана Лобода

and more. I’ve mostly taken all the entries among the 15 top tracks shown by default on the artist page. This works against singers who’ve had lots of other hits under the same name (or who share their name with another group), so where the impact of that was large I’ve looked further down the list to include more plays. I’ve attempted to go through all the obvious variations of artist names – so for “A & B” I also looked up “A feat. B”, “A feat B”, “A and B”, and “A”. I’ve included remixes, radio edits and different translations of the songs.

That all said, here are the results of the people-still-listening-to-Eurovision-2009-entries jury.

Position	Actual final position	Country	Listens
1	1	Norway	25,850
2	2	Iceland	6,602
3	6	Estonia	4,860
4	5	United Kingdom	4,545
5	25	Finland	4,501
6	4	Turkey	3,954
7	3	Azerbaijan	3,716
8	8	France	3,691
9	20	Germany	3,125
10	21	Sweden	2,524

…which suggests that the Europe-wide voting public got it roughly right.

It’s no surprise that Alexander Rybak is in first place by miles, averaging six listens an hour by last.fm users in the last six months. Iceland’s second place in the competition is also accurately reflected by the listening figures – less predictably – and France’s Patricia Kaas appears in 8th place in both the results and the listening figures.

The songs that seem to have been more popular than their results suggested are from Estonia, the UK, and in particular Germany and Sweden. Turkey and Azerbaijan are a little lower in the listener counts. Finland’s entry Lose Control by Waldo’s People, deserves a special mention: it came last in the Eurovision final but is the 5th most listened to. Although this could be the result of last place notoriety, it’s more likely genuine success, either restricted to their home country or, given the style of the song, in the Eurodance world.

The three songs that finished in the top 10 on the night but not in this chart are Greece’s This Is Our Night (four places lower), Bosnia & Herzegovina’s Bistra Voda (nine places lower, although I rather liked it), and Armenia’s Jan Jan (a whopping 14 places lower). The highest placed semi-finalist who didn’t make the final was (appropriately) The Highest Heights, Switzerland’s entry, which is the 19th most popular entry of the last six months.

So there you go. Pseudo-scientific. Passably interesting.

This year’s Eurovision final is on Saturday 29th May, with the semi-finals on Tuesday 25th and Thursday 27th. I’ll probably return in May with a preview – and I’ll attempt to successfully follow-up last year’s post, where, for the first time ever, I successfully predicted the winner.

I don’t send round robin letters with my Christmas cards. I don’t usually manage to send Christmas cards. But if I did send cards and if I did include a letter, the tradition would be to brag about how my kids are doing so well in school and how gorgeous our new kitchen is.

Failing that, I thought I’d have a quick look back at some of the stuff that happened to me me me me me this year. I thought it might be cathartic. For me. Me me me. (Links to Twitpics where appropriate.)

January

I took part in the first round of the Laughing Horse New Act Competition. I made it through to the quarter finals, which was nice. Thank you to the big gaggle of people who came along to support me. One of those was Michael of the thomyk podcast. Oh yes, I’ve been doing stand-up. Not sure I’ve mentioned that on the blog before. So yes.

I am relying on my Google Calendar, which tells me that nothing else of interest happened in January.

February

Things started hotting up in February when a toffee removed one of my fillings. There followed quite a lot of visits to the dentist and, after the second attempt to install it, a new gold filling. I now genuinely hear a ding! whenever I smile.

February was also the month of a night at the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill (acts included this ukulele band); of Twestival, where I met Thom of the thomyk podcast; and of my quiet retirement from the Lib Dem Voice editorial team.

March

Mid-March was the quarter final of the Laughing Horse competition. That time I didn’t get through to the next round. Ah well. The competition is back in 2010 and I’m taking part again. I should probably take a similar perseverance approach to Mastermind – I had my unsuccessful audition in March too.

At the beginning of the month, I went grave hunting not far from where I live and finally tracked down my great-grandmother’s grave marker in an overgrown and badly kept part of Camberwell New Cemetery.

At the end of the month was Barcamp London 6, a geeky unconference held at the lovely theguardian offices in King’s Cross. I gave a talk on politics and twitter. I’m afraid it was rather dull.

April

April was the biggest making-stuff-to-go-on-the-internet month. The first weekend saw the 2009 48 Hour Sci-Fi Film Challenge, in which my team produced the short Pressure Valve in less than two days. As part of that, I met Billy from the internet.

At the end of the month, with Michael on one of his many overseas jaunts, I joined Thom as a stand-in host of the thomyk podcast. In retrospect, that episode talks rather too much about Michael Jackson.

April was also the first and currently last time I played squash. Yes, squash.

May

May was quite a big month. I turned 30 and celebrated/commiserated with a karaoke bash. I do love karaoke. Helen gave me a ukulele for my birthday which, as YouTube will testify, may have been a tactical error.

It was a good Eurovision Song Contest this year: lots of entertainment during the final came from twitter and I won £30 for correcting predicting Norway’s victory.

I did the last comedy gig of my twenties, which was a fundraiser for the film Booked Out. It went well and premiered a New Joke. The month rounded off with a rather fun 40th birthday bash featuring one song from each of the last 40 years.

June

Following an internal reorganisation at work, I changed jobs immediately after June’s European elections. I visited Google’s London HQ for a seminar and hosted a fundraising quiz for the Suzy Lamplugh Trust. The timing of the local election results meant I missed the Liberty AGM, despite having partly joined a year earlier so that Chris would know someone else there. Thanks to a plea going out on twitter from director Ben Miller and star Noel Clarke, I spent a couple of days in Kilburn as an extra in their new film Huge.

Judging from my diary, it was around June that our local pub quiz team formed, a loose collection of regulars and occasional quizzers who would win every week if only the questions were restricted to one particular TV show. And I’m glad it did because it’s given me lots of nice evenings in the pub with a lovely group of people, all of whom I’ve got to know better as a result.

July

Having missed the Greenwich Beer Festival, the Ealing Beer Festival and July’s Karaoke Circus at the 100 Club, July’s best moment was Blur in Hyde Park, a brilliant afternoon/evening/night where I bumped into a whole load of old friends. I also did my first gig outside London, at the Birdcage in Norwich, thanks to host Dan McKee.

Travelling back to the capital by car, I stopped at a service station and picked up a copy of Your Family Tree magazine. I’d never bought the magazine before but I thought the article on podcasting might be interesting. Turned out I was in it.

August

In August, I continued what turned out to be a whole year’s run of missing beer festivals by failing to go to the Great British Beer Festival. I returned to my former home of Leeds for a wedding and made suitable noises as the taxi drove past places I recognised and other appropriate noises when things had closed down or been built. I also went to see Nick on the Fourth Plinth.

I made my annual pilgrimage to the Edinburgh Fringe and saw lots of shows, highlights being those by Richard Herring, Tim Key, The Penny Dreadfuls, William Andrews and Robin Ince. I also did a couple of gigs on the Free Fringe. One of them I’ll be professional and refrain from commenting on; the other was a last minute guest slot in Alan Sharp‘s show, complete with minute or two of new material, which was lots of fun to do and probably my best gig so far.

September

A busy first week in September included Hackney for the Reece Shearsmith’s Haunted House radio recording; a trip along the District Line on a 1938 Tube train with Helen (her video); and Lloyd Woolf‘s Buy a Weatherperson a Drink Party, where I met the lovely Anna, Simone and James, and the Chief Exec of the Royal Meterological Society.

Derren Brown returned to the TV with his lottery predictions and, through the inadvertent magic of search engine optimisation, I got thousands of views on my Derren Brown lottery song. This was also the subject of my contribution to the first episode of new podcast The Pod Delusion.

Because of who I work for, the big thing in September was always going to be a busy week in Bournemouth for party conference. My main memory is being press ganged into doing stand-up in a hotel bar for our department’s end-of-conference get together and being slightly put off when the new Chief Exec wandered in halfway through. I talked more about party conference in the Pod Delusion’s second episode.

September also saw the second Plinther I went to see in person: the other Will Howells (no relation). Annoyingly, I had to leave for conference a few hours before Mike took the plinth.

October

Michael took the Plinth in October – an early start to a long day that ended with a rare trip clubbing. The following day I went to Dr Debbie’s very interesting talk on Thatcher. I took a leap of faith and upgraded to an iPhone; a week later I was at Broadcasting House for the recording of the Penny Dreadfuls’ Guy Fawkes radio play fumbling to work out how to switch it off. With Michael off on holiday as soon as he had deplinthed, I made a second guest visit to the thomyk podcast to not talk about Trafigura. In other podcast news, I contributed to the third episode of the Pod Delusion and was guest host of episode five.

I went along to Barcamp London 7 and gave an interactive talk on things that annoy me, which seemed to go down much better than my previous talk. Best moments of October though were Mr and Mrs Morris’s lovely wedding and my first visit to the glorious Karaoke Circus, where, amongst others, I met Paul and Kate.

November

November featured my doomed attempt at NaNoWriMo; a great gig from Jonathan Coulton with Paul and Storm; Robin Ince’s CD recording; a very funny debut show from Los Quatros Cvnts; more karaoke; more stand-up; a trip to the Bletchley Park fundraiser Boffoonery, where I won a painting; my most recent contribution to the Pod Delusion, on the subject of the Large Hadron Collider; and more. Which might explain why my NaNoWriMo was doomed.

December

Karaoke Circus returned for a brilliant Christmas show at the beginning of December. Lots of great acts though my favourite was Tony Gardner and Ben Miller’s recreation (here it is on YouTube) of Bing Crosby and David Bowie’s awful Little Drummer Boy. I apparently channelled a cross between Sonny Bono and the Boston Strangler for I Got You Babe.

I went to Stewart Lee’s very good new show and the last two episodes of As It Occurs to Me, which – good news – will return next year. I went to Wales and discovered that the Cardiff councillor I was chatting to in the pub is a (very) distant relation. I enjoyed this year’s 9 Lessons and Carols for Godless People and in particular Alan Moore, despite never having read anything he’s written. I went to the Royal Albert Hall for the first time and sang Christmas songs and then it was Christmas and stuff, with my own Christmas message and the thomyk pantomime.

Fillums

At locations as diverse as the BFI IMAX, the Prince Charles in Soho, a local pub theatre and Bad Film Club at the Barbican, this year I saw Watchmen, Star Trek, Bats, Harry Potter and Whatever the Sixth One’s Called, Milk and Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus. I also went to the premiere of State of Play. Milk is probably the best of those and, rarely, a film that actually changed my behaviour: I don’t think I’d have gone to the moving vigil against homophobic violence in Trafalgar Square in October if I hadn’t seen the film a few weeks previously.

Bye bye, 2009

Turns out I’ve done rather more than I remembered. And that was quite cathartic, if a bit egocentric. In retrospect, 2009 was a much more positive, productive year than I’d given it credit for. And as for 2010 – well it’s up to us, isn’t it?

Oh yes, I have a blog, don’t I? So I should probably take this opportunity to wish you all a Merry Christmas and direct you to my new song on the subject of what should be this year’s Christmas number 1 (warning: contains a swear).

And, for balance, here’s Tim Minchin’s White Wine in the Sun, which, should you wish, you can buy from iTunes here.

I might be overstating the case, but only slightly. Ward & White’s Karaoke Circus wasn’t world peace, winning the lottery or swimming with dolphins (I have no desire to swim with dolphins), but it was pretty damn good and I’m still smiling. (Or at least I was when I started writing this post on Friday. Had some links to track down before publishing it so it’s, erm, a bit late.)

OK, from the beginning. Karaoke Circus is so called, host Martin White explained, because it features amateurs singing songs with a clown on stage. There are, though, some key differences from your average karaoke night. Most of the singers are professional comedians, there’s a live band rather than a recorded backing track and the lyrics are on paper. (This is taking karaoke back to its roots in ancient Greece, of course, when they didn’t have TVs.)

The house band comprise Martin on keyboards, David Reed from The Penny Dreadfuls on drums, Danielle Ward on bass and “Foz” Foster on guitar. Foz was the guitarist with David Devant & His Spirit Wife, a band I saw live four times back in my youth. At one point, Foz casually played the intro to Ballroom – one of many highlights of the evening.

As well as the comedians, there are six open mic spots for members of the audience to compete for a “good” prize and the performers are judged by Daniel Maier and The Baron (pictured here).

On Thursday night, Karaoke Circus returned – after shows at the 100 Club, the Edinburgh Fringe and the Latitude Festival – to its home at The Albany. It opened with a song from Foz (on uke) and The Baron, before getting under way with one of the open mic spots – a guy called Nick, winner of the very first Karaoke Circus, who performed Talking Heads’ Psycho Killer.

The first of the comedians to take the stage was Josie Long who carried off a very respectable cover of Sinead O’Connor Nothing Compares 2 U. Despite my responsibility as a geek to document every aspect of the night, I’m going to stop myself listing every singer and song, but highlights included:

• Richard Herring’s Orgasm Addict (watch on YouTube) – not a song I’d heard before but a rather annoying earworm today
• Jeremy Hardy’s Don’t You Want Me – he even brought along backing singers to help
• Robin Ince’s There She Goes, My Beautiful World, a Nick Cave song I’d again never heard of and really rather like – here’s the Spotify link
• Dave Gorman’s post-Song 2 stage dive – once all necessary safety precautions had been put in place, of course. I imagine this is the only time that I’ll find Dave Gorman on the floor at my feet.

Two performances rightly won standing ovations. Surprise guest of the evening was Jessica Hynes, off of Spaced and Doctor Who. The crowd (including me) went wild as soon as she was announced and she proceeded to sing Ain’t Now Way brilliantly – as Richard Herring put it, she cheated by “using talent”.

The other brilliant act was Chris Addison’s rendition of Common People – and I mean rendition in the good, singing way: he didn’t beat it over the head and transport it against its will to a secret prison in Eastern Europe. It was a deserved headline for the night, the crowd singing along and Chris passing the time in the instrumental by throwing packets of Super Noodles to the common people of the audience.

And if all that wasn’t enough to make the evening fantastic (from my perspective at least), I also got to sing. I was being indecisive in trying to pick a song to sign up for before the show so Martin told me to put my name down for all of them – because at least then he knew every song would be taken. I was rewarded with the last open slot and Take That’s Back for Good, complete with string section.

Once on stage, I was sufficiently nervous that my hand holding the lyric sheet was visibly shaking. Looking over the first line of the song, I realised couldn’t remember how it started. But I got it roughly right, I think, and once we reached the middle of the song, I was really enjoying myself, clambering around for the notes I couldn’t quite reach (in a touch of Gary Barlow-like authenticity, I’ll claim) and belting out a bit more the ones I could. The audience provided the backing vocals during the chorus and were supportive to all the acts, which helped a lot. It was great singing with a live band for the first time ever – and cool to have some of my favourite comics forced to listen. A fantastic experience and a privilege.

And as if that wasn’t enough, it was also lovely to see Anna and Simone again, and to meet for the first time twitter followees Paul and Kate. Congratulations to fellow audience member Tim, who deservedly won the good prize for his performance of It Must Be Love (the Madness version).

Paul took lots of photos (including the one above), which you can see on Flickr. There are more photos from the night from Flickr users Isabelle Adam and Lyndsey Brown, and other write-ups of the evening from Richard Herring, Andrew Collins and Martin White, who put together such a stonking night.

The Christmas Karaoke Circus is on December 3rd in Bethnal Green – at the time of writing, some tickets are available online. I’ve already got mine.

Finally, here’s a tiny clip of Chris Addison’s tour de force: