Ahead of the 62nd Eurovision Song Contest in Kyiv this coming month, Switzerland’s Timebelle have released an unplugged version of their entry, ‘Apollo’. Switzerland’s first rehearsal for this year’s contest will take place on Wednesday, they are one of the last countries to arrive in the Ukrainian capital as one of nine countries performing in the second half of the second semi final.
Since winning the Swiss selection process they had travelled to Stockholm to work on their entry. Following this trip to Stockholm, the band were invited to meet Switzerland’s Romanian ambassador Vlad Vasiliu, and their chancellor Mihaela Feher.
Timebelle are a three-piece band from Bern, consisting of lead vocalist Miruna Manescu, drummer Samuel Forster, and saxophonist, clarinettist and pianist Emanuel Daniel Andriescu. Both Manescu and Andriescu are Romanian, as is their manager Mihai Alexandru. Alexandru himself has a history with Eurovision, having competed in Romania’s national selection several times since 1992. In 2003, his song “Don’t Break My Heart”, sung by Nicola, represented Romania in Riga, placing 10th.
During an interview with Eurovoix.com earlier this week, Timebelle said:
[tw-posts title=”Read More Exclusive Eurovision Interviews…” number=”2″ category=”interview-2″ content=”yes” type=””][/tw-posts]We were in Tel Aviv, Amsterdam and Madrid and all of the fans were singing along, they knew absolutely all of the words to “Apollo”. This was fantastic!
Their participation in this year’s Swiss selection was not the first time that Timebelle had attempted to represent Switzerland at Eurovision. In 2015, they entered with the song “Singing About Love” which went on to finish in 2nd place in the national final behind Mélanie René, whose song “Time to Shine” went on to finish last in its semi-final in Vienna with just 4 points. This year was Timebelle’s second attempt at representing Switzerland, and they won their selection show with a landslide 47.88% of the votes ahead of runner-up Nadya, who received 18.02% of the votes.
[tw-accordion class=””] [tw-accordion-section title=”Switerland in the Eurovision Song Contest”] Switzerland hosted the first Eurovision Song Contest in 1956 a contest that they won. Lys Assia won the first contest with the song “Refrain”, it wasn’t until 1988 that Switzerland would win the contest again. At the contest in Dublin it was Celine Dion with “Ne partez pas sans moi” who beat the United Kingdom to victory by just 1 point. In recent years Switzerland has struggled finishing last five times since 2004. In the past two years Switzerland has failed to reach the final.[/tw-accordion-section] [/tw-accordion]
