It was a year for burying hatchets. Time to put the past behind and move on to the future. Several traditional Eurovision nations made gestures towards welcoming Eastern Europe, notably Russia, and in return Russia put on a huge show. Possibly the most extravagant Eurovision to this point, the scale was massive, the stage was massive and the spending was massive.

There were controversies. The Pride march planned for the day of the contest was broken up with several arrests including the organisers. Armenia and Azerbaijan were using the contest to goad each other and Russia itself took the opportunity to go full military build-up in the first semi-final, sending a message to Europe in the form of tanks, jets and Red Army Choirs, while t.A.T.u sang “You’re Not Gonna Get Us”. Maybe those hatchets hadn’t been fully buried after all. Georgia didn’t want to Put In, after the 2008 invasion, so they didn’t and stayed at home.

But despite all those issues, the contest itself passed off peacefully, the only major technical problems being Dima Bilan’s jacket and the size of the flags in the audience. The outcome was one that everyone could love. A song about tradition, about fairy-tales. A song that could be inserted into any European culture’s traditions easily and sung by a man-boy who looked like he’d been magicked out of a fairy-tale himself, Slavic cheekbones and all. Overall, the quality of the songs was high, the number of protest songs was way down.

The EBU had played their part by finally listening to the concerns about voting blocs and re-introducing the juries in the final. It’s doubtful whether that affected the result hugely (although Iceland wouldn’t have been second without them), and it was uncertain if the changes to voting hadn’t just replaced diasporic and neighbour voting with another path for those wanting to ‘fix’ the competition. There was evidence that the voting blocs remained alive and well, just masked by a massive landslide for a popular winner.

Another thing that was masked by the opulence and extravagance of the stage was the financial crisis hitting Europe and the world. Broadcasters were already feeling the pinch and several weren’t certain that they’d make it. LTV in Latvia only confirmed its participation in January 2009 - having withdrawn in December 2008. San Marino pulled out entirely for financial reasons. It was only going to get worse next year - how would Eurovision cope?

In terms of song quality it maintained the quality of 2008. Lots of fans regard 2009 as a minor classic, with a supercharged final and lots of favourites. Having such a stellar winner is certainly a major step up on the previous year. In total there are fifteen songs in the current songfestival.be Top 500 - one fewer than 2008, but way ahead of any other year to this point. Similarly, the level of the national finals was also high, although some countries seemed to take their foot off the gas. Others were happy to step up, Estonia especially marking the changes both in their broadcaster and Eurovision by renaming their final Eesti Laul. I wonder if that will stick?

It was, weirdly, a healing year for Eurovision. In the heart of Moscow and with a state determined to show off and to make veiled threats, somehow Eurovision took the opportunity and learned to accept the reality of the new Europe, just at the time Russia was setting out to turn the clock back to before 1990. Maybe there was no problem with a little bit of neighbour voting. All you had to do was send a really good song and the votes would come.

It’s time to move to Oslo and to see if this unity can hold when the fabric of Europe suffers some instability.

Juries are back. After several years of complaints, the old school scoring method has returned for 2009. But only for the grand final and only for 50% of the score. Televoting still reigns supreme in the semi-final and contributes the other 50% of the final score.

What this did was create confusion. Not only did no one really know what sort of music would succeed - but whether the problems with voting blocs would be solved by it. Or whether it would just make it all worse. It did mean that if a country wanted to try to manipulate the results, it would now have to manipulate two different sets of voters at least.

One thing had changed, perhaps in light of the EBU's changes, was that was there were a lot fewer parodical songs. It felt like most countries were actually trying to win this year. Or at least impress Russia. There were also several attempts made by old school Eurovision countries to appeal to the newer ones. Alexander Rybak was born in Minsk, Patricia Kaas was immensely popular in Russia, and who couldn't be impressed by the UK sending Andrew Lloyd-Webber?

What was the effect of the new voting system though? Straight after Eurovision it was hard to tell. The grand final had only one set of points per country, being made up of both jury and televote scores - so they couldn't be separated. It took two months for the EBU to release the split results after they'd been audited.

There were also more technical problems, not least of which was RTVE in Spain delaying the broadcast of the semi-final they were voting in by over an hour so they could show the Madrid Open tennis. Their semi-final results were not televotes, but the results of their back-up jury. Albania also had a delayed broadcast with the same result.

In the final, there were problems with Hungary's telephone results and all of Norway's public votes, meaning Hungary's were SMS only vote while Norway resorted to using a 100% jury vote instead.

The first thing that was clear was that the running order bias of the televote was alive and well. You only have to look at the semi-finals and look at the qualifiers to notice that the bulk of those songs that made it through were later in the running order. In both semi-finals there was a spookily consistent bias of 60% of the votes going to the second-half of the running order.

The final wasn't so bad, perhaps slightly lessened by the jury voting and also the lop-sidedness of the vote in a year when a few strong songs vacuumed up most of the points.

And that's one of the takes-aways. The semi-final voting seemed more evenly spread. Norway won the final by nearly 170 points, but in the semi-final, the margin of victory was just over twenty. There weren't too many hints that the landslide was in the offing, even though Norway were the hot favourites with the bookmakers.

When the split results were released, they did show some major discrepancies in choices between the televote and juries. Just like old times, ballads were back. Juries preferred grand, old-school songs like Malta, the UK and France. They also preferred Germany's swing and Israel's peace. The televote wanted pop and they wanted ethnic. Türkiye, Albania, Finland and Spain were the songs the public wanted but the jury disdained. Maybe weirdly, Sweden's popera was far more popular with the public than it was with the juries.

There remained diasporic and bloc-voting, most notably with the two songs that made it out of the semi-finals thanks to the back-up jury choices.

Finland finished twelfth in semi-final one with forty-two points. Twenty-two of those points came from just two countries. Sweden and Iceland. In the final, sixteen of the twenty-two points Finland got came from Sweden, Iceland and Estonia.

With Croatia it was more noticeable still. In semi-final two, Croatia finished thirteenth with only thirty-three points. Twenty-two of those points came from Serbia and Slovenia. In the final, Croatia actually got more points. Forty-five. But thirty-five of those points came from the other countries that used to make up Yugoslavia. Every country that had been part of Yugoslavia voted for Croatia in the final.

Jury voting was not killing bloc voting. Instead it was a 2006 style result. Norway's song was loved by all and there was no disputing its win was genuine. Just like with Lordi, it was a victory that masked the problems and hid the fact that re-introducing juries hadn't completely solved the problem.

One last thing. Albania had to use their back-up jury in semi-final two. Their ten points went to the Netherlands. That's ten of the eleven points that the Netherlands got. Without Albania's broadcasting delay, the Toppers may only have received a single point.

In 2009, Eurolaul became Eesti Laul and the competition we know and love today was born in earnest. ETV had already cultivated one of the most distinct and certainly the quirkiest national final in Europe, but this year they needed to do something different.

With the upheaval of the past few years, and now with Eurovision in Russia and with the juries coming back, there was an inflection point to be marked. Most notably, ETV was now ERR thanks to the merger of the public service radio (ER) with television (ETV). The new, bigger organisation felt the need to change its national selection.

This year that meant a new name, and a new philosophy. The competition would bring Estonian tastes and culture to a European audience rather than just trying to pick a winning song. The brief was to include a wide range of music representing the country.

For 2009, it was still studio-based, but there was indeed a wide range of music, not just familiar names - though there were many familiar names. It’s a competition that feels like it’s got its finger on a much more vivid pulse this year, and that’s before it moves to a big stage for 2010. It’s a close thing, but the first ever Eesti Laul is my favourite national final of the year.

Pushing it very close though is Melodi Grand Prix in Norway. It had managed to attract some interesting new prospects, many of whom were so new, no one knew who there were. There was an emphasis on variety as well as more familiar comforting entries. Any competition that can go from Fairytale to Shuffled to Do It Again is willing to try anything to see what works.

There’s also a third big challenger for the crown this year. Creeping into the top three, almost unnoticed is the 2009 Festival da Canção. RTP were brave and tried to use the Internet to winnow down a large selection to one small enough to hold a single TV final. It had its challenges with several entries having votes removed for alleged irregularities, but it yielded some big songs from names that no one had heard of before, and in some cases, were never really heard from afterward either.

Overall the 2009 national final crop is good. It’s not quite as good as 2008, with the increase in the number of entries resulting in much more filler and middling songs. There may not be many absolute clunkers and there certainly weren’t as many parodic or joke entries, but there aren’t quite as many worthy challengers towards the top either. The public mood seemed less inclined to treat Eurovision as something that needed to be ridiculed - the voting was more subdued.

More entries from the wilder outreaches of the national finals.

First Malta. I could have put together a whole blog about the songs from this year's GO Malta Eurosong festival. They are many and they are very various. But here's Kamikazi Lover by Baklava.

Whatever you're thinking a song called Kamikazi Lover by Bakalva might be, it's not this. I have no words.

Staying on that theme of promising song titles and bands. From Spain's El retorno, Here's Living in a Bar by The Leather Boys.

Again, this is not what you're thinking it's going to be...

Introducing trampolines into national finals are Širdelės in Lithuania with Visko per mažai (Too Little of Everything). I'm not sure about the ladybird theme.

Lastly and certainly not leastly, are Rok Agresori in Macedonia with what has to be an all time lost Eurovision classic, Ding Dong.

They've taken all the fancy bits around the outside of Eurovision songs, chucked them away and boiled what remains down to its raw essentials.

What remains is this:

On to the last bit of bonus content for 2009 encapsulating several of the trends in one handy three minute package.

Princess Avenue were a product of the Russian music industry. A female pop-rock band brought together by Viktor Drobysh, producer of the Russian talent shows Фабрика звёзд (Star Factory) and recruiter of mostly female musical talent across Europe. He set up and oversaw a specific TV talent show to create Princessa Avenue, РОКовые девчонки (ROCK Girls!).

As the name of the recruitment show suggests, they're a band that like a strong rock edge to their pop and given just how many female-fronted or entirely female rock bands there were in the 2009 national finals, this is entirely what was in vogue even if it's fashionably late to the part, as Eurovision usually is. This is what the music industry Svengalis and producers were all about circa 2007-2009 having seen what both Avril Lavigne and Evanescence could do in terms of sales and spying that there was a significant gap in the market to exploit.

The band are part Russian, part Finnish and have a song usually labelled as a 'Melfest reject' i.e. it's written by a team of Swedes, Finns and Viktor himself. Never, Never is in English (of course) and the lyrics are in part generic, and in part troubling. For instance

I am saying no but you kept thinking yes

Hmmm. Especially troubling given Viktor is a credited song-writer who went on to marry lead singer Alexandra Gurkova. There's a disturbing amount of semi-non-consensual ick deliberately smeared liberally around the edges of the song, especially given the power dynamic between the group and the man behind the scenes.

At Evrovidenie, it was evident that the industry had dragged its heels too much on girlrock and Princessa Avenue only got two percent of the televote - exactly the same as fellow rock project Nano did in fact. They ended up tied for eleventh place. It didn't put them off though, and Princessa Avenue were back for another go in 2010 after releasing their one and only album in 2009.

The official history says the band split up in 2011, but at that time the only member left was Alexandra with a group of session musicians, so you could argue that they'd evaporated long before then.

As well as marrying Viktor, Alexandra came back with another music project in 2017 under the name of Sasha Holiday. Here's Chameleon from her later releases.

Another song that didn't make my top sixty-four, although this one perhaps should have. It ended up sixty-fifth in my list, right at the top of the group of songs eliminated before the final cut-off. It was again, a victim of a poor draw.

Svetlana Loboda has an interesting career. She also has a mammothly long Wikipedia entry which demonstrates either some intense, dedicated activity documenting her entire life and career. Prior to Eurovision, that career largely consisted of Svetlana joining an array of groups, then leaving shortly afterwards.

Most notably, she was recruited to replace one of the original members of the girl group VIA Gra. VIA Gra (yes, they went there) called Nu Virgos outside of Ukraine, and even by the standards of generational girl groups in K-Pop, they have had a high turnover and a huge number of former members. Svetlana only lasted six months and a tour of Asia. Apparently her onstage behaviour appalled fans who subsequently expressed dissatisfaction with her recruitment. Quite what that behaviour might have been is not explored in depth.

Post VIA Gra, Svetlana went solo and with admirable gusto not only released music, but also started her own fashion line and began the first of her many charitable activities supporting ill children and orphans.

Then came Evrobachennya 2009 and Eurovision. By this point in her career, Svetlana was a one-woman tornado of activity. Who needed the support of an industry when she had the determination and ambition to do it all herself. She designed her own staging, wrote her own song (lyrics by Yevgeny Matyushenko), performed her own choreography. And nothing was too much. Be My Valentine! (Anti-Crisis Girl) is a song and performance defined by its excess.

It won the national final, winning both the jury and the televote, but this performance was relatively subdued, featuring only the topless male dancers along with some of the less-gymnastic choreography featured in Moscow.

Prior to her Eurovision performance, Svetlana was still working for her charitable causes, appearing for the opening ceremony dressed in bandages in support of her campaign against domestic violence. The aural assault of Be My Valentine took her to sixth place in the semi-final followed by a twelfth place finish in the final.

Some suggested that she should've done better. Svetlana responded to this by mocking the idea she was disappointed at the result by appearing in a fat suit and munching on pizza while watching her performance back in her next music video

Throughout the 2010s and early 2020s, the one woman Svetlana industry took off, touring, recording and above all promoting. She's released, at minimum, two singles per year every year since 2009. Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, she's stopped touring Russia and worked towards supporting Ukrainian war victims and displaced families. She's also raised money for the reconstruction of damaged and destroyed buildings in the country.

Svetlana's energy on stage in Moscow was only a glimpse at her motivations and music, but she can be still at times. This is the video of her most recent single Інстинкт (Instinct) in which she sits still and listens to her own track for its runtime.

Occasionally a national final has a song that's a family affair. Iceland, being such a small nation in terms of population, has probably had more familial groups on stage than most. Though sometimes, it's one member of a family on stage and another writing the song.

Here is Hreindís Ylva Garðarsdóttir Holm. She is primarily an actress, working in film, on the stage and starting out on a path that will lead to becoming a teacher and director. She also sings. Hreindís Ylva's grandmother is Erla Gígja Þorvaldsdóttir is an amateur songwriter from Sauðárkrókur who enjoys playing around on the organ she has at home.

In 2009, Erla wrote a song together with neighbour, Icelandic dairy scientist (really) and poet Hilmir Johannesson in their small northern Icelandic community. Hreindís Ylva sang it and they submitted to RÚV in the open submission they'd opened for Söngvakeppni Sjónvarpsins 2009. In total RÚV received 217 entries this year, and one of the entries they chose was this one, from a group of people who'd previously had no interaction with the Icelandic music industry.

Vornótt (Spring Night) is a waltz filled with melancholy, longing, hope and heartbreak. It's essentially the song of solitude that an Icelandic girl might sing on a lonely night at the onset of spring, when the world is returning to life after the long dark, Icelandic winter. Hreindís Ylva sings about a previous spring night that was filled with love, joy, sunlight and flowers, the memory of which she now both treasures and curses in her isolation.

It's exceptionally poetic and at its core, it's a simple folk dance, but one that has some magnetic properties. Hreindís Ylva's innocence draws you into this world filled with nature, magic and birds flying around her.

2009 saw a boy who was in love with a fairytale win Eurovision. Here is the fairytale herself, alone and waiting for him to return.

The folk song from the northernmost coast of Iceland managed to qualify from its heat and make into the final. However, that's where this magical tale drew to a close as Vornótt didn't make the super-final. There were other stories being told for Iceland this year, but this one deserves to be remembered. It's such a quintessentially Icelandic tale.

Hreindís Ylva returned to Söngvakeppni Sjónvarpsins in 2013, again making the final, and that same year she released an album of folk songs by Erla Thorsteinn, but her true calling was to the stage. She's since taken on roles in the National Theatre of Iceland, performed one woman shows, toured performances around Iceland schools and appeared in RÚV television dramas.

She's also active in politics, becoming chairperson of the Young Left Greens in Iceland in 2018 and staying in that role for four years.

This is one of her songs from 2013, Tvö Ein (Two One)

So why isn't the most popular, enduring Eurovision winner ever in my top 64 for 2009?

Well, there's always the fact that it came up against songs that I like more relatively early on in the bracket, but that would be burying the real reason. And that is that I'm just not that fond of it.

Yes, it's slick, charming, and professional. I can appreciate the craft here and understand why this was such a favourite in the odds that ended up being a runaway winner on the evening. The most points ever scored in the grand final to this point. A song that's been in Eurovision's monthly chart of the top 20 streamed songs seemingly constantly for years.

More than that. Fairytale is a runaway winner that felt like it was restoring order to Eurovision after years of voting issues, expansion issues, old divisions across Europe rising to the top, discontent, manipulation, and parody entries.

It's a quintessential Eurovision entry - this is the sort of thing that (almost) everyone watching and hearing can say, yes, that's Eurovision and that's what we want from Eurovision. A song with echoes from the 1970s and 1980s. A song full of folk motifs and tradition. A song that transcends voting blocks. A song that appeals to all. It's a song that inspired other songs, not least of which was the entry in the 2010 Lithuanian national final I Love a Boy Who's in Love with a Fairytale.

The whole of Europe seemingly fell in love with Alexander and his innocent grin almost overnight. He was born in Belarus and thus like many of the acts this year had a Soviet connection, upping the appeal to the Russian diaspora - something that a lot of delegations seem to have worked out was the way to get more votes outside of traditional areas.

His fame was almost entirely instant. He'd appeared on the Norwegian version of Pop Idol in 2006. He'd performed on stage in Fiddler on the Roof, but that was about it. Alexander appeared like a genie - out of nowhere to grant wishes and sing about fairytales. He did go on to write and record other music, but nothing topped the moment on the stage in Moscow in 2009 when he became a Eurovision legend.

He did represent Norway again in 2018, but somehow managed to finish only fifteenth after winning the semi-final. He's released five albums and joins the ranks of national final alumni in recording a voice in a film - in his case he's the Norwegian Hiccup from How to Train Your Dragon. He's toured extensively and perhaps has been pushed a bit too far as he's suffered from bouts of fatigue, exhaustion and fits of anger. The world can't seem to get enough of Alexander.

However, I'm one of those Eurofans who never really got either him or the song. To me, Fairytale feels like a throwback, rather than a song that looks forward. A comfort song from the times of the financial crisis, when Europe as a whole desired stability, security and the opportunity for escapism. It feels like a trip to the beach to paddle in the gentle waves of nostalgia and childhood.

It's not fresh. It's too familiar. It's an abandonment of everything interesting that's been going on at Eurovision in the national finals for the past few years. So, even though it's a slick enjoyable song, to me it also carries a manufactured, palliative aftertaste.

Not for me then - but Fairytale is so big that I can't truly ignore it. There was still a huge chance that it would make my list for the year despite my misgivings, but the draw killed off that possibility relatively quickly. There are songs that did make my top 64 that I think aren't as good as Fairytale - but that's what happens when running a bracket.

Here is Alexander performing during the interval of this year's (2025) Maltese national final with Roll with the Wind