Eurovision 2023: From Duncan Laurence to Måneskin – the song contest stars since 1998
April 13, 2023 –There is one month to go until the Eurovision Song Contest is held in the UK for the first time for 25 years, with a new crop of artists hoping to follow in the footsteps of past winners like Abba, Celine Dion and Måneskin.
A lot of things have changed about Eurovision since the UK last hosted the event in 1998.
But the world’s largest live music event, which attracted more than 160 million viewers last year, still has the power to propel acts to international stardom.
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As well as giving us icons like Abba in its earlier years, a number of artists have made it big internationally after competing in Eurovision in the past 25 years.
Here’s a look at five of them.
Duncan Laurence
I was getting my hair cut on Monday when a remix of the 2019 winning song came on in the barber’s.
It was a reminder of just how big the song still is, almost four years since Duncan Laurence claimed victory for the Netherlands with Arcade.
It took a while for the song to break into the UK charts, only reaching the top 40 in February 2021. But Arcade is now the most-streamed Eurovision song of all time in the UK, and has had almost a billion global plays on Spotify alone.
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It also became the first song from the contest in 25 years to chart in the US and has since been covered by Kelly Clarkson.
“To me it was always a dream to be known as a musician on a global scale,” he told me last year. “The biggest moment was when we hit the one billion streams on all platforms.”
This year he’s involved in the song contest again, writing the entry for Dutch act Mia Nicolai and Dion Cooper.
