Day 5 in Baku, and today saw the start of what you might call the “hard work” phase of the rehearsal fortnight.

If the first rehearsals are all about getting the initial camerawork and technicalities right, and the dress rehearsals are there for fine-tuning, then it’s Thursday through to Sunday when the delegations from the semi-final countries have the opportunity to start properly turning their performance into how they want it to look and sound.

Some start from a lower base than others, of course. Rambo Amadeus from Montenegro had made it perfectly clear that he was unsatisfied with his first attempt at the weekend, and today saw a much clearer vision of what the Balkan nation intends to bring across in an effort to qualify for the final for the first time. Rambo enters the stage wearing a cape, the backdrop features colourful euro banknotes, a banner is brought on bearing the peculiar lyric “HEUTE HABE OBOTNICA”, and the whole thing generally has a sense of merry organised chaos. Apparently they still weren’t particularly happy afterwards, though.

Elsewhere, Greece changed its backdrop and tweaked its dance routine a bit, but Eleftheria’s vocals still sound extremely exposed in the sound mix. Romania‘s Mandinga strutted their stuff, with the boys in white outfits that make them somehow even more irritating to me – in a contest where Sakis Rouvas has reached the top three, though, annoying smugness is no barrier to success. That’s something that Israel will be hoping too, although I find Izabo’s performance of Time to be quite charming – I’m just worried that the chorus sounds particularly weak. See what you think, insofar as you can hear much of it in the official video!

Clothes were a common theme throughout the day, with Iris from Belgium raising a few eyebrows in a somewhat unusual two-piece – apparently she’ll be wearing something else on the night, at least – and Finland‘s Pernilla mixing and matching with a flowing jade-green dress accompanied by a black sweater of some description. It can’t possibly be cold in Baku, surely? Meanwhile, the girls from Latvia are dressed for a cocktail party, but for me the pastel shades just seem to clash with the background and the overall effect is less than pleasing. By contrast, Albania looked quite dowdy and plain, but then Suus was never going to have a Daria Kinzer-style performance.

Other delegations settling into the swing of things included Switzerland, whose dark and moody backdrop (similar to the promo video) really suits the song, and Cyprus, where Ivi Adamou’s performance continued to impress me, at least in the context of what a song like La La Love actually requires vocally and visually – although I’m not sure her backing girls are too keen on having to lift her up all the time!

Of course, some countries like to show their hand right from the start, offering absolutely no surprises during the second run-through. Today, for example, there were few changes in the rehearsals from the likes of Denmark or Iceland, both of whom had already turned up in full costume and with everything ready to go. Instead, they took the opportunity to relax and show off their skills in the subsequent press conferences – with Greta Salóme whipping out her bow and having a fiddle to everyone’s delight:

Perhaps the most noteworthy rehearsal of the day, however, came from San Marino. Not content with one having of the most garish backdrops to accompany the garish music and lyrics of The Social Network Song, today we discovered that Valentina’s happy gang will be dressed as a pilot, a cheerleader, a doctor… We’d call them a Village People for the 21st century, but since San Marino basically is one big village, that thought makes my head hurt. Anyway, the stage routine is actually sitting quite nicely, for all it’s still as cheesy as it could possibly be (think Let’s Get Happy, basically) – but you never get the impression that any of the people on stage are actually having any fun. It’s all delivered with a forced smile and is basically as late-stage Siegel as it gets. Bet it still doesn’t come last in its semi though!

If it does all go wrong and the jump into the final proves too much for Valentina and her Facebook friends, however, the unlucky non-qualifiers can comfort themselves with the knowledge that a fleet of sleek London taxis will be waiting to whisk them away to their hotel and onward to the airport for that unexpectedly early flight home. Here’s a sight you don’t necessarily expect to see in the middle of downtown Baku:

What else?
We must, of course, talk briefly about the hacker attacks that affected several fan websites earlier today. Most were only temporary denial-of-service attacks and have since been resolved, but the long-standing Eurovision fan site esctoday.com was taken down completely, with their site being replaced by an unpleasant anti-gay statement by protestors apparently originating from Azerbaijan (although Iran has also been mentioned speculatively as a potential source of the attacks).

There has been no official public statement by the EBU on this matter to date, although the prinz.de Eurovision blog managed to get the following reply from the press office (in German and in English). However, after a death threat purporting to be from the same group of hackers was subsequently posted on esctoday’s Facebook wall, with specific reference to the safety of esctoday’s on-site bloggers in Baku, we can only hope and assume that the EBU will take the necessary action to ensure the safety of accredited fans and journalists in the Azeri capital over the next two weeks.

In the meantime, we would like to express our sympathy and support to esctoday.com on having lost many years’ of work in today’s attack, and wish them a speedy return to the family of ESC fan sites.

Tomorrow sees a continuation of today’s pattern, with the second batch of rehearsals from the remaining semi-final 1 participants followed by Serbia through to Bulgaria inclusive. We should also have our first on-site report from our editor Danny, who will be living it up at the Georgian party tonight. If previous years are anything to go by, the wine should be flowing freely and the anecdotes will be plentiful – so stay tuned to esc-chat.com and our Twitter feed for all the gossip!