Saturday Flashback: Nica & Joe – Euphoria

Tim: Eurovision selection is already well underway, and we’ll probably start throwing around our annual choice of Saturday Rejects soon, but first off let’s have a listen to this intriguing cover of 2012’s winner.

Tom: Blimey. I did not expect most of an orchestra to appear there.

Tim: Interesting, isn’t it? Nica (not her real name) is Polish, Joe (his real name) is American, and together they came third in German X Factor 2011, and are competing to represent Germany in Malmö. They’ve got a couple of albums out (Spotify), largely consisting of operatic versions of popular tracks.

Tom: It’s always tricky doing something like this: if you don’t get the tone exactly right, you end up doing by accident what Max Raabe did deliberately. The only part of this that doesn’t really work, though, is the “up-up-up”; the stuttering would probably work better as one long, held note.

Tim: I don’t know, I think it works. Other highlights include an Il Divo-esque version of There You’ll Be and a rather rather fantastic cover of David Guetta’s Titanium, but I’ve chosen this one because (a) it’s the only one on YouTube, (b) it’s Eurovision and (c) I wish to express my disappointment that one of them didn’t sit back and let the other do this as a solo, because then we could have called it a Eupharia.

Tom: Oh. Oh, well done.