Eurovision Sportsball: Euro 2016 And Other Coping Mechanisms Written by Ellie Chalkley on June 25, 2016 | 1 Comment

Whether you’re feeling enthusiastic about it or not, you’ll notice that The Sportsball is in full swing. Over at my off-season European music project, Listen Outside, we’re celebrating every match of Euro 2016 by setting up song battles between artists from each country. We’ve covered a lot of musical ground, including Italian riot grrl, an amazing Turkish power ballad, Polish football themed ska, Northern Irish experimental rap, a Ukrainian jazz ballad and a Portuguese boy band. Over the course of the tournament, we’ll be recommending a total of 104 songs – at least three per participating country.

Here’s a playlist of our Greatest Hits so far:

Playlists By The Euro 2016 Draw

This has been both instructive and great fun to put together – writing this at the end of the group stages of Euro 2016 I already feel like I’ve expanded my mind and my musical horizons significantly. By following the structure of the football tournament, I’ve been able to immerse myself in music that I wouldn’t normally listen to from places I wouldn’t normally look.

In the process, I’ve discovered that I actually love Belgian chart pop and also that I really have to set aside some time to get informed about Hungarian electro. I’ve also found that the standard of what is okay to show in a pop video varies wildly across the continent and that you should always, always translate the lyrics. However, the best result is that instead of listening to the abject ITV commentary over the Euro 2016 matches, I’ve been able to listen to more edifying things like ninety minutes of assorted Slovakian sludge metal.

The whole Listen Outside project is an attempt to listen to as much music as possible from the general Europe area (as loosely defined by the EBU) and to tell people about it. I’ve recruited a colleague, Milly, who has the same deeply eclectic musical background, sense of humour and prose style as me (to be honest ‘colleague’ is a bit cold… she’s one of my sisters) and we’re blogging unusual musical recommendations from around Europe at the rate of around one a day. So far we’ve coloured in this much of the musical map… clearly we have work to do in the Balkans. And Scotland. We mustn’t forget Scotland…

Not the Euro 2016 Draw, but the countries ‘Listen Outside’ has already covered

We like to think of ourselves as existing in the journalistic void that sits between a Eurovision community site, our folk memory of Smash Hits magazine and very serious muso webzine The Quietus. We think we might be alone out here.

PIck And Mix: The Musical

One of my favourite things about the Eurovision Song Contest is being offered an arbitrary selection of music that I would otherwise have never heard and thinking about which ones I enjoy and why they are enjoyable. As a music discovery tool, the whole Song Contest process is fabulously efficient in its human-directed randomness.

Of course, we don’t get the full spectrum of amazing music represented in the Contest, as the genres represented in Eurovision tend to be focused on stuff that has a chance of winning a competition involving a popular vote. Music with tunes, songs with choruses. That sort of thing. At Listen Outside we’re free of petty restrictions like this and so can also play you chin-strokingly intellectual dance music, sweary riot grrl, drone metal and prog rock, all of which are basically untenable at Eurovision because of the rules of the contest.

So far we’ve recommended 84 songs from 27 countries in 22 languages. Once the football is over, we’ll be returning to our usual schedule of a song roughly every day, an album review roughly every weekend and our own unique format of gig reviews whenever we have gigs to review. Our grandest aims, in our wildest dreams, are to have a music night in a pub where we play Listen Outside favourites and also to publish an pop annual, like Smash Hits used to do. 

But until then, we’ll be doing things the Listen Outside way.

You can keep up with our quest on the website listenoutside.com, on twitter at @listenoutsiders and on Facebook if that’s your thing.