Việt Nam, until yesterday I only knew a bunch of 70's Eurovision songs covered by Vietnamese artists, many French covers including some that weren't even French originally. Songs like L'Amour est bleu (Luxembourg 1967), Après toi (Luxembourg 1972) and Si (Italy 1974) have all gotten the Vietnamese makeover, basically singing the song twice, in French and in Vietnamese, resulting in tedious 6 minute versions that also quite often suffer from a very cheap production.Of course there are exceptions, the late legendary singer Ngoc Lan is beyond critisism, Elvis Phuong has a very cool name and My Tam's version of Poupée De Cire, Poupée de son (Luxembourg 1965) is superb. (BTW, Poupée must be a popular song in Vietnam, as it's covered at least 7 times).
Some of these will be featured here at Eurocovers in the future.
But then, by accident, I came across Vũ Điệu Hoang Dã, the song we know as the fabulous Wild Dances by Ruslana, winner for Ukraine in 2004.
The singer, Hồ Quỳnh Hương, from Hanoi, takes the song and, even though the music is similar to the original, gives it a new image (watch the video). There's some really wild hair going on that wouldn't be out of place in one of these concrete hair gel commercials, plus a lot of very wild dancing and guys with spears.
My Vietnamese language skills are letting me down a bit but I found out Hồ Quỳnh Hương released the CD Sao Tình Yêu which features Vũ Điệu Hoang Dã in 2005.
She won some award for best female singer the same year and rightfully so as her version of the mighty Wild Dances is fantastic. 85 million Vietnamese people can't be wrong.
Another surprise cover of Wild Dances is Sevmaganman by Ziyoda. Can't seem to find much info on this singer but for the Eurocovers fans: She's from Uzbekistan. For me it's the first Eurovision cover in Uzbek, but I have to admit, I haven't really investigated their music scene. My knowledge of the Uzbekistan music scene is limited to Yulduz Usmanova.Ruslana, the original goddess of Wild Dancing has her temple here.
