On Thursday, Portuguese band The Black Mamba qualified for the final of the Eurovisão da Canção Festival scheduled for Saturday. The group consisting of Marco Bombinho, Tatanka, Miguel Casais, Gilherme Salgero and Roy Pedro Petit sealed the ticket in the second semifinals of the Song Contest.
Representatives from Albania, Serbia, Bulgaria, Moldova, Iceland, San Marino, Switzerland, Greece and Finland also participated in this second semi-final round.
This Tuesday, in the first semi-final, singers and bands representing Azerbaijan, Belgium, Cyprus, Israel, Lithuania, Malta, Norway, Russia, Sweden and Ukraine have already been selected.
In addition to those 20 who scored the pass in the semi-finals, six were automatically added: the representatives of the Netherlands, being the host country this year, and the competitors of the so-called “Big Five”, five European countries with direct and automatic clearances: France, Spain, Italy, Germany and the United Kingdom.
After a year in which the Eurovision Song Contest was not held, due to the Covid-19 epidemic, The Black Mamba was selected for this year’s edition by winning the Song Festival of the nation’s public television station, RTP, which annually identifies the national representative.
Thus it succeeded the Portuguese band Elisa (translator) and Marta Carvalho (composer), the 2020 winners who could not compete at Eurovision because the version was canceled due to the epidemic, Conan Osiris (2019), Claudia Pascual (translator) and Isora (songwriter) – winners in the year 2018 – And Luisa Sobral (songwriter) and Salvador Sobral (translator), who in 2017 won the Song Festival and later became the first and only Portuguese winner to date in the Eurovision competition.
Black Mamba: “The festival and Eurovision were a blessing that came from heaven”
