The international artist Simone has won this year’s GlobeFest™ music contest for Montelimar, singing his duet ‘Avant Toi’ with co-star Vita. The duo qualified through each round of the contest to make it through to Saturday’s ‘super-final’ where they faced stiff competition from South Savannah’s Perry and Puerto’s super group Safera. The show, hosted in Elon’s second city Bat Hadar, recorded record levels of viewers and has been hailed as one of the best quality contests for quite some time. Show director Shibon Shibilah said he was ‘proud’ of the production that Bat Hadar had put on, saying it had ‘rivalled’ other recent hosts including last year’s show in Yaochang, Touzen.
Simone previously represented Montelimar in 2016 in Marlborough with the song ‘À Fleur De Toi’ and came fifth as a solo artist, but teamed up with Vita to record his latest track. A favourite to win the competition, the song has also made history as the first ever winner to be performed entirely in another language other than Havenish. While last year’s winner, ‘Fall On Me’ for Potenza, had verses in Potenzan, ‘Avant Toi’ is unique in its status as a winning entry. Montelimar previously also became only the second nation to score a top-3 result with a non-Havenish entry, when Indila performed ‘Dernier Danse’ in 2017 at the contest in Thionville, coming third – a result that was matched last year by ‘Tu van manquer’ in Yaochang and matched Potenza’s Francesco when he performed ‘Angelo’ at the 2011 edition in Liberdade. Puerto’s ‘Calipso’, which came third in Bat Hadar, was also performed solely in Potenzan.
Runner up South Savannah performing ‘Looking for Light’, became the nation’s most successful entry, beating their previous best result – a fifth place they also secured in 2011. Perry, their artist, was a relative unknown when he was selected to perform the alternative song. Gaining support throughout the week, it was also announced that South Savannah had topped the result on Friday’s semi-final when the three top scoring songs qualified for Saturday’s final, but would be caught by Simone and Vita in the final result.
Next years show will be hosted in Bahía Blanca, Republica del Sur.
