BASEL, Switzerland (AP) — There’s one phrase you hear greater than every other in Basel through the Eurovision Track Contest: Sauna.
The northern Swiss metropolis is not generally known as an epicenter of steamy wood-cabin leisure, however the small municipality of Vora in Finland is, and three native performers have made saunas synonymous with this 12 months’s Eurovision.
KAJ — pronounced “kai” and named for the members’ initials — is bookies’ favourite to win the pan-continental music contest this week with “Bara Bada Bastu,” an ode to steam and warmth whose title interprets roughly as “just take a sauna.”
KAJ is representing Sweden, however the band members come from neighboring Finland, a rustic of 5.5 million individuals and three.3 million saunas, the place they’re a part of the Swedish-speaking minority.
At Eurovision, the trio carry out on a set styled like a country cabin within the woods, backed by dancers dressed as lumberjacks or in huge white towels. The music has an infectiously catchy refrain, a memorable dance routine and a one-word invocation to “sauna!” that’s shouted at KAJ wherever they go.
If they’re sick of it, it doesn’t present.
“The Eurovision bubble is a great bubble to be in,” Jakob Norrgård instructed The Related Press on Thursday. He’s the J in KAJ, alongside fellow band members Kevin Holmström and Axel Åhman.
Norrgård stated that he anticipated Eurovision to be a welcoming setting, “but not this friendly. This is a bit over the top.”
The band members’ solely remorse is that they haven’t had a sauna since arriving in Basel for Eurovision, which ends Saturday with a grand ultimate that can see acts from 26 nations compete at Basel’s St. Jakobshalle area for the continent’s pop crown.
Holmström stated that the band is delighted to be an envoy for sauna tradition.
“It’s a thing I really endorse,” he stated. “It’s good for people. It is good for me, for both my mental and physical health, and (it’s) also a very social event.”
KAJ was fashioned in 2009 and constructed a robust native following with humorous songs in Vora’s native dialect. Not way back they had been acting at birthday events and on the town halls of their residence area. They entered Sweden’s nationwide Eurovision choice contest, Melodifestivalen, considering it’d get them some gigs in Sweden.
They unexpectedly received that contest, and their efficiency in Saturday’s Eurovision ultimate is more likely to be watched by greater than 150 million individuals.
The Eurovision winner shall be determined by a mixture of public voting and factors from nationwide juries. Victory for KAJ would give Sweden a document eight victories because the contest was based in 1956, including KAJ to a listing of Swedish winners that features ABBA.
It could additionally imply an enormous quantity to Swedish-speaking Finns, who make up about 5% of Finland’s inhabitants — and to sauna fans.
Sauna-lovers from Vora — together with the Finnish metropolis of Tampere, which payments itself because the sauna capital of the world — drove a cellular sauna 1,500 miles (2,500 kilometers) to Basel, parked it close to the Rhine and opened it to the general public totally free through the weeklong Eurovision festivities. A dip within the chilly river after working up a sweat was non-compulsory.
It sparked the type of cultural cross-fertilization that followers say is the essence of Eurovision. On the pop-up sauna, native Swiss individuals steamed and chatted with Finns, a Canadian and others. When KAJ dropped by for a go to, they had been mobbed by selfie-seeking followers.
“I love Finnish sauna culture, because it celebrates the freedom of choice,” stated Dorothee Schulte-Basta, a Vora resident who traveled to Basel with the cellular sauna. “There are no rules in the sauna. Come as you are — everyone’s equal in the sauna.”
Finnish politicians have lengthy used saunas, relaxed however exposing, as an excellent setting for laborious talks, a apply generally known as “sauna diplomacy.” KAJ put on drab fits onstage in tribute to Urho Kekkonen, a long-serving Finnish president who famously deployed the method in talks with Finland’s overbearing neighbor the Soviet Union.
KAJ by no means thought a lo-fi music about rural saunas would take them thus far at a contest recognized for electro-pop, outrageous outfits and over-the-top staging.
“When you sit there on the stage and the song is about to start and you see all the LED screens, the millions of lights, and we’re just three dudes sitting and grilling a sausage, the contrast is so funny,” Norrgård stated.
“And that’s exactly our type of humor — you shouldn’t be doing this, this is so stupid. It’s funny. It’s really cool as well.”
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Kwiyeon Ha and Hilary Fox contributed to this story.
