London Greek Radio

Cyprus has confirmed that Sandro Nicholas will be the island’s representative at the 2020 Eurovision Song Contest in Rotterdam taking place later this year.

The Cypriot broadcaster, CyBC, announced the news to excited Eurovision fans in an official statement towards the end of last year.

The 23-year-old German-Greek is an up-and-coming artist and a star of “The Voice Germany” from 2018. He managed to turn all four chairs with Shawn Mendes’ ‘In my blood’ where he reached the semi-finals.

Sandro Nicholas’ real name is Alessandro Rütten and he was born and bred in Germany, with an American father and a Greek mother from Zakynthos. He speaks Greek and travels to Greece frequently. He plays the drums and guitar and at the age of 15, started to write songs and formed his own rock-band.

Sandro has a soulful, pop and rocky-edged vocal and exudes a confident manner on stage.

As well as ‘The Voice’, Sandro was the American entrant at the New Wave Festival in Russia last summer. One of the judges was the Greek Eurovision hit-maker veteran, Dimitris Kontopoulos, who was said to have put in a word with the decision-makers in Cyprus for Eurovision.

Cypriot bosses have stuck to the format that has served them well in previous years by internal selection of the artist and song.

The formula has yielded fairly good results for Cyprus with Eleni Foureira’s spectacular 2nd place and Tamta scoring 13th in Tel Aviv last year.

Mr Nicholas will face the task to uphold Cyprus’ impressive qualification run, with five qualified entries in a row from 2015 to 2019.

Cyprus received 120 songs, all vying to compete as the island’s act for 2020 and have shortlisted the options to three songs. The exact details about the song will be released at a later date.

CyBC chose Mr Nicholas out of several artists, trusting the young and talented potential to resonate with the Eurovision voter.

Sandro is playing a constructive role in the creative song-writing to the entry, in order to find the killer-tune for this contest. Mr Nicholas has told media, he wants “an emotional song”, one that is a genuine, honest song.

In his interview to Cypriot media, Sandro said, “[I am] absolutely captivated. This country is probably one of the most beautiful countries I have ever been to. I’ve been to Zakynthos, Greece. I am Greek, but this place is magical and I’m so honoured and so pleased to be able to represent such an amazing country.”

He added, “It’s an honour for me, [to represent] for the Cypriot flag, and I want to do my very best. It’s fantastic, it’s a dream for me.”

The Eurovision Song Contest Semi-Finals are on 12th and 14th May, with the Grand Final on Saturday 16th May 2020.

London Greek Radio wishes Sandro and Cyprus the best of luck in Eurovision.

Article written by Tony Neophytou