It’s been a couple of weeks since Beovizija 2018 took place in Belgrade, and Sanja Ilic & Balkanika won this festival with the song “Nova deca”, and will thus go on to represent Serbia in the Eurovision Song Contest 2018. After everyone finally thought that this will be the first Beovizija not to be hit by any scandals, one of the contestants – Maja Nikolic claimed that the competition was fixed and that the two female vocalists of Balkanika broke the rules of Beovizija by miming the entire song, whilst the male vocalist sung over his own pre-recorded vocals!

The fifth clause of the rules of Beovizija 2018 stated that all lead vocals must be sung live, whilst backing vocalists can be pre-recorded. Danica Krstic, one of the members of Balkanika had an accident on stage during her performance, knocked her head-mic off of its position which then ended up tangled in her dress, but nevertheless – her vocals remained as strong as if nothing had happened.

Danica is a lead vocalist of the band, and according to the rules of the competition, she should have sung all of her parts of the song live, which indeed was not the case. Newspapers and commercial TV stations in Serbia are all reporting about this incident, and whilst the members of Balkanika, and Sanja Ilic himself stated that this is all “lies and nonsense”, the Serbian national broadcaster stated the following:

Beovizija is a festival where all singers sing live. In the case of Sanja Ilic & Balkanika, Danica’s head-mic fell off towards the end of the song due to the choreography and got tangled in her hair, but it remained close enough for the sound to still be captured. Our sound engineer noticed it immediately and put the volume of her microphone a lot higher.

In comparison, the difference in the sound quality can be clearly heard in the performances during the competition stage, and at the winner’s reprisal at the end of the show.

Give a listen to “Nova deca” here, and pay attention to the part starting from 2:15: