Mullingar native Sion Hill – real name Nate Johnston – represented Ireland last Saturday night on television performing his new single Speak Up in the Free European Song Contest, with former Eurovision winner Conchita Wurst as co-host.
Nate finished in the Top 10 in front of a TV audience of four million viewers.
The Free European Song Contest is a music competition in the Eurovision format that aired on German, Austrian and Swiss TV, organised by the German broadcaster ProSiebenSat Media and Stefan Raabs production company Brainpool TV.
Speak Up has already broken into the Billboard Top 100 songs in Germany and the Shazam Top 200 charts following release last Friday.
The music video for Speak Up was shot in Berlin where Nate was quarantining for the last few weeks in order to be able to compete in the competition, which took place in Cologne.
Sion Hill is signed to German record label Clouds Hill gmbh and has recently released two other singles, Fuel Kids and Last Minute with Warner Music Germany.
Sion Hill was due to perform at a number of music festivals in Ireland this summer to build on his performance at All Together Now last August and his sold out headline show in the Sugar Club in December 2019. Following the disappointment of the postponements (all for understandable reasons!) he is hoping to perform Speak Upon Irish TV soon and elsewhere around the World for his fans.
The contest served as an alternative for the Eurovision Song Contest 2020, which was planned to be held in Rotterdam, but was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The song, said Nate, was written in London, a city “that can make you feel lonely even though it’s full of people”,
“Speak Up is the shimmering anthem for a new age of self-care. I didn’t feel so good writing this song,” he says, “but I’m feeling fantastic playing it.”
After leaving Ireland for Berlin, after leaving Berlin for Hamburg, and after leaving Hamburg for the murmuring vastness that is London, Nathan Johnston has carefully re-calibrated his musical palette. While his lauded 2017 debut Elephant was an eclectic soul-pop wonderland comfortably sitting between a room full of chairs somewhere in Berlin, his relationship with London is manifested in the globetrotters’ latest single, Speak Up.
Sion Hill’s new single ‘Speak Up’ is out now across all digital platforms.
