Who is Mustii, the singing actor full of glitter who will defend our national tricolor at the Eurovision Song Contest tonight?

However, the dress rehearsal on Wednesday evening did not go smoothly. The revolving stage on which Mustii sings malfunctioned during his performance. As a result, the organizers allowed him to perform a second time after all the other candidates. Hopefully everything will go smoothly on a technical level during the second semi-final tonight. Mustii itself is ready for it.

Unlike most other artists that RTBF has sent to the Eurovision Song Contest in recent years, the 33-year-old singer from Sint-Gillis in Brussels did not break through via The voice Belgium. Thomas Mustin, as he is really called, is first and foremost an actor. He played in the thriller series that was also acclaimed by us La treve and won the 2019 Magritte du Cinéma Prize for Best Male Talent for his performance in the costume film L’échange des princesses. In recent years, Mustin has emerged as a familiar face to our French-speaking compatriots, both on the small and big screen and in the theater.

“My parents sent me to theater as a child because I was timid and lived in a bubble,” Mustin says in the short documentary The road to Malmö which can be viewed on VRT Max. He grew up in Lasne and La Hulpe, in Walloon Brabant. During the acting lessons that Mustin took there, he blossomed and something clicked. “That made me want to love life – as Sandra Kim would say.”

It is not immediately expected that he will be the second Belgian entry to ever win the Eurovision Song Contest after the ‘J’aime la vie’ singer. But ever since he announced his song ‘Before the party’s over’, Mustii has been hovering around tenth place among bookmakers. He should normally easily survive the second semi-final tonight, in which ten of the fifteen candidates will advance to the final on Saturday.

A thousand background voices

“Music is also a form of acting for him,” his parents said The road to Malmö. “The stage is my playground,” Mustin added. This is evident: Mustii clearly does not suffer from stage fright. He throws himself completely, with very expressive gestures, and screams his lungs out in the epic finale of his song. Mustii may be alone on stage, but the circle of microphones between which he sings – it looks a bit like a press conference – symbolize the choir that sings along at the end of his song.

Mustii launched an open call earlier this spring: who wanted to sing along with the closing lines repeated like a mantra?I got a soul on fire / I’m gonna make moves tonight / I got a soul on fire / I’m gonna raise roofs tonight‘? About a thousand people from all over Europe responded. They could record and submit their own voice. “I took ‘United by music’, the slogan of the Eurovision Song Contest, literally,” says Mustin.

The producer team started working on those recordings. Among them is Pierre Dumoulin, who is gradually emerging as the purveyor of the French-speaking Belgian Eurovision Song Contest entries, because in addition to ‘City Lights’ he also wrote the (much less successful) ‘Wake up’ by Eliot from 2019. To ‘Before the party’s over’ also co-wrote Nina Sampermans, the Flemish singer and songwriter who has already been involved in several successful Eurovision songs, including ‘Tout l’univers’ with which Swiss singer Gjon’s Tears came third in Rotterdam in 2021.

Just like Chekhov

‘Before the party’s over’ is a theatrical pop song with dark bass, reminiscent of Oscar and The Wolf – albeit with a less unique voice than that of Max Colombie. Mustii sings about the wild rush of nightlife: “They told us it was paradise / but we barely made it through the night”.

“It is the first song that starts from myself,” Mustii said this week Humo. “It symbolizes my life so far: the first part is subdued and melancholic, the second is full of euphoria. Finally I live without taboos.” Announcing ‘Before the party’s over’, Mustii, who is queer, described the song as “a primal scream to live life to the fullest, before the party’s over”.

He drew a parallel with the 1920s: “Just like then, my generation is dancing frantically to forget the impending apocalypse.” According to the singer, the song even shares a message with the play The three sisters from Russian writer Anton Chekhov: “There will come a time when everyone will know the meaning of all this, but in the meantime we must get on with life.”

More than glitter

On a musical level, Mustii is not ready for his test piece. With two albums full of electro pop (21st century boy from 2018 and It’s happening now from 2022) he has already filled the AB three times. He is also a jury member in the competition Drag race Belgium. “Drag is a way for me to transform myself, to express my emotions, to bring out my inner self with clothes and make-up,” he said in Humo. “For me, David Bowie and Grace Jones are also drag, just like Mustii.”

In the weekly magazine he also regretted that Flemish people this year seem to be supporting the Dutch entry Joost Klein more than their own compatriot. “It is just one example of how divided Belgium is when it comes to culture, and I think that is a shame,” he said. “There are many Flemish people in my creative team: Bjorn Tagemose is responsible for the stage act, Tobie Speleman is the producer, Nina Sampermans co-wrote the text, Willem Ardui from Blackwave plays the keys, Elke Hoste is my stylist … With my new record (coming out soon, ed.) I certainly hope to play in Flanders more often.”

But more than as a musician, Mustin sees himself as an actor. “I really need the acting. Take now La nuit se traine, a thriller in which I play a brutal man, a completely different type than I am. I don’t want to be pigeonholed by glamour, glitter and drag.”