Next February, Belgian band Urban Trad will release a Best of CD. The 2003 Eurovision Song Contest runner-up are going to to celebrate their 10th anniversary.

Describing themselves as a band writing and performing "European traditional music of the 21th century", Urban Trad’s project started in May 2000, when Yves Barbieux gathered to create a first CD with artists already well-known in the traditional Belgian music scene (Orion, Luc Pilartz, Perry Rose, Tom Theuns, Didier Laloy…). In the beginning, it was meant to be just an album project, but the success encountered during the promotional concerts encouraged Yves in adding a public dimension to Urban Trad with other artists. Each of their 4 studio albums – the later published in 2007 – includes collaborations with other musicians.Back in 2003, the CD album Kerua as well as the CD single Sanomi almost sold 35,000 copies each, "mostly in Belgium", as the biography states. “The second place at Eurovision was not enough to give the impulse we hoped for abroad, both for record selling and dates”, the group declares on its website.

Urban Trad is also called a band to experience live. Next on their schedule is a concert this Saturday, 19th December, in Buggenhout (East Flanders).

Urban Trad represented Belgium in 2003 with the song Sanomi, the first Eurovision Song Contest entry to be performed entirely in an imaginary language. They placed 2nd, only two points behind Turkey’s Sertar Erener thus being the best placed Belgian act since Sandra Kim.

Urban Trad live at Les Francofolies de Spa (2004):