Dermot O’Leary talks to Ed Sheeran. Goosebumps.
In times gone by, the Brit Awards was one of those events in the calendar that you could love to hate. It is with a heavy heart that I inform you that undiluted hatred is the only possible reaction to such an orgy of desolation as I witnessed tonight.
The sterility of the show is now such that the chances of anything remotely interesting happening probably rank somewhere near the possibility of finding charismatic and appealing aliens on those new exoplanets: bugger all to zero.
But it is more than that. The Brits has become like the self-replicating robots hypothesised in the Grey Goo extinction theory, capable of devouring all of its opposition and turning it into copies of itself. I would posit that the show is now unsubvertable. Even deceased punk musician GG Allin, who would habitually smear himself in his own faeces during his live shows, would struggle to get a rise out of this audience.
The Brit Awards, 2017 (right)
This is because subverting or looking in mockingly on something as an outsider presupposes at least some people to be enjoying that thing in the first place.
This was quite evidently not the case at tonight’s ceremony. There was a horrific sense of going through the motions about it by all involved. Everybody participating seemed to be aware of the futility of the show and, in a broader sense, of life itself.
This manifested for the viewer at home in a range of ways. The entrance of Simon Cowell, who in less hellish times might have provided a focal point for my ire, I instead greeted with a pathetic relief at the fact I actually recognised somebody there.
His interactions with the woman he was onstage with were bizarre and awkward, and he at one point appeared to effectively pretend to be a member of One Direction as he co-accepted the award that he was nominally presenting to the single member who bothered to turn up. (Touchingly, whichever one it was [unclear since Zayn Malik cleverly broke out on his own and seized the position of ‘the only one that anyone will actually remember’] said that One Direction will endure forever). And yet all I felt towards Cowell was a vague pity that he too must suffer this atrocious awards show.
What else to add? There was one vaguely palatable moment in the whole dismal ceremony. I was quite shocked when Noel Gallagher, somebody who has actually produced music of some sort of note/worth, took the stage at this music-themed awards show. Who’da thunk it?
Noel said little to introduce the award, and one wondered why he was taking time out of providing voice-overs for documentaries about ‘Definitely Maybe’ to attend the ceremony. Then it became clear why he had been summoned by whichever corporate events management consultancy runs the Brits these days: he was presenting an award to David Bowie, another person who had actually produced music of some sort of note/worth, for best album for the 2016 jazz rock album Blackstar.
Noel thinks he might have spotted the Brit Awards’s credibility…oh wait, no, that’s a small star a trillion light years away.
Of course David Bowie departed this earth in that foul year of Our Lord 2016, so Noel raised the statue to the sky, saying “this award goes…to the king.”
Following, as it did, Sheeran’s performance of “Shape of You”, the dedication to one of the most towering recording artists of all time was a timely and poignant reminder that it is, or was once, actually possible for music not to be completely shit.
However, we were immediately reminded by Robbie Williams’s tuneless performance of a medley of terrible material from his latest album that music is, and will likely remain forever, completely shit.
wholovestherain 