The Brit Awards - Shite

Our UK correspondent Kev on his brave assignment of covering the Brit Awards this year.

I’m painfully aware of how spectacularly detached I am from modern popular music. In the run up to the Super Bowl, I boldly declared to my Facebook echo chamber that I’d never knowingly heard Kendrick Lamar, and after a cursory listen, I deemed him shite, and that ZZ Top should have been doing the half time show instead. This, I conceded, firmly plants me in the musical territory of "old man yells at cloud".

I've made peace with the fact that mainstream festivals like Leeds and Reading have long since scrubbed me from their target demographic. At nearly 40, teetotal, and having tasted the sweet luxury of glamping pods, the notion of sleeping in a tent now feels like volunteering to marinate in a body-sized Johnny for a weekend. My festival glory days are two decades behind me, and were it not for my stubborn allegiance to the metal and punk underground, I’d be doomed to those family-friendly nostalgia fests headlined by UB40 or Peter Hook, featuring cutting edge delights like a DJ set of "club classics" by Gok Wan.

But with that said I do at least attempt to keep my hand in on occasion, and this last weekend saw the Brit Awards roll around. Being a fairly normal and well adjusted lady (though bare in mind she did agree to marry me), my wife was curious to see what sort of tribute may take place to the poor lad from One Direction who died last year. Problem was, that meant enduring the entire show. But, nothing else was on, and the Firestick was all the way upstairs, and so I took the opportunity to undertake a daring piece of investigative reporting for you all.

As is tradition with these televised circle jerks, they wheeled out a masturbator of ceremonies to herd the glitterati, and this year’s designated tosser was funny man Jack Whitehall - peak millennial posh boy, renowned for his “cheeky banter”. He’s cut from the same smug cloth as James Corden and Joel Dommett - the kind of people who overuse the word "legend". The tabloids screeched about OUTRAGE over his edgy quips - a joke about the latest R&B sex offender, P Diddy, and a reference to the fact that Stephen Hawking couldn't dance. Inauthentic try hard barely covers it.

The music itself was a bin fire that no amount of ironic detachment could salvage. Sabrina Carpenter kicked things off by faux-fellating a bloke dressed as a Kings Guard - prompting pearl-clutching parents to wail about the horrors their children had witnessed. As far as what her music sounded like, I dunno, I can't remember. Former Little Mixer Jade Thirlwall, now going by the mysterious name of simply Jade, performed a sort of pop opera split into five parts, featuring a bloke wearing massive prosthetic hands and a fat suit, and a load of dancers who looked like the Putties from the Power Rangers. Having never bothered listening to him before, I was stunned to find out that the winner of best rock act, Sam Fender, essentially sounds like Bryan Adams, making his appeal to the youth frankly perplexing. I can only surmise that if he possessed Sean Dyche’s bulldog mug instead of that heartthrob sheen, there's absolutely no way he'd be playing anywhere other than the Dog & Duck on Thursday nights. If he was any further in the middle of the road, he'd need a cat's eye shoving in his arsehole.

Jade at the Brit Awards, and some Putties. No difference.

The acceptance speeches were a fresh hell of their own. We appear to have reached an era where popstars unironically refer to themselves and each other as "artists", a delusion of grandeur so thick you could build a wall with it and keep reality out entirely. Ezra Collective and Stormzy collected their awards and promptly turned the mic into a megaphone for Jesus. Not content with a respectful and understated acknowledgement of their spirituality, they churned out “shout outs” like they were auditioning for a Hillsong gig, that sort of loud evangelism you'd normally associate with a recently sober cocaine addict or reformed football hooligan. The whole night felt like a three-hour gratitude journal from a self-help group.

The Brits were never a bastion of the avant-garde, but they used to at least flirt with chaos. In 1992, the KLF dragged grindcore heros Extreme Noise Terror onstage for an admittedly terrible rendition of 3am Eternal, machine-gunning the crowd with blanks. Fellow anarchist jesters Chumbawamba doused John Prescott with a bucket of water in 1998. Oasis used their ’96 speech to tear into Blur at the height of the "Britpop wars" - though those of us without hearing impediments knew Suede were infinitely better than either of them. The same year gave us the infamous Jarvis Cocker incident where he waved his arse at Michael Jackson during his performance of the career nosedive that was the Earth Song, in protest over him behaving "like Christ". Behaviour which would have earned him a shout out from Stormzy this year.

As infantile as this may all seem, popstars were feral enough to climb any soapbox and lob a Molotov at the establishment back then. This year’s Brits felt more like Britain’s Got Talent spliced with a Billy Graham sermon. I’d say it’s time to fire fake machine guns at the lot of them, but Whitehall would probably call it “banter” and ruin it.