Key events
Laura Snapes
OK new drinking game: take a sip of Horlicks every time the presenters make another wearying booze gag (“gag”) and hopefully you’ll have conked out before the night ends.
Laura Snapes
And we’re back to the dreadful drinking “gags”, a mainstay of the Mo Gilligan era. Is Kylie Minogue going to drink from a shoe in the Australian “shoey” tradition? … Yes she is. Just say stilett-no.
Oh boy, can’t wait for “American superstar” Tate McRae (she’s Canadian) after the break. Maya Jama might be playing hard and fast with accuracy there on more than one level.
International artist: SZA
Laura Snapes
The Brits can struggle to attract international pop superstars and hardly any of this category is here – only Asake, Caroline Polachek, CMAT and Kylie Minogue seem to be here from the nominations – and so it is with the winner SZA, who had a huge year in 2023 thanks to the December 2022 release of her sublime second album SOS and only appears tonight in video form.
“I’m so grateful for this honour, thank you for bumping my music, and I hear you’re at the O2 which is my favourite … and I should be back really soon!”
Mabel Banfield-Nwachi
I’m on the floor among the celebs and everyone is wearing black leather – that seems to be a look this year. A lot of leather trousers on the men. All the ex-Love Islanders were loving Calvin and Ellie, which says a lot.
Laura Snapes
ITV and the British music industry’s primetime Saturday night showcase is going down well on Twitter. The only way to jazz it up: massive Kate Middleton reveal in the middle of Jungle’s performance.
Alternative/rock act: Bring Me the Horizon
Laura Snapes
The Sheffield band win the all-male category in a rare mainstream showing for British metal, often sorely overlooked at the Brits and the Mercury award. It’s their first ever Brit award, though they performed live with Ed Sheeran a couple of years ago. I am extremely here for the cutaways to an extremely bored-looking Young Fathers, who should have won this. But here’s to BMTH’s sweary speech, which leads to a good part of it being blanked out.
Oli Sykes: “I reyt don’t know what to say ‘cause we didn’t think we’d be winning this at all. Cheers to the Brits for making the voting system so complicated only our fans could be arsed, thanks to our fans [sweary sweary swearing] This is bloody insane this. Cheers to our management, family, all that stuff. I’m not gonna say owt eklse, thank you so much, cheers. Reyt good.”
Calvin Harris and Ellie Goulding’s performance reviewed
Ben Beaumont-Thomas
The UK may be a petty, pursed-lipped, radically ungenerous island – but certain things get me waving a Union Jack like I’m the admin for a Facebook page about Spitfire maintenance, and our love of dance music is one of them. More than rap, more than indie-rock, more than Dua Lipa trying really hard, commercial dance is our national pop music, and the way we rallied around Calvin Harris and Ellie Goulding’s Miracle to send it to No 1 for eight weeks had me staring wistfully off the white cliffs of Dover. My millennial nostalgia was juiced by Harris essentially splicing trance classics Tell It to My Heart, Castles In the Sky and Seven Days and One Week, and Goulding’s ethereality makes her the perfect trance vocalist. But you don’t get a hit of this stature through nostalgia alone: it’s a copper-bottomed bit of songwriting.
Ellie Goulding stays in that ethereal tone throughout, rarely bringing in that rougher grade of sandpaper that so differentiates her voice from the rest of her peers – and of course Calvin uninterestingly prods some equipment that may or may not be plugged in. But just as this performance starts to feel a bit mid, he gives it the full Sundissential treatment with a hard-trance breakdown lifted from the Hardwell remix, as Ellie bounds around with her backing dancers like they’re a bunch of kids who have just set a toilet on fire at Leeds festival. Vibes retrieved!
R&B act: Raye
Laura Snapes
Two down! This one is voted for by the public via Instagram. It’s a new standalone genre category after musicians and fans complained about R&B being conjoined with the pop slot last year: one of those musicians, Mahalia, was nominated this year. Arguably Raye does so much more than R&B – and if we’re talking genre purists, it would have been lovely to see Cleo Sol win this – but I begrudge her precisely nothing. “What!” she mouths as the camera turns to her.
“Hi! Look I just wanna say, when I was about 16, 15 years old, I wanted to be an R&B artist, that’s what I would say. And I was told, I think, a lie that R&B doesn’t sell in the UK so I needed to learn how to make different kinds of music. I know that’s a bit shady but I need to say R&B is so important and there are so many R&B artists in the UK eating it up. I wanna shout out to Mahalia, who campaigned for this award, Cleo Sol, who’s immaculate, Sault. This really is a lot – thank you.”
MORE SHADE PLEASE!
Laura Snapes
I will be passing Ben the smelling salts during this one as I don’t know that I’ve ever known him to love a song so much in the six-plus years we’ve worked together. I find Ellie Goulding’s voice a bit like opening a bag of icing sugar, accidentally inhaling a bit and choking.
Group of the year: Jungle
Laura Snapes
“There’s been some pretty awesome bands that have come out of the UK,” says Billie Joe Armstrong. But … Jungle? Really? Young Fathers should have blitzed this with their fantastic, absurdist sound, showcased on last year’s Heavy Heavy, our No 2 album of the year – and they look pretty nonplussed at their table – but instead it goes to Jungle, tepid white soul pastiche artists whose greatest contribution to British music is a lot of soundtracks for sports montages.
It’s their first Brit nomination and thus award, and they spend their excitable acceptance speech – which features the first sweary sound blot-out of the night on the ITV feed – thanking their team and families. Forgettable in every way.
Song of the year: Raye – Escapism ft 070 Shake
Laura Snapes
One down, five possible gongs to go! Raye wins her first award of the night for Escapism, one of the songs she claimed was left collecting dust in a filing cabinet when her former label Polydor declined to release it. More fool them: Raye went it alone as an independent artist, the song hit UK No 1, was the biggest-selling song by a British female artist in 2023 and it went many-times platinum all over the world. She is literally leaping up and down with glee – and in bare feet.
“Ahhh! What! Thank you God, like wow! I’m shaking. I didn’t … I don’t really know what to say right now but thank you, thank you to my team. Wow, I’ve always dreamed of saying that, ‘thank you to my team’. Thank you to my distribution company who are called Human Resources, a small little imprint in America, no one else would take my songs but J [Erving], thank you for believing in this music. Thank you to Mike Sabbath, who collaborated on my entire album on this song. He made the beat, I heard it in the car. I can’t believe this is happening, aaah!”
Loving her saying that she’s always dreamed of saying “thank you to my team”! A graceful barb.
Plus in the presenters’ prelude, we got our first political statement of the night from the stars of ITV’s Mr Bates vs the Post Office: “In spite of what the government say, they’re not paying the postmasters.”
Dua Lipa opens the show – her performance reviewed
Ben Beaumont-Thomas
It would be inaccurate to say that Dua Lipa is entering her flop era – the first singles from her upcoming album, Houdini and Training Season, are currently in or around the top 20 most streamed songs globally on Spotify. But there’s something a little gimlet-eyed in how they’re written – catchy in a grimly determined rather than breezily natural way – that makes them hard to love, and some mean media types (not me, yet!) are wondering if she could be on the way down the other side of fame’s hill.
Well, that performance should quieten them down a bit. Dressed in her second leather ensemble of the night, she launches into Training Season and while I find this song really quite plodding and funkless on record, Lipa lifts this B-tier material with a really robust vocal performance – she sounds like she absolutely has to have the sexual-spiritual connection she’s singing about, and her voice doesn’t waver even when strutting around a populous troupe of acrobatic dancers. That’s the kind of boot-camp vocal training that only peak pop stars can haul themselves through – and it makes for a potent opening.
Laura Snapes
We’re graced with a new cohort of presenters this year, Clara Amfo, Maya Jama and Ronan Kemp. All dyed-in-the-wool actual presenters, the Brits are seemingly going for “abject professionalism” this year after the shambolic “comedy” of Mo Gilligan the past two years. Or … 70s variety show with this Love Island “kiss cam” bit? What! (I have never seen Love Island and have no idea what is going on here.)
