The Brit Awards 2016: from A to Zzzzzz

You know, I was tempted to simply repost last year’s article, seeing as this year’s Brits line-up appears to be little more than a regurgitated hybrid of the past few years. I haven’t done that, however – I still respect you, even if the organisers of the Brits don’t.

Last year, I wrote what was effectively a chronological breakdown (in every sense of the word) of 2015’s audio-visual atrocity. I could easily have done that again, but it’s kinda self-defeating when you’re trying to criticise the rehashing of old ideas, so instead I’ve lovingly compiled the highlights (in no sense of the word whatsoever, in many cases) of this year’s ‘spectacular’ in the form of an A to Z, for no particular reason.

And yes, some of them are pretty tenuous, but work with me here…

A is for Adele, who probably does the most interesting thing of the entire evening by dropping an F-bomb approximately 85 minutes in after Major Tim Peake announces (from space and everything!) that she’s won yet another fucking award for her godawful caterwauling. That said, if you think she sounds bad on record, her speaking voice is something else entirely – in an alternate universe, she’d be running the caff in EastEnders or gaining meaningful employment as a human burglar alarm.

B is for Bieber. The first artist to simultaneously hold the number one, two and three spots in UK chart history, apparently, which is odd as it all sounds like number two to me. He rather predictably wins the International Male Award (which I’m sure had absolutely nothing to do with the fact he was in attendance) and gives a speech lifted straight from one of those bullshit pseudo-inspirational memes about life being a journey and how we’re all on our own individual journeys. That’s true – after hearing that, I went on my own individual journey to the bathroom to reacquaint myself with my dinner.

C is for Coldplay, who demonstrate the truly wretched state of mainstream British music by being named Best British Group. They also open the show with a performance so reserved that it may as well have a German beach towel slung across it. Chris Martin plays his battered old piano whilst rocking back and forth like someone who swats imaginary pigeons, the drummer looks like he was rudely awoken just seconds beforehand and the other two decide to alternate between playing their usual instruments and a set of additional drums, for no apparent reason. I would wager this is what the producers think passes for an explosive, on-point show opener these days and yet the end result is probably one of the most underwhelming, by-numbers performances yet at any Brit Awards ceremony, as Coldplay slip ever further into predictable self-parody. One question: do you think the other three members of Coldplay actually know they’re in Coldplay?

D is for Dec and Ant, also known as Ant and Dec. It’s their third (and thankfully final) year of hosting and this means we have to endure a whole evening of two excitable Geordie foreheads in designer suits harping on about “upping their game”. Not sure what their game was, exactly, or how they think they’ve upped it, but tonight they could have beamed in a hologram of any Ant and Dec hosting job from the past decade and no one would have noticed the difference.

E is for ecstacy, as in something which might make sitting in that audience even vaguely enjoyable.

F is for fire – and lots of it. That’s literally all I can remember about Justin Bieber’s performance. While he’s undoubtedly as popular as ever (maybe even more so), he’s really not doing anything that Justin Timberlake hasn’t already done a hell of a lot better.

G is for Gary Oldman, who comes on to accept the Icon Award for David Bowie. It’s clearly an emotional occasion and no one can blame one of our nation’s finest actors for wanting to pay tribute to one of our nation’s finest musical legends, but you can’t help feeling everyone in that arena is wondering how long Oldman’s speech is going to go on for…

H is for hairy, which could be used to describe Jack Garratt, winner of this year’s Critics Choice Award, who has a rather alarming hair and beard combo, giving him the appearance of a graphic design student who works part-time in Urban Outfitters. He sits there taking advice from last year’s winner, James Bay, who tells him to ‘keep doing what you’re doing’, by which I assume he means keep folding those jeans and hand in your coursework on time. On paper, he sounds like he should be an interesting proposition (“brilliantly talented multi-instrumentalist”) but in reality he sounds exactly as you’d expect someone who’s won both the Brits Critics Choice and BBC Sound of 2016 accolades to sound: relentlessly pedestrian.

I is for International Female, deservedly won by Bjork who has the honour of being the only winner of the night not to be present at the ceremony (I’m obviously not including Bowie here). Instead, she sends an acceptance video in which she appears to be wearing melted plastic over her face. Unlike Lady Gaga, Bjork’s kookiness never feels contrived. Treasure her.

J is for James Bay. This year’s George Ezra, I guess – he sounds like every over-ambitious busker on every city centre street corner and you’d probably struggle to name more than one song. The only real difference is that Bay looks a bit like Jack White, if he’d been styled by River Island and the Amish. He wins British Male Solo Artist and duly accepts his gong from Kylie before rotating on the spot, apparently unsure which direction to face (a common problem tonight, thanks to the circular stage in the centre of the arena). To his credit, he seems humble enough, but there’s no escaping the fact that his win is exactly what’s wrong with this year’s awards.

K is for K-hole, as in you’d probably need to be stuck in one to enjoy much of tonight’s ceremony.

L is for Lorde. The rumours about who would be taking part in tonight’s Bowie tribute hadn’t been promising – Noel Gallagher and Chris Martin (with whom Bowie had famously refused to work) were among the names touted. In the end, it was Lorde who stepped up to perform ‘Life On Mars’, accompanied by Bowie’s own backing band. A beautiful, subtle and, above all, fitting tribute.

M is for Mark Ronson, who still irritates the living shit out of me for reasons which have yet to become entirely clear.

N is for Nick Grimshaw, who comes on with Cheryl Whatever-Hernameis to present the award for British Breakthrough Act. It goes to the appallingly named Catfish and the Bottlemen (I’m sure there’s probably some ‘hilarious’ story behind it but frankly I don’t give a shit) but all I can think about is the fact Grimmy’s head appears to be at least four times the size of Cheryl’s. Feeling slightly disturbed.

O is for One Direction, who, despite technically not really existing at the moment, manage to win the British Artist Video of the Year Award. Two boys in suits who look like they’ve drawn crude beards on their faces in felt tip accept the award. It’s good that they’ve given the work experience kids something to do.

P is for Pam Hogg, who designed this year’s statue and thankfully succeeded in ensuring she didn’t repeat Tracey Emin’s mistake of making 2015’s trophy look like an ornament in your gran’s downstairs toilet.  

Q is for: “Quick, Adele’s about to swear, press the mute button... oh, never mind.”

R is for Rebekah Brooks. Oh no, wait, sorry – it’s Jess Glynne. If I’m honest, she’s not been on my radar at all and I’m pretty sure I’m not in her key demographic. That aside, she has one of the least pleasant-sounding voices I’ve heard since Sam Smith. Still, if the music career doesn’t work out in the long-term then she could probably make a pretty reasonable living recording those warning klaxons used when bin wagons are reversing.

S is for Simon Le Bon, this year’s token Veteran Pop Star Who Looks Like He Doesn’t Really Know Why He’s Here. Good of him to take time out of his undoubtedly hectic schedule to be here tonight.

T is for Tame Impala, who scoop the International Group Award. Pleasant surprises (or indeed ANY surprises) at the Brits are few and far between, but this is definitely one of them.

U is for underwhelming, which is exactly what British music SHOULDN’T be, right? Maybe the bigwigs at the Brits missed the memo?

V is for varying degrees of mediocrity. Fifty shades of Bay, if you like.

W is for white, as in: “Wow, the Brits seem overwhelmingly white tonight – I wonder why they chose to overlook the many innovative black artists who made fantastic music over the past year in favour of yet more homogenised River Island balladry from skinny, long-haired, hat-wearing white boys with guitars or miserable, watered-down blue-eyed soul from whining white women who’ve been ploughing the same stale creative furrow for the best part of a decade?”

X is for xylophone jazz-wobble tech-hop, a genre woefully under-represented at this year’s Brits, to the point where there were no xylophone jazz-wobble tech-hop artists nominated at all. I’m writing a very strongly worded letter to my MP as we speak.

Y is for years and years. Not the awful pop three-piece of the same name, but the amount of time I feel is passing with each excruciating second of Adele’s closing performance. I note she’s playing it safe by not wearing a cape.

Z is for Zzzzzzzzzzz. Wake me up when LEVELZ are nominated for Best British Album, okay?

2014: that was the year that wasn't (part one)

I realise I come across as a happy-go-lucky kind of person without a care in the world, but there are still a few people on this here planet capable of getting right on my tits.

Anyway, it's always better out than in, as they say, so in the first of two articles I thought I'd vent some steam over famous people who have no concept of my existence but have still managed to wind me up in some way.

Coldplay

Let no one say that Chris Martin isn’t consistent. Six albums in and every line he utters still sounds like a feeble apology for disappointing sex, while the other three (the ones who AREN’T Chris Martin) sit there like the three members of U2 who aren’t Bono – smug in the knowledge that however ridiculous their frontman looks and sounds, they’ll still be raking it in.

It wasn’t just his music that irritated this year either – the announcement of Martin’s split from Gwyneth Paltrow (I don’t know which one of them should be more relieved, frankly) could only have been more pretentious had they arranged for doves to deliver hand-written parchments to every household in the world.

The group’s seventh album, A Head Full Of Dreams, with its title presumably chosen from a competition open only to infant school pupils, is due for release next year. Martin’s once again dragging out the whole ‘this album might be our last’ bollocks which he’s been peddling since at least the second album.

We can only hope he’s telling the truth this time, although I won’t be holding my breath – life isn’t that kind.

Incidentally, this year also gave us the greatest review of a Coldplay album you’ll ever read. Seriously. Read it here.

Paris Hilton

This year, professional oxygen thief Paris Hilton was named ‘Female DJ of the Year’ by French youth station NRJ. Okay, it’s not exactly a Grammy and in the grand scheme of things it probably won’t have any significant impact on the course of human progress, but it does beg the question: has Paris Hilton EARNED any sort of award for her ‘DJing’?

As anyone who has seen videos of Hilton in action (no, not THOSE videos) will tell you, she does a lot of dancing, pointing and pretending to fiddle with stuff, but very little in the way of actual DJing (some videos show a ‘helper’ who hides behind the decks and does all the technical stuff that Hilton doesn’t need to do because she’s too busy dancing, pointing and pretending to fiddle with stuff). The downside of recent advancements in DJ technology is that you can pretty much get your equipment to do all the work for you – stick Hilton behind a pair of 1210s with a stack of vinyl and we’ll see how well she fares then.

Paris Hilton is a DJ only because she has seen someone do it, decided she wants to have a go and her people have made it happen. She hasn’t worked to get where she is today. Where most DJs spend years finding their sound, hunting down rare tracks and generally paying their dues to whatever scene they aspire to be part of, Hilton has simply snapped her fingers and become a DJ, just because she’s used to getting her own way. In fact, everything she has ever achieved in life has been purely down to the fact she was excreted from a rich woman’s nether regions nearly 34 years ago, rather than because she’s actually any good at anything.

To be named ‘Female DJ of the Year’ is also an insult to every female DJ who has had to strive for recognition in what has traditionally been seen as a male-dominated industry where a woman behind the decks is, unfortunately, still treated as some sort of novelty (for example, the words ‘female DJ’ might appear in brackets after their name on a flyer – you wouldn’t list a DJ’s skin colour or sexuality in the same way, would you?).

Memo to Hilton’s ‘people’: you can put an end to this. This is your time to shine. The world is depending on you.

Alex Turner

If I’m honest, there’s always been a whiff of the emperor’s new clothes about Arctic Monkeys. I don’t dislike them, as such, but I’ve just never found them worthy of all the hype that seems to have surrounded them throughout their career.

However, it’s not the band themselves that have particularly irritated me this year, it’s that bequiffed twat of a frontman, Alex Turner. He wasn't quite so bad in the early days when he generally didn’t have very much to say, but more recently the fame and success seem to have gone to his Brylcreemed little head, to the point where he appears to have adopted the voice of an Elvis impersonator for his between-song gig banter. He doesn’t look like a rock star: he looks like someone PRETENDING to be a rock star.

The glistening cherry on the cake, however, was his excruciating acceptance speech at this year’s Brit Awards, in which he adopted the expression of a teenage boy about to tell his giggling mates about how he’d lost his virginity at last night’s party, before launching into a frankly bizarre lecture about rock ‘n’ roll and how it will never die.

He even talked about rock ‘n’ roll being ready to “smash through the glass ceiling”, as if white-dominated guitar music had somehow spent the last half- century being brutally oppressed by the music industry.

This tax-dodging ‘man of the people’ then finished his little routine by telling organisers to “invoice me for the microphone if you wanna” before dropping said microphone on the floor in the style of a petulant child who’s just been ordered to tidy his room.

Rather predictably, the increasingly irrelevant NME creamed its pants and stuck Turner in all his quifftastic glory on its front page, hailing him as the leader of some new rock ‘n’ roll revolution – a cover which will probably go down as one of the most embarrassing in the magazine’s once respectable history.

Shush now, Alex - grown-ups are talking. 

Tom Odell

For that abomination of a song used on the John Lewis advert, above all else. The fact it’s a cover is irrelevant – the end result is still the musical equivalent of waking up on a cold winter’s morning to find yourself covered in someone else’s vomit.

Odell’s strained – nay, strangulated – voice can’t seem to decide whether it’s trying to yawn or let out a desperate yet futile cry for someone, ANYONE to put it out of its misery. This is doubtless what Odell himself fancies as deep and meaningful – the mark of a REAL musician trying to convey REAL feelings and yet still managing to sound like an X-Factor contestant refused a place in the final because “the standard is particularly high this year and you just haven’t got what it takes”.

Like Ed Sheeran, I struggle to see the appeal of Odell. Unlike Sheeran, I don’t know anyone who actually likes Odell’s music. That said, there’s undoubtedly a budding musician sitting in a coffee shop somewhere, guitar in hand, telling their largely indifferent audience that they need Tom Odell’s album in their lives.

That’s a brave move in a room full of people brandishing boiling hot drinks, isn’t it?

Katie Hopkins

I’m loathe to give this hateful excuse for a human being any more publicity than I have to, but it’s impossible to write about people who have irritated me this year without including her.

I can’t even be bothered to repeat anything she’s said (Google her if you’re that desperate), but I will say this: someone, somewhere, at some point has wronged her (possibly in a fairly trivial way) and she has retaliated by embarking on some sort of ideological mission to vomit venom at everything in her line of vision. This extends to banning her own offspring from mixing with other children based on their names, in case they should tarnish her little darlings’ delicate minds and, presumably, their prospects of marrying somebody rich, gullible and on the verge of a heart attack.

I’ll also say this: she looks like someone skinned a horse and then applied lipstick and a Miss Piggy wig. Just banter, Katie.

From the archives: Consciously uncoupling myself from Coldplay

As traumatic experiences go, this has got to rank up there with mislaying your house keys or losing your mum in the supermarket. There’s a high likelihood that I could be scarred for life.  I still wake up screaming in the middle of the night.

There’s no easy way to say this, so I’m not going to insult your intelligence by dressing it up: I found a Coldplay single in my record collection. Yep. There it was, nestled between Cold Water Flat and Collapsed Lung (Google ‘em both), just waiting to be found at an opportune moment.

I took some consolation from two facts: firstly, it came free with an issue of NME back in 2008, so I didn’t pay for it as such and, secondly, I’ve never actually listened to it. I must have removed it from the cover of said magazine all those years ago, filed it away (alphabetically, of course) and forgotten about it.

Unearthing it after six apparently Coldplay-free years brought up a lot of feelings – guilt, anger, shame, disappointment. How had I let my guard down so spectacularly? How could I look people in the eye again? How could I even step out of the house in the morning?

Thankfully, the solution came to me quicker than you can say ‘conscious uncoupling’.

What follows is a handy step-by-step guide to purging unwanted pests of the Chris Martin variety:

1. Remove the offending record from your collection. Gaze upon it briefly to ensure it is indeed a Coldplay record and not something worth keeping. I checked Discogs to ensure that it wasn’t valuable and therefore worth selling. Thankfully, it was only worth £1.79 (less than I paid for the magazine, I think) so I could proceed with my original plan.

2. Take a bowl – ideally one that the record is too big to fit inside. You may gaze upon the bowl too if you wish but a bowl’s a bowl, so don’t waste valuable purgin’ time.

3. Place the Coldplay record on top of the bowl in the sink and boil the kettle. Once boiled, pour the contents of the kettle onto the record.

4. Bearing in mind boiling water and human fingers don’t really mix, use your fingers (or another suitable appendage/implement) to push what should now be a very soft record into the bowl, so that it bunches up (alternatively, you could push another similar-sized bowl down on top of it to make, um, another bowl, but I didn’t think of this until afterwards).

5. Hey presto! You’ve made a nifty piece of modern art, which already serves more purpose in this fetid existence than anything Chris Martin has ever emitted from his self-righteous face hole.

6. Take comfort in the fact that there is now one less playable Coldplay record in the world. That’s one less person suffering. You’ve done something amazing today. This also works with anything by Bastille, by the way.

It’s taken a lot of courage to share this, but I don’t want others going through similar experiences to think they are suffering alone. I’m in your corner. 

Originally published on It Is Happening Again on June 5, 2014.

From the archives: People like Coldplay and voted for the Nazis. You can’t trust people.

It’s a cold December evening, somewhere between Christmas and New Year, and we’ve returned to the pub we frequented as teenagers, only now we’re actual grown-ups in our 30s.

We’re playing darts. Nothing too serious, but we’re all agreed that getting the arrows to stick in the right numbers still counts for something. Talk turns to music and, specifically, our bafflement at the continuing success of Emeli Sande, despite the fact that her recorded output is about as exciting as regrouting a shower.

“Music for people who don’t like music,” says one of my friends to nods and general murmurs of approval.

“Coffee table music,” I add, to yet more approval, “like Dido.”

I’m feeling over-confident now. This is it. I’m going to hit the ball right out of the park with my next comment. This will define the evening. Here I go.

“And Coldplay!”

Pause. Silence. The rest of the group turn to face me with a collective look that says one thing: I’ve gone too far this time.

“Ah, Coldplay are okay,” says one, and then with the tone of someone trying to deter a school bully from beating up a smaller kid: “Leave them alone.”

Another chips in: “Coldplay have done at least five or six amazing songs.”

I can’t believe my ears. I’ve misheard them. I MUST HAVE MISHEARD THEM.

“But, but… Coldplay?!” – that’s all I can muster. I’m not going to win this one. But it gets me thinking: why, exactly, do I detest Chris Martin and the three other blokes who aren’t Chris Martin so much?

Is it because their songs always sound half-finished, promising something they never deliver? Is it because I’d gain more musical fulfilment from watching an old grey coat for an hour? Is it because of Yellow, where Chris describes things being ‘all yellow’ in the manner of an eight-year-old reading a prayer in school assembly, or that mind-numbingly boring accompanying video where he – get this – walks along a freezing beach for a few minutes (if ever a video accurately represented a song)? Is it the band’s name, which sounds like the sort of word you’d come up with to cheat at Scrabble? Is it the fact that no one would have given a shit about Coldplay had they emerged at the height of Britpop and that their early success was probably really only down to good timing? What about the way Chris used to write slogans on his hands and wrap tape around his fingers like some sort of apologetic messiah? Or do they just make music for people who don’t like… oh, hang on.

I don’t think I can pinpoint a single reason. It’s probably all of those and probably none of them too. If there’s one thing I can be sure of, however, it’s that I definitely hated Coldplay before it was fashionable to do so, regardless of whether or not I had a valid reason.

Maybe one day I’ll work out exactly why I don’t like them, or perhaps I’ll eventually lose my mind and admit that, yeah, they’re okay. Shoot me.

Until then, my friends and I are going to have to agree to disagree. 

Originally published on It Is Happening Again on January 6, 2014.