I’ve come to the Brit Awards, dear reader, in order to bring you news from the World of Pop, intending to observe in a neutral and detached manner. Unlike Morrissey – complaining last week that “the Brit Awards have hi-jacked modern music in order to kill off the heritage that produced so many interesting people” – or Kasabian, who snarled that wins for Ed Sheeran would be a victory for squares, quaintly couching their objections in the language of a 1960’s Cliff Richard film, I come not to bury the Brits but to watch them in a mood of nostalgic curiosity. I’m revisiting a scene where in the past I have been both bored witless and riotously entertained, to see what’s happened in my entirely insignificant absence.
I was last here in 1996, the Year of Jarvis Cocker, when my band’s song “Missing” was up for Best Single; and the year before that, in 1995, at the height of the Blur/Oasis Wars, I was seated with Massive Attack, “Protection” being nominated for Best Album. Madonna performed that night. She’d recently recorded with them and it was the first time I heard anyone refer to her as “Madge”. (I assumed that Nellee and 3D and Mushroom and Daddy G, no slouches when it came to nicknames, had invented it themselves.) After the awards we went to her private party at Brown’s in Soho, within which inner sanctum was a sanctum even more inner, where a velvet rope fenced off the area containing actual Madonna, and a handful of Chosen Ones.
And now here I am again, after a twenty year gap, at an event that’s bigger, glitzier and more of a TV show than an actual awards ceremony, but what else has changed? Not the winners, who are as predictable as ever, chosen by a voting process about which everyone is suitably vague. Oh, it’s more or less whoever in any category has sold the most, or is the best, – look, let’s not dwell on it. Like old Tory leaders, the winners emerge. There are no surprises.
What is different is the atmosphere in the room, which partly reflects the atmosphere in pop music, and is created I think by the fact that there are no bands. Where it used to feel like a school canteen full of rival gangs, with warring factions shooting insults and dirty looks at each other, poised on the brink of a food fight, now it is a civilised dining room, all the nominees, like their fans, being much-Selfied and much-Liked individuals. Solo artists, islands. They sit not with their mates and partners-in-crime, but with their managers and pluggers, and all of them on good terms with the similar individuals at the next table.
There’s less camaraderie, and less rivalry, and the absence of both is what dulls the air.
Band camaraderie is infectious, and enlivens an audience – you want to be part of that gang, whether it’s the Rolling Stones or the Spice Girls, the Libertines or One Direction – and bitchy rivalry is entertaining. Blur vs Oasis was silly but funny. Now, admiration and respect are the order of the day. Sam loves James, Ed loves Sam, and everybody is Taylor’s best friend.
In short, nothing happens. Almost nothing. With my Mum-face on I think that Paloma Faith holding a microphone in the pouring rain is a health and safety nightmare, but it turns out that the accident waiting to happen is an unforeseen one, involving stairs, a cape and a dancing bull. Madonna falls over, giving the evening its longed-for news angle. Seated only yards from the stage I hear the crash as she goes down, most shocking of all being the heavy ker-THUMP of her mic hitting the floor. Golly, I think, that mic’s actually on. Not a given nowadays – and quite a thrill.
What is most remarkable though, and confirms everything I’ve ever thought about the indestructible will-to-power of Stars, is her recovery. Have you ever fallen flat on your back? I have once, on the slippery decking outside my back door, and on landing whiplashed and winded did what you would do, and burst into tears of self-pity. Which is why I’m not a global superstar with a decades-spanning career, and neither are you.
Tracey Thorn appears at the Cambridge Literary Festival, in association with the New Statesman, on 18 April. Book tickets here.
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