The Brits Chit Chat

Well at this stage the dust is settling on The 30th Annual Brit Awards. Like all big music award shows it's an bloated and slightly lumpy beast but this year did throw up some gems. Check out the full list of winners here, some nice choices. JLS winning might have meant some turned up noses but it's a fair marker of their huge popularity with the UK pop audience in the last few months, while Florence and the Machine taking Best British Album for Lungs will assure that the album will have chart legs for months to come. As a big Gaga fan (how surprising) it was genuinely great to see her pick up an award in all of her categories, not least Best International Album. Her genuine emotion during the speech was touching too:







Of course she also performed, an unusual but powerful mix of Telephone on the piano and my personal fave from The Fame Monster, Dance In The Dark. A stark, moody performance dedicated to Alexander McQueen it offers up some juicy hints at what to expect from The Monster Ball when it rolls into Dublin this weekend (excitement!). Of all the other performances and moments there were a few I found interesting.


The Spice Girls winning for most memorable performance was sort of a token award that didn't mean a whole lot but the whole thing was funny. Sam Fox making a tit of herself (what else is new) and Geri and Mel B turning up to split the award. Mel is great, charming and funny and obviously glad to be there. And that hair works way better on her than it should! Geri on the other hand seems a bit blah on the whole thing. I love the bit where she goes to take the mic off Mel but Mel isn't ready to hand the mic over. Priceless. 





Lily Allen looked amazing and seemed to compliment the perfectly engineered madness on stage quite well. It was a neat reminder of what a year she's had and what a triumph that second album It's Not Me, It's You was, moving her from promising newcomer with huge hits to a bonafide British popstar. The Fear still remains a fantastic pop single, equal parts wistful, angry and utterly utterly catchy.





Dizzee Rascal and Florence and the Machine pulled off their performance of You've Got The Love with aplomb. I wasn't quite sure how this one would work (particularly with awful memories of that lame Beyonce/Outkast "performance together" a few years ago) but overall it really did. Florence was charismatic and effortless, a perfect conduit for the simple but effective staging and inevitable glitter at the close. Dizzee's rap was a nice compliment to the track and their back and forth movement on stage felt like a nice spin on the usual "rapper performers with singer performing the hook" dynamic. And it was certainly more interesting than Jay Z and Alicia Keyes who while perfectly enjoyable failed to top their VMA performance.





Cheryl Cole of course picked up alot of the tabloid coverage today. Truth be told her performance was a perfectly watchable pop romp but one that could have worked better. The different parts were excellent in terms of staging, the Michael Jackson style opening with the white coats and THAT single, the rather effective Show Me Love breakdown and sliding back into the remainder of Fight For This Love. The dancers were on point and visually it worked. But Cheryl herself seemed off. Her vocal seemed to veer from a bad prerecorded vocal and obvious miming to the original track which was confusing. 





And there was a slightly lacklustre air about the way she was hitting some of those moves too which is a shame. The great appeal of Cheryl for so many is that her emotions are always hugely present to what she is doing. It works well on the X Factor where if she's upset she's REALLY upset. If she's proud she's REALLY proud. But when those nerves kick in it makes her REALLY nervous. And the knock on effect is obvious. Of course it won't stop the Cheryl juggernaut from rolling on but you can't help but feel that sometimes when Ms. Cole says she misses her bandmates, she really isn't lying.


Robbie Williams closing the show was alot more fun than I was expecting. It's easy to write the man off but there is a catalogue of amazing pop songs that he brought to life that make him impossible to ever truly dismiss. Angels may have become lambasted as a karoke favourite/wedding song but that's only because it's genuinely great. It remains to be seen whether or not he can truly turn around the general sense of him being past it in the eyes of media types/the general public but this performance is a good start. The performance is in two parts here and here


With that another big music award show out of the way. I'm curious to see how this weekend's Meteor fare in comparison at least!


They won't top that Mel B/Geri golden moment, unless there's an Emma Bunton / Mel C pairing I'm unaware of :

That's the kind of thing I live for when it comes to Awards show. Take note The Oscars.