{"id":506600,"date":"2026-03-01T03:49:07","date_gmt":"2026-03-01T03:49:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/506600\/"},"modified":"2026-03-01T03:49:07","modified_gmt":"2026-03-01T03:49:07","slug":"this-years-brit-awards-found-a-flicker-of-chaos-but-the-winners-were-never-in-doubt-brit-awards","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/506600\/","title":{"rendered":"This year\u2019s Brit awards found a flicker of chaos \u2013 but the winners were never in doubt | Brit awards"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Brit awards<\/a> have perhaps borrowed a trick from the Mercury prize, which last year unexpectedly applied the defibrillator to an event that\u2019s been on the verge of extinction for years by the simple expedient of moving it to Newcastle and packing the audience with music fans rather than music biz grandees. The Brits\u2019 relocation to Manchester had the effect of adding at least a slight edge of chaos to a ceremony that\u2019s become increasingly slick in recent years, largely by dint of involving Shaun Ryder, who almost immediately enlivened proceedings by telling an anecdote about being busted for drug possession during the Brits in the 90s that ITV found it necessary to bleep out in its entirety.<\/p>\n

The show itself was too varied to suffer from the blandness that\u2019s cursed Brits past, offering performances ranging from Rosalia\u2019s Bj\u00f6rk-assisted opera\/gabber hybrid to Alex Warren (\u201cwhat you get if you order Ed Sheeran on Temu\u201d, as Whitehall put it) performing Ordinary with a smoking-jacket-clad James Blunt on piano, via the unexpected sight of Ghostface Killah dad-dancing with Dua Lipa during a medley helmed by outstanding contribution to music winner Mark Ronson.<\/p>\n

There wasn\u2019t much in the way of chaos in terms of the actual winners, however. If the Brits primarily exists to reward commercial success \u2013 and it has seldom given any indication otherwise \u2013 then the results were more or less a foregone conclusion. The international categories suggested a mildly unexpected leaning towards the leftfield \u2013 Brooklyn alt-rock band Geese trounced cartoon K-pop trio Huntr\/x; Rosalia beat out Taylor Swift and Sabrina Carpenter \u2013 but otherwise things proceeded as you might have expected.<\/p>\n

Deleted scenes \u2026 Bez (left) and Shaun Ryder present the award for group of the year. Photograph: Doug Peters\/PA<\/p>\n

Olivia Dean won every category she was nominated in, which seemed entirely fitting. Since early last summer, her records have just kept selling and selling. Her album The Art of Loving hasn\u2019t left the UK Top 5 since its week of release. Her single Man I Need has been the most-streamed track in Britain for seven of the last nine weeks. Were the UK singles chart an accurate reflection of popularity, rather than a labyrinthine business involving weighting, Accelerated Chart Ratios and negative variances, it would have been No 1 for most of this year, despite being released last August. Were it not for rules forbidding artists from having more than three tracks in the charts at once, a quarter of this week\u2019s Top 40 would entirely comprise Olivia Dean<\/a> songs. She is also the first British artist to enjoy a major US breakthrough since Dua Lipa nearly a decade ago: The Art of Loving is enjoying its 16th week in the US Top 10, where it\u2019s currently outselling Taylor Swift\u2019s The Life of a Showgirl. Under the circumstances, if she hadn\u2019t swept the board at the Brits, she\u2019d have every right to demand a steward\u2019s inquiry.<\/p>\n

Likewise Dave, winner of the hip-hop\/grime\/rap category. His third album The Boy Who Played the Harp seemed like a risky move \u2013 relatively muted and sparse, packed with lengthy tracks that found the rapper wrestling with politics, religion and existential crises, home to a lyric that wonders whether there\u2019s any point in him actually rapping any more \u2013 until it entered the charts at No 1 and spawned the single Raindance, a huge global hit.<\/p>\n

You could mount a case that EsDeeKid \u2013 the balaclava-sporting scouse rapper whose unexpected US success was crowned when actor Timoth\u00e9e Chalamet appeared in one of his videos, scotching a bizarre online rumour that EsDeeKid actually was Timoth\u00e9e Chalamet in disguise \u2013 could reasonably have expected to beat Lola Young to the breakthrough artist award, given that Young\u2019s big single, Messy, was released nearly two years ago, but equally Messy was a slow-burning hit that only made it to No 1 in 2025. Britain\u2019s songwriters might have looked askance at Noel Gallagher going home with songwriter of the year on the basis of a set of songs he wrote 30 years ago, but given that said songs just powered a reunion tour that grossed $405m (\u00a3301m), and caused Oasis to sell a million albums over the course of 2025, it made a certain kind of sense. Within the self-imposed parameters of the Brits, it all seemed pretty inarguable.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Brit awards have perhaps borrowed a trick from the Mercury prize, which last year unexpectedly applied the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":506601,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[49,48,75,341],"class_list":["post-506600","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/506600","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=506600"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/506600\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/506601"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=506600"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=506600"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=506600"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}