Staged each February since 1982, the Brit awards — the nominations for this year’s edition were announced yesterday — were launched by the major record labels in an attempt to give sales a lift during the fallow period after the Christmas rush. (What they wouldn’t give for just a “brief” lull now, as album sales go through the floor.) Though long known for headline-making controversies and gaffes, the ceremony, televised live, has also attracted criticism for reasons more profound than malfunctioning autocues or Jarvis Cocker flashing his bum at Michael Jackson.
It celebrates success rather than creativity, snipe detractors. It’s a fix, they add (an accusation that, no matter the involvement of the Electoral Reform Society in collating many of the category votes, seems destined always to hover over the event). It promotes blandness over risk-taking: a charge made with especial vigour about last year’s grime-shunning shindig, which managed to give the #OscarsSoWhite Academy Awards a run for their money.
Well, yes... but. The Brits is about money, and how to make more of it. It is geared towards a mainstream, primetime television audience and the advertisers willing to pay to reach that audience. It has never been, and never will be — despite the smattering of less predictable inclusions in this year’s list of nominees — remotely alternative. Which got us thinking: what would that list look like if the organisers went rogue? Something, perhaps, a bit like this.
Critics’ Choice/Breakthrough
The most problematic Brits category, the Critics’ Choice prize has a stellar track record: since its inception in 2008, winners have included Adele, Florence + the Machine, Ellie Goulding, Emeli Sandé, Sam Smith and James Bay. OK, Jessie J and the hapless Tom Odell don’t fit that narrative, never mind last year’s winner, Jack Garratt, whose debut album limped to silver status, then disappeared from view. But six out of nine isn’t bad.
This year’s victor, the hirsute, heavily tattooed blue-eyed-soul singer Rag’n’Bone Man, announced last month, is huge on the Continent. What he — and the Brits — will be desperate to avoid is death by comparison. Garratt’s paltry sales were dwarfed by another male Brit, who ended the year with the only debut album by a British artist to sell more than 100,000 copies. No, not Zayn Malik. Step forward Bradley Walsh, the former Corrie actor and gameshow host, relaunched as a supper-club crooner. By rights, he should win the Breakthrough award. He won’t, but he’s our choice anyway.
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Icon
The third Brits Icon award was bestowed last November on Robbie Williams, who hasn’t made a decent album for more than a decade. Broadcast on ITV, the ceremony, three months upfront of the Brit awards, happened to coincide with the release of Williams’s latest lacklustre album — timing that helped to promote both brands, but struck many as brass-necked to the point of provocation. But he’s released so many records, the defence would undoubtedly say. Yes, and so has Elvis Costello. Still spiky, innovative and artistically restless after all these years, the bespectacled contrarian gets our vote. Would he ever win it? Not a chance.
British Group
Last year belonged to the 1975, who enjoyed a level of success on both sides of the Atlantic that should be impossible for the Brits to ignore. The Manc band’s second album, I Like It When You Sleep, for You Are So Beautiful Yet So Unaware of It, was pop at its most ravishing and confounding. They spent years being rejected by the very labels that now celebrate their success, which adds a last-laugh quality to the coronation. Not a risky choice, but surely the right one.
British Female Solo Artist
Our candidates would include PJ Harvey, Shura, Bat for Lashes, Anohni, Nao, Jones and Laura Mvula. Dream on. This is a safety-first category for an awards show that is already risk-averse. Emeli Sandé should walk it. They can’t possibly give it to Adele again. Can they?
British Male Solo Artist
Lorde’s Bowie tribute was the highlight of last year’s event. Commercially, the Starman had the sort of bumper year the Brits adores. Yup: poor old Olly Murs misses out again.
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International Female Solo Artist
They’ll probably opt for Beyoncé or Rihanna as a way of getting one of them to perform at the ceremony. We can live with that, but there was another non-Brit female who enjoyed none of Bey’s commercial advantages, but still lit up 2016 like a catherine wheel. We can’t help it if we’re tilted towards Christine and the Queens’ Héloïse Letissier.
International Male Solo Artist
This will go to a biggie for the same reasons Beyoncé should get the nod: think Drake or the Weeknd. Yet neither artist did anything you wouldn’t expect them to do last year. That feat was instead achieved by Frank Ocean: we waited years for a new album, then he dropped two of them. A live duet between Frank and Héloïse would be something — but don’t hold your breath.
On a “you don’t have to be dead to sell albums, but it doesn’t hurt” basis (see Bowie, above), and purely because the organisers’ true passion is shifting units, it could be Prince. But what would they do for an acceptance speech?
