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Brits vs Rock

Don’t iron out those creases, Mr Joseph. Stay ruffled.

Posted 15th February 2011, 12:05pm in Blogs by Matthew Horton
Matthew Horton

Matthew Horton

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Brits vs Rock In an interview with the Guardian this week, Universal's UK chairman and BRITs head honcho David Joseph spoke of his desire to – and I paraphrase here – rid the awards of all spontaneity and replace it with a sterile showcase. His comments were imbued with the sense that the audience (and more importantly, the industry) was done with the ramshackle moments that have characterised previous years and wanted “gravitas”, something that gave a more fitting example of what's great about British music, what makes our pop (rock, R&B, indie, dance, whatever) stand as a beacon to the rest of the world. He'd accomplish this by not re-employing Peter Kay.



OK, I'm paraphrasing again, but The Powers were unhappy with Kay's merry quips last year about “20 minutes of entertainment stretched to two hours” and, by implication, his possibly accurate description of Liam Gallagher as a “knobhead”. These unfair remarks serve to undermine the quality of our musical tradition. They're a bit self-deprecating. A bit British. The first cosmetic solution is to replace Kay with James Corden. Talk about out of the frying pan into, well, another frying pan.

At the nub of the changes is the move from the doomed Earl's Court to the swish O2 Arena, an immediate chance to add a patina of glitzy sophistication. Nothing says cavernous, soulless professionalism quite like the O2. You won't get a Jarvis, er, bumrushing the stage at the O2 – it's too damned high for a start, and policed by a crack team of burly crowd control executives.



But isn't this the point? Think back to all those legendary BRITs events and what springs to mind? Is it another smooth performance from Jamiroquai? Is it the emotional outpouring at Annie Lennox's 12th consecutive Best Female gong? Is it Rihanna and Klaxons pooling two great pop songs, 'Umbrella' and 'Golden Skans' to create one grotesque mess? Or, by a similar token, Florence + The Machine squaring up to Dizzee Rascal on ‘You Got The Dirtee Love’? Not that you’ll need to exercise the grey matter to remember that – turn on your TV or radio and Flo’s still holding onto that “luuuuuuuuuuuu…”



Anyway, no, the stuff that sticks is Jarvis’s wiggle, Brandon Block making a different kind of arse of himself, Sam Fox and Mick Fleetwood causing an entire nation to watch through their fingers at once – in short, the spirit of rock’n’roll, all unlovely, thrilling, visceral and hopeless. Don’t iron out those creases, Mr Joseph. Stay ruffled.
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