The Brit awards have perhaps borrowed a trick from the Mercury prize, which last year unexpectedly applied the defibrillator to an event that’s 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’ relocation to Manchester had the effect of adding at least a slight edge of chaos to a ceremony that’s 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.
The show itself was too varied to suffer from the blandness that’s cursed Brits past, offering performances ranging from Rosalia’s Björk-assisted opera/gabber hybrid to Alex Warren (“what you get if you order Ed Sheeran on Temu”, 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.
There wasn’t much in the way of chaos in terms of the actual winners, however. If the Brits primarily exists to reward commercial success – and it has seldom given any indication otherwise – then the results were more or less a foregone conclusion. The international categories suggested a mildly unexpected leaning towards the leftfield – Brooklyn alt-rock band Geese trounced cartoon K-pop trio Huntr/x; Rosalia beat out Taylor Swift and Sabrina Carpenter – but otherwise things proceeded as you might have expected.
Deleted scenes … Bez (left) and Shaun Ryder present the award for group of the year. Photograph: Doug Peters/PA
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’t 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’s Top 40 would entirely comprise Olivia Dean 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’s currently outselling Taylor Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl. Under the circumstances, if she hadn’t swept the board at the Brits, she’d have every right to demand a steward’s inquiry.
Likewise Dave, winner of the hip-hop/grime/rap category. His third album The Boy Who Played the Harp seemed like a risky move – 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’s any point in him actually rapping any more – until it entered the charts at No 1 and spawned the single Raindance, a huge global hit.
You could mount a case that EsDeeKid – the balaclava-sporting scouse rapper whose unexpected US success was crowned when actor Timothée Chalamet appeared in one of his videos, scotching a bizarre online rumour that EsDeeKid actually was Timothée Chalamet in disguise – could reasonably have expected to beat Lola Young to the breakthrough artist award, given that Young’s 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’s 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 (£301m), 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.