Before we get to Adele and Anne-Marie briefly being tempted to hit the stage with a forward roll, consider the evening’s build up. What were you doing at 5.42pm yesterday evening? Because the thousand record label execs, events types and multifarious other corporate bashes rattling through the Prosecco in the hotel next to the O2 were watching a stripper whipping their ginger locks around and around, in what appeared to be a tribute to the girl on the car bonnet in Whitesnake’s 1987 Here I Go Again video. The only difference was ours had a full and frankly impressive beard.
If half five-ish seems a tad early for strippers — and for posterity, let me point out this a Tuesday we’re talking about (would no-one show if they did it on a Friday?) — by 6pm, we’d had a deluge of latex and by 7pm we’d witnessed a kind of Guantanamo Bay-themed aerial show. In this, our dancer — bag on head, orange jumpsuit, dressed for an execution — began spinning, before the bag was peeled off, the jumpsuit whipped away and we watched her dangle by her hair in a bright yellow bikini. At this point confetti tumbled from the butterfly-strewn ceiling, as if to say: “It’s alright, folks! And don’t worry about those pesky human rights abuses we just alluded to!” And I would have thought it was all alright, except the lighting rig was wobbling threateningly and so instead I shifted myself out of harms way.
None of this, of course, put anyone in the room off their rather good three course meal, and absolutely nobody was holding back on popping corks and unscrewing caps. Here was a room ready for a very big night, and why wouldn’t it all be batshit to begin with? “It’s a bit like a mental Britain’s Got Talent, this,” said the person next to me. I think it was meant admiringly.
“MAKE. SOME. NOISE!” our compere instructed repeatedly, she being Ashley Stroud, a talented cabaret singer whom I thought I recognised from the training scenes in Full Metal Jacket.
Time now to head off the main event: Adele’s opportunity to distract us from the Vegas debacle. Oh, and the awards. With the dress code limited to “smart”, this was a room filled full of people with vastly different understandings of the word. There were ball gowns, leopard print suits, veils and one bloke with chinos and an untucked shirt. It might have been his “going out” shirt, mind.
The Brits is about its awards, but it’s about television too. Viewers at home had Mo Gilligan doing a sterling job as presenter. And sure, we saw him, but when the ad breaks came on, there was a stage manager bounding about asking if we were all having a great night, guys, eventually repeating it so often I wondered if he’d warmed up by watching Bob DeNiro do the “You Talkin’ To Me?” scene in Taxi Driver.
Ed Sheeran isn’t exactly my bag, so his heavy metal take on Bad Habits didn’t surprise me as much as it seemed to everyone else — I was more surprised he hadn’t already got to this point of breakdown faster. I think it was meant to get our attention. Does he need it? Probably not, but then again, did you buy his last record?
The show passed as it did on television; Little Simz was truly astonishing, and her acceptance speech with her mum was just as heartwarming in the stadium as it must have been on the screen. KSI was made up to be there; yes, the whole stadium gasped when colab-partner Anne Marie tottered, but what a champ she was to recover. Sam Fender made Liam Gallagher look like an amateur — at least, I think so: everyone started talking over Gallagher about halfway through his song, so he could have picked up. I liked that his guitarist looked like a doppelganger of Noel.
Later, Holly Humberstone managed to make a 21,000 seater stadium feel like a park bench, whispering in each of our ears. Dave, winning his award, showed that he really throws himself into hugs — he seemed to almost topple poor sweet Bukayo Saka over. Ronnie Wood was every inch the war-scarred rocker he ought to be, doddering along the straight line from introduction point to the podium and only getting lost the once. Later, once he’d presented his award, Brian Cox made a beeline for him. I wondered what nights they’d once had, and what those ahead might look like.
Perhaps the most literal indication of Adele’s starry pull came by way of a handy visual metaphor: next to me, a man fell down the stairs twice (twice!) as he descended them in order to get a snap of her performing. Adele is Adele; there’s not much else to comment on. She magically appeared in time for any award she might win and seemed to have things to do in between, though she and Idris Elba appeared to be good mates.
But this, to me, was a night that belonged not to the stars on stage (although for the record, Dave and his flamethrowing guitar was a true spectacle) but to the crowd watching them. While Maya Jama proudly boasted her job was to get the A-listers “bladdered” from her brass-lined bar, in the stands were workmates picking canned G’n’Ts out of cotton bags of booze. The gowns on stage were high fashion, but we had the likes of a girl with giant pink bows on her arms but no shoes on her feet. And for every type who still left before the night concluded — that undying obsession with avoiding a queue still alive and well — there were those still milling about at the end, faintly dazed, a bottle of beer in one hand and a gift bag in the other, shouting for a mythical mate and wondering if anyone was “going Shoreditch”. Big nights out; Christ, have people missed them. Maybe the stripper wasn’t so over the top after all.
