Sabrina Carpenter clearly knows which side of her geopolitical s***storm is buttered. Marching onto a Union Jack stage while flanked by a parade of King’s Guards, she serves up a vivifying shot of “Espresso” interspersed with snippets of “Rule Britannia”, and closes her ultra-raunchy “Bed Chem” segment by disappearing groinward on one of her sentries (or was he a beefeater?).
Throughout her Brits 2025 opening performance, the Pennsylvania pocket rocket celebrates British pop supremacy as if angling for citizenship, and who could blame her? With America making a monumental arse of itself on the world stage – did you see Teddy Swims dressed as a sentient duvet? – it’s time once more for this land of hope and (morning) glory to step up and lead the free-music world.
Signs have been promising. The 2024 Brits ceremony ushered Britain’s long-stagnant pop culture into a new era of justice (after years of label suppression, Raye took home a record six awards), equality (the majority of prizes went to women) and punk-rock abandon (Kylie did a shot of tequila from her shoe).
This year, Charli XCX is rightfully rewarded with five nominations and the Songwriter of the Year award to celebrate her instant club culture classic of a sixth album making Brats of us all last summer. Last year’s Rising Star winners The Last Dinner Party have graduated to numerous main categories, hoping to see off big dogs like Coldplay and Sam Fender with a whip of a pre-Raphaelite petticoat.
Category lists brim with respectable names – Jamie xx, Michael Kiwanuka, Beabadoobee, Nia Archives, Central Cee, English Teacher, Fontaines DC – and the inclusion of a contemporary jazz record like Ezra Collective’s Dance, No One’s Watching alongside The Cure’s Songs of a Lost World makes the Album of the Year category look more like a Mercury Prize shortlist than the usual stream-totting back-slap.
In fact, in this company, tonight’s Best Pop Act nod to Little Mix’s now-solo JADE seems a tokenistic throwback to the glorified sales conference that was the Brits of five years ago, when profitability alone was kingmaker and cultural evolution could go hang. Her mind-blowingly bizarre performance too – a kind of Munster marriage on Mount Olympus between an ascending angel and an ogre groom, in four operatic acts – suggests a glittering future as a Eurovision novelty entry.
To stretch the political metaphor further, after a chaotic array of random, short-lived presenters in recent years, Jack Whitehall returns offering posh if aimless stability. He starts strong, pulling in cameos from legendary Brits-fluffers Sam Fox and Mick Fleetwood for a pre-recorded Squid Game skit, and hits the stage lobbing Golden Globes style roasts at the stars in the room like someone who knows he’s never going to get Will Smithed in the face by Coldplay.
Many of his jibes land like prize-fighter jabs: the Sugababes are “the jury duty of pop”, Teddy Swims has “the voice of an angel and the face of a primary school desk”, Eurovision hero Sam Ryder looks like “someone brought their drug dealer”. But as he descends into that imploding black hole of comedy that is the tableside Brits interviews, he begins to lose it like all the others. Particularly when contractually forced to plug 5ive tours and Danny Dyer films, do misfiring bits with the Robbie Williams monkey or try to talk to a silent woman who’s come wearing the face of a horse.
Confident and floundering, half zinger, half dud, Whitehall virtually embodies the state of British music as displayed throughout the evening. Charli XCX wins four of her five awards – “It’s the Brat Brits!” Whitehall exclaims – and uses her speeches to champion artistic integrity (“you don’t need to compromise your vision”) and award show wear from the Kanye’s Wife range (“I thought this was the age of free the nipple?” she says after ITV objects to her sheer dress).
Ezra Collective also do the nation proud. Their closing performance with Jorja Smith and a stage full of brass players is a celebratory bonanza of tropical party vibes full of exuberant hope for the future of British music. And that they win Best British Group above Coldplay and The Cure is a bold signal that the Brits are no longer a closed shop of unchallenging big-sellers.
On the other hand, the evening feels somewhat outdated – Paloma Faith? Raye again? Stormzy rightly criticising the fan voting system for his Rap Act win over Central Cee? – and the fresher faces offer little new. Rising chart invader (and John Lewis ad singer) Lola Young might fling her dirty laundry into the crowd and tip washing powder across the stage, but her performance of “Messy” is barely soiled soul pop. Sam Fender delivers an enjoyably spirited dash through the title track of his new album People Watching, but its close resemblance to Don Henley’s “The Boys of Summer” makes you wonder what the Best Rock/Alternative category (which he wins) is supposed to be offering an alternative to. And this year’s Rising Star winner Myles Smith performs his Mumford-like “Stargazing” on a fittingly beige set.
Smith does, however, provide one of the most impassioned moments of the evening, during his acceptance speech. He attacks the government for treating music like “an afterthought” by cutting support and services for artists, suggests that major arenas should help support the grassroots venues that are the industry’s lifeblood and pleads with the industry bigwigs in the room to stick by artists after the first TikTok buzz has faded.
Indeed, if any state-of-the-industry insight emerges tonight, it’s one of struggle, of hollowing out, of ladders raised. Ezra Collective shout out the youth clubs and schools that gave them aspiration and purpose: “So many of the problems that face greater society in the UK,” says drummer Femi Koleoso, “the solution lies with giving a young person a trumpet”.
Even Last Dinner Party bassist Georgia Davies, receiving the Best New Act award, highlights the plight of independent venues and that “art is under threat”. Their performance may be the ultimate in cultured cult baroque – singer Abigail Morris tripping around a set based on the Twin Peaks red room, singing a swear-free “Nothing Matters” like the Spiders from Middlemarch – but no strata of new music is immune from the rot. If Britain is ever to run music again, it needs security guarantees on its bedrock. And the Brits, at least, is where the row is breaking out for the world to see.
