Dua Lipa
It would be inaccurate to say that Dua Lipa is entering her flop era – the first singles from her upcoming album, Houdini and Training Season, are currently in or around the top 20 most streamed songs globally on Spotify. But there’s something a little gimlet-eyed in how they’re written – catchy in a grimly determined rather than breezily natural way – that makes them hard to love, and some mean media types (not me, yet!) are wondering if she could be on the way down the other side of fame’s hill.
Well, this performance should quieten them down a bit. Dressed in her second leather ensemble of the night, she launches into Training Season and while I find this song really quite plodding and funkless on record, Lipa lifts this B-tier material with a really robust vocal performance – she sounds like she absolutely has to have the sexual-spiritual connection she’s singing about, and her voice doesn’t waver even when strutting around a populous troupe of acrobatic dancers. That’s the kind of boot-camp vocal training that only peak pop stars can haul themselves through – and it makes for a potent opening.
Calvin Harris and Ellie Goulding
The UK may be a petty, pursed-lipped, radically ungenerous island – but certain things get me waving a Union Jack like I’m the admin for a Facebook page about Spitfire maintenance, and our love of dance music is one of them. More than rap, more than indie-rock, more than Dua Lipa trying really hard, commercial dance is our national pop music, and the way we rallied around Calvin Harris and Ellie Goulding’s Miracle to send it to No 1 for eight weeks had me staring wistfully off the white cliffs of Dover. My millennial nostalgia was juiced by Harris essentially splicing trance classics Tell It to My Heart, Castles In the Sky and Seven Days and One Week, and Goulding’s ethereality makes her the perfect trance vocalist. But you don’t get a hit of this stature through nostalgia alone: it’s a copper-bottomed bit of songwriting.
Goulding stays in that ethereal tone throughout, rarely bringing in that rougher grade of sandpaper that so differentiates her voice from the rest of her peers – and of course Harris uninterestingly prods some equipment that may or may not be plugged in. But just as this performance starts to feel a bit mid, he gives it the full Sundissential treatment with a hard-trance breakdown taken from the song’s remix by Hardwell, as Goulding bounds around with her backing dancers like they’re a bunch of kids who have just set a toilet on fire at Leeds festival. Vibes retrieved!
Tate McRae
Even a year ago this booking might have felt a bit B-list but McRae has become so absolutely enormous in the interim that this now feels like a bit of a coup. Greedy, up for best international song, has been a vast success on streaming, and follow-up Exes hasn’t done shabbily either. Anyone who had her pegged as a Billie Eilish clone in the wake of her bruised piano ballad You Broke Me First has been comprehensively proven wrong: some of her best performances have been over throbbing deep house (You), tech-y EDM (10.35) and glossy new wave (She’s All I Wanna Be).
We’re getting Greedy here, and there’s lots of purposeful walking while she lets the backing track do the heavy lifting. Of course there’s a segment ringfenced for her to do her oft-viral bougie-streetdance choreography – and while my cardio levels are such that I could barely say my own name after doing all that, she does stay firmly in her vocal comfort zone again, idly moving around her middle range. It does feel a bit phoned-in, and can’t help but feel disappointing given this is the biggest across-the-pond star the Brits have conjured this year. Meanwhile, I’m also having a full-on new-dad moment at being baffled by her abdominal fashion choices.
Jungle
If you need a précis on who Jungle are, they named themselves after the some of the most forward-thinking music in the UK, and then proceeded to make some of the most backward-thinking music in the UK. They started out with the Fifa-14-loading-screen-core of stuff like Busy Earnin’ and have since graduated to what is very much the “live laugh love” of funk and soul music, with less edge than my toddler-proofed kitchen. Their decidedly un-pyroclastic 2023 album Volcano sound like a tepid mix of other artists with everything that made those artists good removed – it’s no-sodium Sault; not so much the Temptations as the Ooh No I Musn’ts. Or like someone asked that Adobe AI music software that dropped this week for “J Dilla for Tory barbecues”. Indeed, they’re so blah they should probably be put on an Arts Council protection list for artists most under threat of being replaced by artificial intelligence. They seem nice and one of them cried a bit at winning best group and I’m not so jaded to not go a bit gooey at that – but come on, Young Fathers are right there.
They’re playing their sleeper hit Back on 74 which does have a pretty, if rather inconsequential-feeling, chorus melody – and the strutting dancers lift the cruise-ship-at-teatime feel just a little. But this is one of the most forgettable performances I can remember at the Brits, which is to say it feels like Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones barged past Guardian security and hit me with that Men In Black mind ray. The earth spins onward and leaves this behind.
Raye
There’s fairytale stardust across this performance, a coronation moment for a pop Cinderella who at one point was very much not invited to the ball, and left to toil in the depths of a major label for years. She extricated herself from that flatlining deal and became one of the UK’s most successful independent artists, a turnaround marked by her record-breaking seven nominations and six wins.
She first performs Ice Cream Man on piano: a song about how she was sexually assaulted during a recording session, and it’s the kind of raw and candid songwriting she didn’t seem to get to make in her unhappy spell with Polydor Records. Then it’s into an orchestral version of Prada, her mega-banger that earned her one of two song of the year nominations, and then a 1920s lindy-hop intro to Escapism – her other song of the year nomination – before switching up again into a sumptuous big band arrangement.
For me, it’s the crispness of the rap drum programming of the original that gives the song its urgency, and makes its tale of nihilist bacchanalia work, given that it’s something you might actually listen to in a bout of nihilist bacchanalia. I don’t think she needs the heavily telegraphed classiness of the orchestral version – this uniquely tortured song doesn’t need or suit it – and perhaps there was too much packed into this megamix performance. But there’s no doubting Raye’s conviction, star quality and ability to carry her pain to the back of the biggest arenas.
Chase & Status and Becky Hill
Becky Hill won the dance category the last two years and was Olivia-Colman-at-the-Oscars levels of endearing when picking up each: someone who palpably loves dance music culture and isn’t too cool to pretend she doesn’t. It’s right there in her singing voice, too – gloriously histrionic and keen of feeling – and she’s now become the patron saint of nights out in clubs where you make questionable life choices. Legend has it that if write “motive” on a Be At One mirror in lipstick and chant her name three times she jumps out with a Jägerbomb. Chase & Status’s stock meanwhile is higher than ever: having stayed with a drum’n’bass scene that had waned out of the charts in recent years, they were ready to capitalise when it inevitably came back around, with their outrageously huge track Baddadan.
They open with a snatch of Baddadan delivered by Irah, and then into the Hill-helmed Disconnect, whose headily rising melody has the requisite wobbly-eyed dancefloor headrush. They switch back again to Baddadan, if only for a brief spell, and back to Disconnect – it’s not easy to conjure the feel of switching between two decks in a nightclub at the cavernous O2 Arena, but all concerned make a good stab at it, and Hill is in typically brilliant voice. This was a shot in the arm for a slightly deflated Brits.
Rema
Long championed by the diaspora here, the rest of the UK has eventually come around to the charms of African pop, with massive chart hits for Burna Boy, Libianca and Tyla in recent years – and the biggest of all has been Calm Down by Nigerian vocalist Rema, which is the kind of perfect earworm that doesn’t just go round your head all day but then also decides to buy a timeshare in your subconscious.
Like Raye he gets a souped-up full-band arrangement but this one actually suits the song much better; the tempo has been slightly upped to keep the energy high, and perhaps to free up some more space for host Maya Jama chatting about getting wrecked, as is her wont. But there’s still space for the song to simmer down to a tender standstill, then explode into a bombastic coda. Rema has a gorgeous open book of a voice, and he negotiates the song’s little curlicues with ease, making this one of the night’s best performances. He’s wearing the kind of fur hat that would see you right through a Yukon winter, and as a broadsheet journalist and father it behoves me to say “he must be bloody boiling in that”.
Kylie Minogue
Having not had a hit of any substance since 2010, in recent years Kylie made genre forays into country and disco along with a Christmas album, and it looked like she was pootling off into cosy Radio 2 land. But she swerved decisively back to pop with Padam Padam: malevolently sexy and powered by firmly up-to-date programming, it sent a wriggle of pleasure through summer 2023, although people saying “Padam?” as a question got old after about five minutes.
There’s a whisper of Spinning Around as a portentous fanfare builds like the score to a particularly depressing Christopher Nolan film – but then we’re into Padam Padam, with Kylie appearing atop a lofty plinth, that bit of staging long beloved by X Factor, Eurovision and more. She channels the same endearing everywoman energy she had on stage at that epic Glasto performance, clearly enjoying herself and – unlike Robbie Williams unforgivably didn’t do in this slot a few years ago – just gives us hit after hit. Can’t Get You Out of My Head begets a bit of Slow and then Love at First Sight – which squeezes even more dancefloor euphoria than Calvin & Ellie and Chase & Status managed. She keeps the dopamine pumping by finishing with All the Lovers, jumping around for the drop like a kid who’s double-dropped fistfuls of Haribo. It’s a wonderfully unguarded and joyous ending, matching Raye’s jubiliation at her historic wins.
