Key events
And we’re off
Laura Snapes
This Dua Lipa performance of Training Season is giving James Bond opening titles via Cirque de Soleil. Will this performance vanquish the “go on girl give us nothing” meme spawned by her performance at the 2018 Brit awards?
Laura Snapes
Pity these poor dancers, suspended above the stage waiting for Dua Lipa’s opening performance to start.
Laura Snapes
Excellent stuff happening on the ITV2 red carpet feed as the presenter asks Caroline Polachek whether her dress, with its elf-ears-cum-Madonna-cone-bra is “a homemade affair”?
“If only,” she says, barely hiding her disdain. “This is a Jean Paul Gaultier and Simone Rocha collab.” [Presses delete on part two of costume box joke.]
Ben Beaumont-Thomas
Two of Green Day here, looking like a middle-aged goth couple who used to be cool but have rung your Ring doorbell four times about your poor recycling bin management in recent weeks, but you’re ignoring them, so they’re getting right up to the camera to express their disapproval.
Laura Snapes
Did Griff: 1. Struggle from option paralysis about which outfit to wear? 2. Have a fight with the Last Dinner Party over the costume box? Hard to tell.
Ben Beaumont-Thomas
Olly Alexander, AKA our Eurovision entry this year, which is … fine. Bit mid-table. If you’re a country people actually like. Which we’re not. Here’s Laura’s review from yesterday.
Big “Lawrence Llewellyn-Bowen hosting an immersive murder mystery weekend” energy to this frock coat. Brits awards-art history hive: is that Joan of Arc down there? What does this represent if so?
Ben Beaumont-Thomas
Shout out to Cassö, who is wearing an outfit so boring I haven’t even bothered to crop the whole thing, but who I massively venerate after he made the mighty Prada – a huge high-tempo dance banger splicing Raye and D-Block Europe with the energy emanating from a Renault Clio packed with five 17-year-olds. He made it on a laptop while he was at Swansea uni and ended up becoming one of the biggest songs of 2023, spending 22 weeks in the Top 10, five of them at No 2 – and now it’s up for song of the year. An unfairly little-trumpeted British success story.
Laura Snapes
Here’s Annie Clark AKA St Vincent, who just presented the Last Dinner Party with their Rising Star award on the ITV2 red carpet coverage – quite possibly because guitarist Emily Roberts plays a signature St Vincent guitar on stage.
And there you have it:
Ben Beaumont-Thomas
Joe Keery from Stranger Things, looking like the rhythm guitarist from a band in 2007 who are trying to get past that bruising 4/10 in the NME in 2005. Actually, though, he’s a properly massive pop star as well, recording as Djo – his song End of Beginning is currently the fifth most streamed song in the world right now on Spotify with 5m plays a day.
Laura Snapes
Oh spirit come, we beckon you! Oh wait it’s best international artist nominee Caroline Polachek.