Hugh Jackman
Hugh Jackman opens the show, ahead of a UK tour that starts in May in which he will perform songs from The Greatest Showman, Les Misérables and hopefully a musical theatre version of Hungry Like the Wolf dressed as Wolverine. Cynics will say that this is a shameless ploy to flog tickets to casual ITV viewers, and they would be absolutely right, but The Greatest Showman was the UK’s biggest-selling album in 2018, so it is absolutely right and proper that he is here.
He appears atop a pyramid of dinner-jacketed dancers, performing The Greatest Show, whose “whoa-oh-ohs” are exactly the kind of thing you’d hear in the chorus of a Brit awards-anointed, major label pop prospect. But turned up to an absurd fever pitch: every dial has been twisted to 11 for the Brits 2019 opening.
An armchair psychologist could do a fairly quick assessment of our culture off the back of it: we just want maximalist musical entertainment – of the likes of Bohemian Rhapsody, Mamma Mia! and A Star is Born – to deafen the awfulness of everything else in the world. “Australia’s answer to Bradley Walsh”, as Jack Whitehall bills him, proves the perfectly deafening tonic.
George Ezra
Exuding ruddy-cheeked asexual vigour like a Richard Curtis hero, or one of those butcher’s mannequins come to cheerful life, George Ezra feels like the only thing holding Brexit-era Britain together, by sheer force of his wholesomeness. If the pop-star thing goes south, you can imagine he’d shrug gamely and go off to become a PE teacher and have four kids.
He performs Shotgun, up for British single later on this evening, backed by lustrous vistas of Monument Valley. Some extremely supple bass guitar and robust brass back his summer road-trip anthem; if Hugh Jackman’s tactic was, like the Aesop fable, to blow your coat off your back, then Ezra warms up the room to the point where everyone’s ready to not just take off their coats, but skinny-dip in the pool. Shotgun is a blast of pure positive energy that only the churlish, the contrarian and the people who you absolutely never want to be stuck with in the kitchen at a house party hate.
Little Mix
Little Mix, whose spat with Piers Morgan seems to have sent them into weaponised frenzy of sass, sit like a coven around a table before discarding their pink PVC coats for a marauding take on Woman Like Me. They’re joined by Ms Banks – who we championed back at the start of 2018 and is standing in for Nicki Minaj; the US rapper co-signed Banks’ magnificent guest verse on Stylo G’s Yu Zimme, in which she announces her intention to absolutely rinse the assets of her boyfriend, a very Little Mix kind of energy.
Banks crushes her self-penned verse, bragging of her “hips from my mama and attitude from my daddy”, and Little Mix also deliver: all throaty hollers, saucy gyrations and tongue flicks, plus a bombastic martial energy in a glitching, exploding arrangement. Their knackered gasping for breath is audible at the end of the mic: they gave everything, and are rightfully Britain’s best girl band in a generation. Shame they didn’t win best group in a way – but judging by the fan energy on socials, the public-voted video award will be theirs.
Jorja Smith
Jorja Smith goes from backing up Rag’n’Bone Man at last year’s awards to getting a slot of her own, and you could make a reasonable case for the Brits helping to nurture her path towards the big time. But then they would, wouldn’t they, given she is distributed by the Orchard, which is owned by Sony, which has been managing the last three years of the Brits. But her commanding choruses and charisma mean she deserves the industry whirring away beneath her, even if her taste for vocal fry is on a par with a particularly disgruntled Los Angeleno tween.
Don’t Watch Me Cry is the Britsiest choice she could have made for the Brits: piano breakup ballads have of course, per Adele, been some of the most memorable moments in recent Brits history. Aside from a rogue whoop, the audience is pin-drop quiet for Smith’s commanding performance, though truth be told, she is better at lower-key, bruised performing than this classic vocal showboating – it would be so much radical to get her to do something like Blue Lights, a claustrophobic crime story, on stage here. But as a bit of palate-cleansing after the bombast of the first few performances, it works perfectly.
Calvin Harris
Medley! The Brits were born for medleys. We kick off with Giant, which to be honest is one of Calvin’s weaker moments: Rag’n’Bone saying “I am” over and over again like a malfunctioning mindfulness app does not a chorus make, and the brass is like an abortive Rudimental studio session heard through a partition wall. But this is a pretty robust rendition, with Harris twisting knobs amid banks of (presumably redundant) analogue synths and generic electronic gear.
It segues into Promises, with Sam Smith dressed like a mirrorball being sent through a black hole. Whoever keeps breaking up with him and sending him into boozy nights out full of self-loathing and loneliness, please keep doing it – it’s giving us some great pop songs (see also Dancing With a Stranger). But it doesn’t seem to faze him: singing ever so slightly flat, he’s joined by Winnie Harlow for some Saturday Night Fever-style dance moves and generally fabulous sashaying. Finally Dua Lipa, ever a fan of a high short, stalks her way around some shrubberies as if lost in the Ibizan hillsides for her performance of One Kiss: the sound of flirty eye contact over a 5pm mojito in Alicante.
Altogether it’s a very strong showcase for the Scottish producer’s pop touch. Can we take a minute to hail him? Slide, Blame, We Found Love, Ready For the Weekend, his Spectrum remix, This Is What We Came For and potential Brits winner One Kiss are all in the absolute top tier of pop this country has ever produced. And, Shawn Mendes aside, his underwear advertising remains #goals.
Jess Glynne and HER
I should perhaps defer to a woman to ascertain how far this performance has pushed global feminism forward, but I would hazard not very much. In a Dove campaign come to life, Jess Glynne, US R&B star HER, and 70 women (including Jess’s mum) all take their makeup off as she performs her song Thursday. According to Jess in a press release we got beforehand, this is “a gesture to remind ourselves and everyone else that it’s okay and we are enough as we are. I hope this moment can help enforce that no woman is alone.”
It is enormously well-meaning, and gestures of sisterhood like this – on a very public stage – are laudable, even culture-jamming. It certainly beats the staging for your average piano ballad; Jess is in perfect voice, and HER adds a gorgeously improvisatory take on verse two.
But just as Dove’s campaigns, beyond their apparent championing of diverse body types, still quietly trade off female insecurity and a valorisation of beauty, this act ends up feeling trite when set amid a night that announces beauty actually IS about glamour and makeup. Point is, if this makes you feel better about yourself as a woman, you’re sitting on a bar that society loves to keep really, really low.
The 1975
The 1975 now, fronted by Matty Healy, a pigeon-toed manifestation of the anxieties facing rock stars today. There’s the existential stuff we’re all going through – twisted politics, the death of the planet – plus some rather more particular anxieties, like how it’s simultaneously quite problematic and quite exciting to have women throw themselves into your DMs. And there’s some old chestnuts too, like how nice heroin is.
Performing Sincerity is Scary dressed in a woolly hat and headphones over his tuxedo in front of some huge New York brownstones, a la the video, the band smoothly play out the laid-back, Chance the Rapper-indebted track. I was kind of hoping for a ferocious state-of-the-nation performance of Love It If We Made It, but I can’t be mad at someone who shouts out our brilliant deputy music editor Laura in an acceptance speech – and with a statement of real political importance.
Pink
She may be heading towards her Radio 2 years, but Pink’s image – the bourbon-slurping tattoo artist ready to give Karen at the other end of the bar a piece of her mind – still makes her stand out in the pop landscape. In fact, she’s an object lesson in how to be a major label, Brits-friendly artist: doggedly weather the early days when the label has no idea how to package you up, shrug off the inevitable flop records, keep singing songs that empower people out of the sweatpants phase of a breakup, and never forget the importance of Germany as a secondary market.
Starting in her dressing gown in her dressing room – very much part of her #relatable image – she kicks off with Walk Me Home and is swiftly hoisted into a costume that looks like Big Bird in the climactic scene of Carrie. Up she goes into the heavens, with the flamethrowers from Kanye’s 2015 performance earning back some of their value for Just Like Fire – a highlight of late-period Pink, thanks to its vocal leaps as vertiginous as her drop to the arena floor. Then it’s into Just Give Me A Reason, in some ways her most melodically satisfying song; Nate Ruess’s part is done (very capably) by Dan from Bastille in the most quintessentially Brit awards moment of this year’s Brit awards. The medley klaxon has been well and truly sounded.
Another recent Brits cliche – projection mapping – is deployed for an upbeat take on Try before a change into a newsprint-covered mac for What About Us. It remains an utterly shameless ripoff of Coldplay’s Sky Full of Stars, but remains just as cheesily satisfying. She and her dancers finish by holding lights in a gesture of solidarity for … what? Well, it doesn’t matter. Sometimes pop just needs to be uplifting.
