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Charli xcx, Jade and Ezra Collective’s Brit awards cap a vintage year for adventurous pop | Alexis Petridis
Playing music that is as smart as it is successful, Brit winners made articulate calls for artist development – while host Jack Whitehall was brilliantly risky
If Charli xcx – and producer AG Cook – hadn’t been lavishly rewarded for her agenda-setting album Brat, you would have wondered what had gone wrong: likewise Chappell Roan, whose ardent emotion both in and out of the recording studio makes her one of pop’s most cheering recent developments: she responded to her two awards with acceptance speeches that called upon the music industry to offer more long-term development support to artists – a theme also picked up on by Myles Smith, winner of the rising star award – and shouted out the trans community and sex workers. It’s meant as no smear on Carpenter herself, a witty and self-knowing star whose album Short n’ Sweet went to No 1 in 18 countries and contained a succession of superb, similarly chart-topping singles, but you did rather get the feeling the Brits were making up an award to give to her and – given the absence of Roan – secure her presence at the event itself. They won the Mercury prize in 2023, scored their first Top 10 album with last year’s Dance, No One’s Watching and became the first British jazz act to headline Wembley Arena: precisely the kind of success that the Brits should be celebrating.
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