The Second Serve // Brits And Pieces

Aside from Sam Smith turning up to the red carpet looking like a chess piece sex doll, this year’s Brits was a pretty lacklustre affair.

To try to jolt a bit of life back into the proceedings, we thought we’d take a look back at some of the better moments from the awards over the years – including a few previously undiscussed items.

It’s good to see Shania Twain back at No.1 on the album chart and feted at the Brits.

This year’s event went a bit better than the last time she was invited in the early 2000s too. There, she overheard a label exec giving her a bit of a slagging off, describing her latest album as “cheesy”.

So she went home and wrote a letter explaining that she was the highest earning star the label had ever had – then got the label to distribute a copy to every single person who worked there.

The Brits ’96 are the ones most famously remembered – largely because of Jarvis Cocker waggling his arse at Michael Jackson during his performance of Earth Song.

But one little-remembered fact about the whole thing that’s often overlooked was that Jackson’s people made it a contractual obligation that Bob Geldof introduce him with the words:

“When Michael Jackson sings it is with the voice of angels and when his feet move you can see God dancing.”

JJ writes:
“One day, shortly after Jarvis Cocker stormed the stage during Michael Jackson’s performance at the Brits, loads of kids turned up on a coach at the main Hamley’s store. It turned out they were the same kids that had been on the stage performing with MJ at the time of the Jarvis incident.

“They were told they could choose any toy they wanted, all on Jacko’s credit card, which resulted in them buying so much stuff the items took up over three flights of staff stairs at the back of the building.

“Instead of buying just one item, individual kids were like flies to shit, grabbing everything they could. Subsequently Michael Jackson’s credit card bounced and Sony had to send a cheque to cover the costs.”

Lizzo was due to perform at the Warner Brits after-party in 2020 but, after downing a ton of tequila at the awards ceremony itself, performing was the furthest thing from her mind.

Showing up a solid two/three hours late to the post-show bash, Lizzo continued to get the free gargle into her with great relish. She then refused to get off the chair she was dancing on (with a glass of champagne in hand) and got fairly mouthy with Chiltern Firehouse’s security guards. After said encounter, she continued to dance on the chair until her leg went through it and she tumbled down like Madonna did off those stairs.

Then, with a bruised behind and ego, she headed off into the night.

To cabaret club The Box – where she continued getting royally sozzled way into the early hours. A champ.

One big scandal that never quite broke at the Brits happened ten years ago – and involved Simon Cowell. The Mail ran a piece about how he had been seen making out with a new girlfriend there, Caroline Stanbury. All very juicy, all very provable – as they had a load of photos of it happening.

The only trouble was that Caroline Stanbury (ex-girlfriend of Prince Andrew; now a Real Housewife of Dubai) was very much married to someone else at the time.

So legal teams were brought in, the story was promptly taken down and the more incriminating photos somehow ended up fading from circulation.

Robbie Williams was in Melbourne last year, shooting live crowd footage for his upcoming biopic, Better Man – including a recreation of Robbie’s duet with Tom Jones at the 1998 Brit Awards.

Robbie was very chatty at the shoot, telling the crowd they were having to film with a local Tom Jones impersonator because getting the real thing was “too fucking expensive” – and that he couldn’t actually remember the original performance because he’d done three grams of coke and a bottle of sambucca that night.

If you played Friday’s quiz, you might have thought that we put together a quick Burt Bacharach round in honour of the great man’s passing. Actually, it was total coincidence. That quiz had been compiled and uploaded earlier in the week – so hopefully us collating that weird collection of questionable covers didn’t do anything to bring it on…

Anyway, there’s five hopefully non-fatal quizzes lined up for this week: each made up of ten songs. You just have to identify the title and the artist. You get a point for each; twenty points across the ten songs.

Monday’s Theme: Brit Winning Singles

[Play it here]

What’s it like to be a seat filler at the Grammys?
[Read on BuzzFeed]

Turn your computer into an old-skool Mac
[In-browser simulator]

Meet the star players of last night’s Puppy Bowl
[Read on Digg]

Other videos we missed last week #1: Jason Statham also appeared in Erasure’s Run To The Sun
[Watch on YouTube]

Other videos we missed last week #2: Vic Reeves in Shakin Stevens’ What Do You Want to Make Those Eyes at Me For?
[Watch on YouTube]