There’s nothing inclusive about a Brit Awards that ignores rock

There was much to celebrate about Tuesday night’s Brit Awards. The triumph of female performers was long overdue: six out of the seven winners in mixed-gender categories were women. Then there was the return of live music after 14 months of silence. That this happened in front of a limited audience of NHS key workers made it all the more special. But there was something even more notable in its absence than a full crowd: anything remotely resembling rock music.

In terms of the awards dished out, the Brits honoured pop music in all its diversity: from the banging disco of Dua Lipa to the eclectic rap of J Hus and from the empowered teen pop of Little Mix to the all-conquering songcraft of Taylor Swift. The small number of rock acts in the running – Biffy Clyro, The 1975, Fontaines D.C. and the ubiquitous Foo Fighters – were overlooked.

HAIM, the Californian sisters who were named Best International Group, were the closest thing the evening had to a traditional rock group triumphing. All of which is fine. At their best, the Brits reward both commercial success and quality songwriting, and this is something organisers achieved brilliantly this year. But where were the bands making a racket? As one wag put it to me, the Brits is basically turning into the Smash Hits Awards.

It wasn’t just the awards themselves that lacked good ol’ fashioned rock. The performances did too. The only band to play were Coldplay, and they’ve long abandoned being a rock band in the traditional sense. The song they performed, Higher Power, was produced and co-written by Max Martin, the man behind countless pop gems from Britney’s Baby One More Time to Swift’s Shake it Off. It’s pure pop.

And of course, with rock ‘n’ roll music comes rock ‘n’ roll behaviour. The Brits are known for the various controversies that have occurred over the years: dance band The KLF once left a dead sheep at the post-show dinner; Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker famously mooned on the stage during a saccharine Michael Jackson performance; Danbert Nobacon of anarchist band Chumbawamba chucked a bucket of ice-cold water over erstwhile Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott; and the feud between Blur and Oasis played out in front of millions of viewers at the 1995 awards.

It is no coincidence that all these controversies involved members of bands. It’s instructive about the current state of music that it fell to a solo acoustic balladeer to provide this year’s most rock ‘n’ roll moment. Lewis Capaldi’s expletive-strewn speech as he presented the award for British Album of the Year was largely bleeped out by ITV, which broadcasted the ceremony. So sweary was the Scot that more of his speech was censored than was aired. Whether intentional or not, it was amusingly subversive – something the rest of the ceremony lacked.

I realise that I’m in danger of sounding like a dinosaur here. I’m also conflating rock music with bad behaviour. It isn’t always thus: rock bands can be angels just as much as pop stars can behave appallingly. But this year’s Brits seemed to hint at a wider shift in our cultural landscape: the death of debauchery.

As writer Ian Winwood argues in his forthcoming book Bodies: Life & Death in Music, the days of the rock ‘n’ roll madman (or woman) are over. Excess and idiocy are no longer cool. This is because there is a growing unease in celebrating what Winwood terms the “instability of outlier personalities”. In other words, musicians’ physical and mental wellbeing today is paramount. I fully support this. But high jinx and mischievous merrymaking at an awards ceremony are surely still acceptable? The odd bucket of water over a politician’s head must continue to be fair game.

But back to the music. The Brits, of course, merely reflect current music trends. And pop, R&B, and rap music have been in the ascendency for years now at the expense of rock. This is unlikely to change in a major way. The best-selling album of new rock music in 2020 was AC/DC’s Power Up, and that only scraped to Number 26 in the Official Charts Company’s year-end chart (AC/DC were also the highest-placed band on the list).

Indeed, most music industry insiders I speak to believe that rap will now be the dominant force in perpetuity, becoming the new pop. Yet there are a great many rock bands still out there releasing fantastic music. The last year or so has seen excellent albums by The Killers, The Strokes, Royal Blood, The Big Moon and Idles, as well as hugely exciting bands such as Fontaines D.C and The Snuts. This year we have new albums from bands such as Wolf Alice and, possibly, Arcade Fire to look forward to.

Music’s great pendulum will no doubt swing back towards rock in a small way at some point. But as the music world takes much needed steps towards becoming less blinkered and more inclusive, it would be a shame for it to start overlooking rock as a genre in the process.

Would Led Zeppelin, Coldplay, Radiohead or The Rolling Stones break through today? Probably not. And it’s about time that other genres are allowed to flourish. As it finally embraces the 21st century, the industry mustn’t throw out the baby with the bathwater.