Brit awards 2021: follow the ceremony live | Music

Astonishingly, Little Mix are the first girl group ever to win this category. In their speech, they pay tribute to the Spice Girls, Sugababes, All Saints, Girls Aloud, “all of the incredible, incredible female bands” that came before them, as well as calling out the sexism and racism in the British pop industry.

On top of that, they’re bizarrely under-celebrated by the Brits considering their decade in pop dominance: this is their first victory in the group category after two prior nominations (and they’ve previously won for best single in 2017 and video in 2019). They’ve written down a speech because “two of us have baby brains”, says Perrie; one of the first thanks on their long list is Jesy Nelson, who recently departed the band.

While I’m sure commenters BTL will have plenty to say about their “manufactured” music and “economical” outfits, this moment is sweet, sentimental and long overdue – worryingly, perhaps entirely too late. With one member gone and two pregnant, I’m getting flashbacks to the dog days of the Spice Girls and the crushing sense that proper adulthood was about to swoop in to steal all my 10-year-old fun. At any rate, Confetti is a much better song than, um, Holler so no need to panic just yet.

If Dua provided the last year’s uppers, then Arlo offered the consoling comedown. You could hardly turn on the radio last year – whether Radio 1, 2 or 6Music, a sign of her cross-generational appeal – without hearing Black Dog, Parks’s accidentally apposite, blessedly tender devotional to a grief-stricken friend who can’t force themselves outside. And her debut album, Collapsed in Sunbeams, followed through on its promise: balancing a dreamy sound and poetic air with piercingly observed details. Maybe you could consider Billie Eilish a bit of a Brits precedent here – they’re a year apart in age, both making hyper-intimate pop – but it feels rare for the Brits to recognise such introspective work, and even more so for an artist signed to a true independent label, Transgressive. She thanks her family and friends and says she’s living proof that anyone can do it.

This year’s trophy comes in two parts, so you can give the Mini Brit to a mate. It’s all a bit Mean Girls: A piece for Gretchen Wieners!

One of the key pleasures of the Brits is a medley, and Lipa delivers one straight off the back of Coldplay’s set. A take on Love Again set on a depressingly pandemic tableau on the London underground goes into a blast of Physical on a tube train on stage itself. There’s a blast of Hallucinate’s club energy, and then into Don’t Start Now and Future Nostalgia – and all of it in a Geri-referencing pleated Union Jack miniskirt, her second chaotic look of the night. She is the consummate British pop star and surely this could be a very big night for her.

The ceremony has started but I can’t let these tremendous outfits go unnoticed: Rina Sawayama and Simon Neill from Biffy Clyro!

Coldplay are the Brits in band form: trying to be cool and youthful, way too corporate to get away with it, and yet almost always enjoyable. Chris and co are in that tricky part of a career recently faced by Katy Perry and others, where they’re not ready for a life on Radio 2, but their age means that any climb up the charts must now be done up a tricky, crumbling north face rather than the gentle inclines afforded the likes of younger, more relevant likes of Headie One, Dua Lipa and Joel Corry.

They could make it, though, with Higher Power, a really stellar new single produced by pop powerhouse Max Martin (who has worked with many shortlisted artists tonight such as Taylor Swift, Ariana Grande and the Weeknd). It’s essentially The War on Drugs on actual drugs, with a peppy Dancing in the Dark-type snare keeping the energy high, and Chris using his traditional whoa-oh-ohs to encircle quasi-religious bromides presumably gleaned from an ayahuasca ceremony with Instagram fitness models in Tulum. Chris is in really fine voice right across the pretty broad octave range needed for this track. They perform it on a pontoon in the Thames with holograms instead of backing dancers – social distancing kings!

Worth every penny of the inevitable ULEZ fine! Missed a trick by not inviting giant CGI Rita Ora up for a guest appearance tho.