The Ivor Novello awards have been rewarding ‘excellence in British music writing’ for the last fifty-five years, and with that legacy comes a certain amount of prestige. Receiving an Ivor is often seen as a far more respectable achievement than getting a Brit or an NME award and it’s partly down to the presentation. The Brit Awards look more like a kids birthday party, this year with Peter Kay hired as the clown and Liam Gallagher playing the grumpy dad. The NME’s try to be a bit edgier but, despite Jarvis Cocker’s input, still turn into a school disco, with everyone trying to be more alternative than everyone else. The Ivor’s eliminate any of these problems by simply not allowing any cameras in, and initially seem to be a truly alternative awards ceremony, reward good, real music. However, a quick glance at this year’s results suggests otherwise.
With a panel appointed to decide the winners you would think that there would be little commercial influence, but with PRS as sponsors, commercial success completely dominates one of the awards. The PRS for Music Most Performed Work Award -presumably based on whose song has been whored out the most- went to Lily Allen for ‘The Fear’. Fair enough, if that’s the song that got played the most, I guess it deserves the award. The issue comes when you see that Lily Allen also won the award for Best Song Musically and Lyrically, with the same song, and the award for Songwriter of the Year (with Greg Kustin). Now, surely one award is enough? Surely an awards event with a panel should be able to spread the awards around a little more evenly? Surely that’s exactly what the panel is for? If the public were voting for the awards and it turned out that the whole country loved Lily Allen more than anyone else, then that’s that, she…deserves the award, but a panel of judges has the ability to stop that. Apparently they chose not to.
After you’ve digested the information that twenty percent of the whole ceremony was essentially dedicated to Lily Allen, it’s hard to take the rest of it seriously. The news that Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs took the award for Best Original Film Score sort of flies straight over your head. At this point the whole prestige and status of the event fades away. Winning one Ivor Novello this year simply means that you’re nearly as good as Lily Allen, because she got three of them. That’s not going to persuade me to go out and buy the soundtrack to Ice Age. There were some brighter moments; Johnny Marr deservedly received the Ivors Inspiration Award and Bat For Lashes and Imogen Heap were given the awards for Best Contemporary Song and International Achievement respectively. Even Paolo Nutini getting the Best Album Award comes across as a good thing. At least he’s actually on the writing credits for it. Contrastingly, Girls Aloud’s ‘The Promise’ was nominated, despite it being credited to a list of seven other people, which didn’t include any of the band’s actual line-up.
An event like The Ivors is an opportunity for people who supposedly know what they’re talking about, to really reward artists for their songwriting ability, regardless of commercial success. With the influence it holds, BASCA (the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors) could have taken the chance to highlight some new talent, by picking something that’s been going on under the radar, and granting it the respect it deserves. Instead they chose to give out a few awards to artists that everyone’s already heard of, and allow one person, who is clearly not the ‘future of music’ to completely overshadow the whole thing, it just seems a little bit lazy. What was previously a well-respected institution now just seems to be another meaningless awards ceremony that no one with any sense will give a shit about. Sorry Ivor.
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