The Ivor Novellos

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.

The Winter Olympics, rewarding obscurity, insanity and then maybe talent.

At the time of writing I am watching speed skating.

It's ridiculous. Five men -some with moustaches- line up,

then for some reason they attempt to complete 'NINE LAPS OF THE TRACK!'. The track, incidentally, is a tiny oval within which these men spend a couple of minutes skating like morons. Apparently, these men just travelled 1500 metres, on ice, in a circle, to win a bit of gold. Obviously, it's prestigious, without a doubt, it's the Olympics, I'd take a medal if I could. Yet it seems ridiculous to train to the extent these people do, to dedicate their lives, as these people to, just to get a medal. What the hell is a medal?! No-one deals in medals any-more! It's like a horse getting a rosette, what on earth do they mean?

I suppose that, maybe, over the years (about 2000 of them) the Olympic Games have earned themselves a fair bit of attention, and rightly so. Nothing else has lasted that long. Jesus supposedly turned up at a similar time (i.e. 'the beginning of time') and look what happened to him. It's impressive that an event that is essentially a display of fairly unnecessary talents has stood the test of time, and anyone that comes out as victor in such an event in modern times deserves some credit for it. Even if just to be part of a colossal legacy. I suppose it's just the winter bit that gets to me.

In ancient times, when there was no abundance of fairly useless modern distraction tools, a competition to see who could run really fast in a straight line, or who could throw a rock the furthest would have presumably been a fantastic way to while away the time. Making it a competition is just a natural progression.

Although it's the 'winter' aspect of it that is currently affecting me, (mainly because that's what's on telly at the moment) even that makes sense. Most of the sports are essentially insane. The basis of the majority of the events is putting something on your feet, or putting yourself on something, and then just sliding down a hill. Skiing, snowboarding, luge, skeleton, bob-sleigh, they're all fundamentally the same, but in an environment where there are a lot of hills, and where it snows quite a bit -as you'd expect- it is literally the winter equivalent of the summer games. Running is just a way of getting around, so is skiing. Why not make it a competition every now and then? The part that baffles me is the UK's involvement in it, and the extent to which we attempt to compete.

There aren't that many hills in the Great Britain. We have a few, but they're nothing special. Most of them very rarely accommodate snow. If they do, it's so rare, that no-one owns the skis to utilise it. Luge, skeleton and bob-sleigh tracks don't even rely solely on the weather. You can make ice, but we've barely got the hills to make doing that worthwhile. Yet still, every four years, the BBC is commandeered by coverage of the UK being distinctly below average at winter sports, because as a country with a temperate climate, we can never quite reach the peak of that domain.

Everyone knows we're not going to win, a couple of days ago the commentators were ecstatic when we got eighth place in some form of snowboarding, they must have gone insane when we actually won our first gold medal in eight years. Obviously it's great if we can excel in some aspects of the games but it seems like there's a little too much excitement and anticipation. Can we not just set our standards a little bit lower? That's clearly a horribly pessimistic suggestion. We'd never achieve anything if we adopted that attitude. I'm not quite sure if there is a solution, or even a problem. We probably all just need to calm down a bit.

Liam Gallagher. Definitely A Knobhead.

Peter Kay, a man who's entire career is based on simple observations (and that the fact that those observations were made in the north of England), stuck to his guns at the Brits by making another one.

The real news from the 30th anniversary of the Brit Awards however, is that nothing has changed. Noddy Holder still exists and somehow managed to find an opportunity to work 'FEEL THE NOISE' into his few seconds of stage-time. Peter Kay is still simply telling us what he sees, and Liam Gallagher is, without a doubt, still a 'knobhead'. He accepted the award for 'Best British Album of the Last 30 Years' for '(What's the Story?) Morning Glory', which is a great album, by far the best from the shortlist (sorry Dido), but that doesn't make Liam any less of a dick.

For a start, the album is written by Noel, Liam's only credits on the album are vocals and tambourine. Even if Noel didn't want to go and get the award, Liam should have at least mentioned him rather than just thanking 'Bonehead' and 'Quiggs'. However the thing that ultimately confirms his status as a knobhead is his 'rock and roll' attitude to the whole thing.

Wow. What a rocker. His twitter account (the epitome of rebellion) has added to the whole story after he posted this yesterday;

"Listen up fat fuck as a real northerner I was brought up 2 say shit 2 people's faces not behind their back. Live forever LG"

Where to start? He's called Peter Kay a 'fat fuck', which is a bit playground. He's used '2' instead of 'to' which is just wrong, and he's felt the need to sign it off with his initials despite it coming from his own Twitter account. This post is quite knobhead-ish but if you scroll down the page a bit it gets worse. Apparently he had a little go at promoting the bands Brit nomination on Twitter, because that's just as rock and roll and nonchalant as his interview. 'If we're going to fucking get invited then I'm gonna turn up and 'ave it.' Slightly different attitude to his 'VOTE FOR ME I'M DESPERATE' posts on Twitter.

His band's struggling I guess, (in that it no longer exists) he might as well have a go at milking that old whining cow as much as he can till it ultimately commits suicide out of a combination of boredom and anger. Following this little escapade he's obviously reinforced his status as an absolutely uncontrollable rock-star nutter. 'Let's all go and take some class A drugs... and be complete arseholes.' Knobhead.

I honestly do really like What's the Story.