Dapper London lads Plan B and Tinie Tempah were popular local winners at the Brit music awards, while Arcade Fire followed its surprise Grammy victory with two prizes at the British ceremony.
Tempah, a 22-year-old product of London’s dubstep scene who released his first album, Disc-Overy, last year, won trophies on Tuesday for British breakthrough act and British single, for Pass Out.
Dressed in a snazzy white dinner jacket and black-rimmed spectacles, Tempah dedicated his best single award to “UK music, peace and love.”
Photo: REUTERS
Plan B — a hip-hop artist who changed direction and hit the charts with the Motown-influenced concept album The Defamation of Strickland Banks — was named British male solo artist of the year.
Retro hipsters Mumford and Sons took the trophy for British album of the year, for their banjo and mandolin-laced debut, Sigh No More.
Band member Marcus Mumford said the band was “very honored, very humbled” by the prize.
Photo: REUTERS
“This is very bizarre, very strange,” he said.
Although they reached the top 10 of the US album chart and performed at Sunday’s Grammy Awards alongside Bob Dylan, the Brits show was Mumford and Sons’ first prime-time TV appearance in Britain.
Grown-up boy band Take That — reunited and still huge in Britain 15 years after its original prime — took the prize for best British group, while folky singer-songwriter Laura Marlin was named best British female solo artist of the year.
Montreal indie band Arcade Fire continued its recent run of awards success with prizes for international group and international album of the year, for The Suburbs.
Singer Win Butler alluded to the cries of “Who?” from some quarters that greeted the band’s album of the year victory at the Grammys on Sunday, by advising people unfamiliar with the group to “check it out on Google.”
International solo artist awards went to Cee Lo Green and Rihanna, while teen heartthrob Justin Bieber was named international breakthrough act.
Long criticized as dull and predictable, the Brits had a revamp this year, with a new Union Jack-striped award statuette designed by Vivienne Westwood and a tighter show with more live performances.
Adele, Mumford and Sons, Arcade Fire, Rihanna and Green — fresh from a psychedelic Grammy appearance with Gwyneth Paltrow and the Muppets — were among the acts performing at London’s O2 Arena.
Green struck a more elegant note Tuesday, performing his hit Forget You dressed in a white suit with red boutonniere.
It was a lively but well-behaved ceremony, although the spirit of rock ’n’ roll lived on in attendees such as The Who frontman Roger Daltrey, who presented the best album award.
“Good to see that the British music industry still has enough money for a good booze-up,” he said.
Ovation of the night went to Take That, who performed its song Kidz amid a phalanx of dancers dressed as riot police, in an apparent nod to Britain’s student protesters.
Most of the awards are chosen by 1,000 music critics and record industry figures, with several decided by public vote.
On the Net: www.brits.co.uk
June 2 to June 8 Taiwan’s woodcutters believe that if they see even one speck of red in their cooked rice, no matter how small, an accident is going to happen. Peng Chin-tian (彭錦田) swears that this has proven to be true at every stop during his decades-long career in the logging industry. Along with mining, timber harvesting was once considered the most dangerous profession in Taiwan. Not only were mishaps common during all stages of processing, it was difficult to transport the injured to get medical treatment. Many died during the arduous journey. Peng recounts some of his accidents in
“Why does Taiwan identity decline?”a group of researchers lead by University of Nevada political scientist Austin Wang (王宏恩) asked in a recent paper. After all, it is not difficult to explain the rise in Taiwanese identity after the early 1990s. But no model predicted its decline during the 2016-2018 period, they say. After testing various alternative explanations, Wang et al argue that the fall-off in Taiwanese identity during that period is related to voter hedging based on the performance of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). Since the DPP is perceived as the guardian of Taiwan identity, when it performs well,
The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) on May 18 held a rally in Taichung to mark the anniversary of President William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20. The title of the rally could be loosely translated to “May 18 recall fraudulent goods” (518退貨ㄌㄨㄚˋ！). Unlike in English, where the terms are the same, “recall” (退貨) in this context refers to product recalls due to damaged, defective or fraudulent merchandise, not the political recalls (罷免) currently dominating the headlines. I attended the rally to determine if the impression was correct that the TPP under party Chairman Huang Kuo-Chang (黃國昌) had little of a
A short walk beneath the dense Amazon canopy, the forest abruptly opens up. Fallen logs are rotting, the trees grow sparser and the temperature rises in places sunlight hits the ground. This is what 24 years of severe drought looks like in the world’s largest rainforest. But this patch of degraded forest, about the size of a soccer field, is a scientific experiment. Launched in 2000 by Brazilian and British scientists, Esecaflor — short for “Forest Drought Study Project” in Portuguese — set out to simulate a future in which the changing climate could deplete the Amazon of rainfall. It is
RSS