Girls Aloud arrive at the Brits, but where's Nadine? Photograph: Leon Neal/AFP/Getty Images
At this year's Brits launch (or "Brits lunch", if you're Sharon Osbourne haplessly wrestling with an autocue) the big PR spin was that "pop is back". The nominations included Mika, Leona Lewis and Take That as proof of this rather nebulous "pop" idea, and it was always going to be interesting to see how it played out on the night.
Things started promisingly when Mika opened the show. He put on a good performance with a medley of tracks from his platinum debut album, but it set at uncomfortable tone for the evening when the "credibility" of his performance was bolstered by a guest spot from Beth Ditto. This was later reflected in Rihanna's performance of Umbrella. You might speculate that the song had earned its stripes by being the longest-running number one single of the 21st century but apparently that was not good enough for a Brits performance: the Klaxons-backed mashup with Golden Skans was one of the evening's highlights but it hinted at the Brits' discomfort at accepting a pop song as being worth celebrating in and of itself. "It's all right, viewers - cool people like it too ..."
Later in the show, Leona Lewis's performance of Bleeding Love, backed with a couple of dozen dancers, was clearly designed as a classy 'n' career-defining set-piece but the Brits' voting academy had already urinated on Lewis' chips from a great height by ensuring that she took home none of the four awards for which she was nominated. Kylie meanwhile (and "you can always rely on Kylie to put on a show" etc etc) chose to reflect the solidly average X album with a performance of her new single (in shops this week) whose production values would have been better suited to a throwaway CD:UK performance than an iconic Brits moment.
It spoke volumes - and prompted this writer's irony-meter to explode - when Minogue introduced Paul McCartney and praised the fact that the Beatles made it acceptable for artists to write their own songs. When even Kylie seems embarrassed at the sometimes wonderfully synthetic nature of pop, you know you're in trouble.
What would I have changed? I know they've become the cliched last refuge of the battered pop fan but in a year that Girls Aloud received the first Brit nomination in a five-year career characterised by both solid commercial and unprecedented critical success it might not have hurt to turn four minutes of the show over to a live performance of Call the Shots. It could have tipped the balance, although it is perhaps just as well this didn't happen because while the band's key members all turned up Nadine Coyle was so busy in LA that she managed to "forget her passport" and couldn't make it back to the UK for last night's ceremony. (This is the second time Coyle has played the "mislaid passport" card - the first was when she lied her way onto Irish Popstars.)
Promoting this return-of-pop idea at the 2008 Brits was always going to be difficult because it was projecting the music industry's financial hopes for the next 12 months onto an awards ceremony celebrating pop's fairly average last 12 months, but a reluctance to embrace or support pop convincingly has resulted in an ineffectual launch pad for its big comeback. Not that it matters - presumably a different genre is already being planned for reappraisal at 2009's Brits. "Country is back" has a nice ring to it, don't you think?
