The Lipster

Back in the olden days, the late 80s, the Brit Awards was one of the best excuses the Smash Hits journo had to behave in a preposterous manner. A purely gossip-gathering opportunity, Smash Hits wasn’t interested in sex or drugs particularly (in fact, the heady pop bugle only ever referred to sex as “’mazin rumpo” while the booze/narcotic combo would be alluded to, perhaps, with “much wibbling ahoy after 15 pints of Um Bongo Um Bongo, They Drink It In The Congo”) but with finding out whether the nation’s favourite pop folk had a winning sense of humour or were glum-faced titans of torpor. Every year, the evidence was duly collated, a team of reporters such as myself dispatched to ambush the stars with some perkily stupid questions.

Mostly held in vast hotel ballrooms or the Royal Albert Hall, The Brits back then was a security-light free-for-all where stars, PRs, journos and be-suited big-wigs mingled together down endless corridors and backstage areas. During the event itself, the milling hundreds troughed like cattle from buckets of free booze around the traditional circular tables. You could pester, everywhere, such hoary Brits alumni as Sting, Phil Collins, Dire Straits, Peter Gabriel and always Annie Lennox, who seemed to win everything for 27 consecutive years while no-one young or “pop” ever won a thing (especially not Bros, Yazz or anyone to do with Stock, Aitken and Waterman). Our Stupid Brits Questions were innocuous enough (the likes of “Are you sure you haven’t left the iron on?”) but the stars, categorically, were not interested in Stupid Questions and much more so in the trough of wine.

Once, on cornering Bruce Dickinson from Iron Maiden, barely one question was completed (possibly about Um Bongo Um Bongo They Drink It In The Congo) and the bald response duly arrived: “Fuck off”. Sir Cliff Richard, unfeasibly, was much more forthcoming. Hapless Hits reporter: “What was the last thing you did before leaving for this evening’s bash?” Sir Cliff: “I had a drink. A bourbon and coke.” Hapless reporter: “A bit rock ‘n’ roll for you, Cliff?” Sir Cliff: “I invented rock ‘n’ roll. It was all my idea.” The likes of Eddi Reader from Fairground Attraction, meanwhile, often proved agreeable. Hapless Hits reporter: “Did you ever win anything at school prize-giving?” Eddi Reader: “No. So, once, I went into the school library and stole a book and wrote in it, ‘To The Best Pupil Of 1969, Eddie Reader’. I don’t think my mum believed me, it wasn’t even the end of term.”

In 1988, the most memorable response ever came from Adam Clayton from U2, who few are aware is spectacularly posh (officially the Prince Charles of Pop) who was approached by our then-Editor, Barry ‘Banzai’ McIlheney. History has not recorded the question but the reply was indelibly heard: “Clear off.” Or, more accurately, “Clear awf.” For the last 20 years, then, to one specific corner of the pop universe, Adam Clayton has been officially known as Adam “Clear Awf” Clayton...

Like most things in the contemporary world, the Brits now operates under tyrannically strict control, no more than a glittering TV spectacular designed to generate maximum revenue for both ITV and the increasingly beleaguered music industry. Today, of course, they save the hoary old blokes for the end (and it’s usually a bloke) while there’s youth and pop everywhere but The Brits, as ever, is not where we look for our rock & roll thrills. And most pesky reporters, unless they’re specifically “on duty” with a specific artist, are mysteriously not invited.

One chum has been to the Brits these last three years and says the japes, tragically, are over. “All the stars stay inside their individual dressing rooms backstage these days,” she laments. “Nobody mingles.” Last year, she also witnessed why the stellar host, Russell Brand, is not hosting the event this year: he was continuously censored during rehearsals. “He was livid,” she notes. “He kept shouting, ‘Why the fuck did you hire me if I can’t say what I want!?’”

Twelve years on the from the Jarvis Cocker/Michael Jackson Arse-Aloft Incident (arguably the greatest single moment in the Brits 31-year history) and the Brit Awards big-wigs hire The Osbournes as this year’s hosts, who made the pre-show pronouncement there would be “no scandal this year, we are behaving”. As we at Smash Hits used to say, "Swizzle!"