Brits

They say that you should never meet your heroes. Well I'm not so sure about that. As long as you haven't built up an unrealistic picture of them in your imagination you generally get what you expect and often much more.

However, watching The Brits last night I decided that perhaps the maxim should be changed to "you should never see your heroes drunk". The Kaiser Chiefs won three awards and each time they went to collect an award they dropped in my estimation. I had based my perceptions of the band on their lyrics, music, and image. What I saw last night was a bunch of incomprehensible drunks who were incapable of stringing a sentence together or saying anything remotely interesting or witty. What a shame.

Coldplay on the other hand were every bit as you would expect. Bland. I like their music but it rarely shocks you, and that was like their behaviour at the Brits. You can't imagine them trashing a hotel room after a riotous night of drinking. But you can imagine them folding the towels neatly and doing the dusting before checking out.

Paul weller won the lifetime achievement award. Well deserved, but strangely he didn't seem to have the requisite gravitas to close the show. An odd choice of songs didn't help and I felt underwhelmed - which is a pity because I love The Jam, The Style Council and much of solo material.

Highlight of the night for me was Prince. Years ago when I was at University I bored people rigid by insiting that although he had gone bonkers and was purveying paint-by-numbers funk/soul he was actually a fantastic guitarist. Well at this years Brits he rolled back the years and put on a show-stealing performance with some exquisite guitar playing. The guy still has star quality and I hope we see more in the vein of Purple Rain in the future.

Other than that, awards went to James Blunt (most annoying twonk in popular music) and Green day (most over-rated bunch of middle class white boys playing at being punks).

Tonight it's the Bafta film awards. Hurrah!