Tonight is the biggest night in British music and we’ve been wading through the archives (YouTube..) to find you some of the funniest and most memorable mishaps and fumbles from Brit history. So as you sit there with your fingers crossed waiting for Lady Gaga to trip over her dress/hair piece/high heels/hanging meat, take a few minutes to check out these legendary screw ups..
There could only be one way to start this list of Brit Award fumbles and that would be with a ceremony that was completely rife with mishaps. The 1989 ceremony was infamous as a prime example of how live television can go totally wrong. Some bright spark had decided that page 3 girl Sam Fox and Fleetwood Mac drummer Mick Fleetwood would be the ideal hosts. The fiasco that followed (broadcast live) featured plenty of fluffed lines, guests coming on at entirely the wrong times, Michael Jackson’s taped acceptance speech being forgotten altogether. Miss Fox stumbled through the awkwardness by yelping “woo!” with annoying frequency. It was car-crash television.
You can always rely on the yobs of the music industry to stir up a juicy bit of gossip for us entertainment mongers and when a drunken Brandon Block stumbled up onto stage after his friends convinced him he had won an award (he had not) Ronnie Wood found himself in a slanging match with the DJ. A legendary bit of drink-throwing on Woodâs part added to the entertainment.
A Brits classic. Back in the time before Michael Jackson’s career was tarnished by Martin Bashir and a second and far more serious wave of paedophile claims, Jarvis Cocker was the voice of reason among an industry of Yes men. In 1996 he stormed Jacksonâs stage performance with a navel flash to the camera, ran like a mad man in between the singing choir and then finished off by wiggling his derriere at the singing idol. That was hardcore..
You can always rely on Liam Gallagher for a nice bit of controversy and last year was no exception. Staggering onto the stage in what one can only assume to be a decade long drug binge, Liam accepted his award, said ‘Live Forever..’ as if he was some sort of Greek philosopher, swore, threw the microphone and then Brit award into the crowd and then somehow made it off the stage without knocking himself out on the podium. Peter Kay then summed it up in one when he returned to the stage; âWhat a knobhead.â?
The KLF, while not widely known these days, once upon a time managed to win big at the 1992 Brit awards for Best British Group, (joint winners with the utterly unspeakable Simply Red). Despite this win, they decided to open the 1992 show with a less than conventional collaboration that would have sent even David Guetta and his DJ decks running a mile off. The band managed to get hardcore heavy metal band, Extreme Noise Terror (ânuff said) to perform their song 3am Eternal on stage with them. Up until that point the awards had been a somewhat straight-laced suit and tie affair for music industry executives who were more used to artists who would shut-up and do what they were told. The audience consisted of old school businessmen and serious musicians who thought people like Phil Collins were subversive. In simple terms, it was musical suicide, and when they fired a machine gun of blanks into the audience and shortly after caused chaos at the after show party (stories involving a dead sheep emerged) they were well and truly off any future Brit award guest list.
