And Finally Artist News Awards

Adele wins Album Of The Year Grammy, gives half of it to Beyonce

By Andy Malt | Published on Monday 13 February 2017

The Grammys happened then. And despite seven million thinkpieces in advance asking if they’re still relevant, here we all are talking about them. All manner of things happened that we can talk about. I will now proceed to talk about some of them.

The big Album Of The Year prize went to Adele for ’25’ – one of five she won in total – who went ahead and Kanyed herself, as West himself wasn’t in attendance. “I can’t possibly accept this award”, she said, accepting the award. “The ‘Lemonade’ album was just so monumental, Beyonce. It was so monumental and well thought-out and beautiful and soul-bearing”.

She also, possibly by accident, broke the trophy in two and offered half of it to Beyonce. She still had both halves when she appeared for photos backstage though. But maybe she gave Beyonce her bit later. That would give ‘Lemonade’ one and a half Grammys – it having already received Best Urban Contemporary Album earlier in the evening.

In a speech accepting that prize, Beyonce said: “My intention for the film and album is to create a body of work that would give voice to our pain, our struggles, our doubts, and our history, to confront issues that make us uncomfortable. It’s important to me to show images to my children that reflect their beauty, so they can grow in a world, where they look in the mirror, first with their own families as well as in the Super Bowl, the Olympics, the White House and the Grammys and see themselves. This is something that I want for every child of every race, and I feel that it’s vital that we learn from the past and recognise our tendencies to repeat our mistakes”.

Adele was also involved in another of the night’s more memorable moments, performing a tribute to George Michael, which she halted and restarted when it didn’t go as planned. A minute into her slow-paced cover of Michael’s ‘Fastlove’ she fluffed a note, stopped and told the audience “I’m sorry, I can’t mess this up for him”, before restarting the performance.

Lady Gaga and Metallica didn’t get to stop their performance of the latter’s single ‘Moth Into Flame’, despite frontman James Hetfield’s microphone not working. He eventually moved to share a mic with Gaga, but was visibly displeased by the end.

Those accusations of irrelevance though. Those just won’t go away, will they? It’s a pitfall of any major awards event, but they have increasingly dogged the Grammys in recent years. And with various major artists sitting out the event yesterday, including Kanye West, Drake, Justin Bieber and Frank Ocean, they were only fuelled further this year.

One attempt to bring the event up to speed with 2017 was to allow self-releasing artists and streaming-only albums to be considered for awards. Many saw this as a way to allow Chance The Rapper and his ‘Coloring Book’ album to receive nominations. It certainly paid off, because he won three trophies in the end – Best Rap Performance for ‘No Problem’, Best Rap Album for ‘Coloring Book’, and Best New Artist.

Chance also turned in one of the best performances of the night, playing gospel versions of ‘How Great’ and ‘All We Got’.

A lot more than all that happened, but it’s a very long show. There were 20 performances in all. Twenty! Which meant there was only time to give out nine of the 84 total awards at the main show. You can see all the winners here.