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Artist News Awards
BRIT Awards winners to be given two trophies for each award
By Andy Malt | Published on Wednesday 28 April 2021
Everyone likes to get a little extra something for free, don’t they? So it’s good news for BRITs winners this year, who will get 1/3 extra free on their prize. By which I mean, all award recipients next month will get a smaller trophy to go alongside their full-sized one. Although, they will be expected to give it away, so they shouldn’t get too attached to the freebie.
The two trophies – the big one and the small one – have been designed by visual artists Es Devlin and Yinka Ilori, who seemingly took at face value the number of musicians who get up on awards stages and say that they wish they could share their prize with someone else.
At the 2017 Grammys, Adele literally snapped her Album Of The Year award in two and in order to give half of it to Beyonce. But from now on (well, at the BRITs this year, at least) there will be no need to cause any trophy damage, as every winner will get a second trophy to give away to someone else.
“Yinka and I thought that the best award that one could receive would be agency to award another”, says Devlin. “Each recipient is invited to award the second trophy to someone they consider worthy – it might be recognition – or it might be someone that does something entirely unrelated to music”.
Ilori adds: “The idea came from the experience of lockdown, where your neighbour you’ve lived beside for six years and never say hello to suddenly gave you flowers, foods, acts of kindness. I wanted to capture that. I would describe it as two artists from different disciplines, different inspirations, coming together to design a trophy based around the idea of giving something back – acts of kindness”.
I don’t know what to think about this. CMU convention would probably dictate that I should call it the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard of in all of history. But then maybe it’s… nice? I mean, it’ll be interesting to see who the mini-trophies get given to. That’ll probably tell you something about the winning artists too, which might be fun. It does have the potential to make acceptance speeches drag on even further though, which would not be fun.
The BRITs audience this year, of course, will largely be made up of key workers taking part in a government pilot programme testing the safety of largescale events. Will someone try to give a little trophy to a nurse? Or an Amazon driver?
Alternatively, will there be an obvious snub for a key collaborator? Will anyone just keep both trophies for themselves? Will someone give a trophy to one of their bandmates, thus revealing an awkward power dynamic that already threatens to tear the band apart? See? It could be fun!
We’ll get to see if this is super fun or a terrible terrible idea when the ceremony takes place on 11 May. You can have a look at the two trophies here.
