When Raye is so spectacularly successful in The Brits 2024 it leads me to wonder whether she will also dominate The Grammys. I doubt it. I fear it means that so little decent music and talent is being nurtured and made in the UK. That was the case in the 1950s and early 1960s. It was all America - Sinatra, Presley and great American pop.
Thanks to The Beatles, pirate radio and Top of the Pops, we Brits took over in the mid 1960s and dominated the globe for decades. It was a great time creatively for British talent and for the UK Treasury.
We started to decine in the 1990s. BritPop meant very little globally. Oasis and Blur were less significant than Who Let The Dogs Out and I Get Knocked Down But I Get Up Again.
I knew exactly what was going wrong and planned to change it in this Century as I became, in 2000, Global Chairman of EMI Records with ambitions such as forming music sales and digital distribution companies under EMI (Apple did that later with iTunes) and radio and TV online stations (like You Tube later became).
That never happened. I never became EMI boss.
So British music has now reverted to a similar state to when I had my first hit in 1965.
Not that Taylor Swift is much better than Raye - it's become a global problem.
But as you watch (and listen to) The Brits, think about that.
Why did Raye win 6 awards? Because there's nothing else around.

Of course it could be that now I'm 79 I no longer understand mass appeal music. The mass has changed. And it was the first time I actually could not watch The Brits.

Interesting - no comments but loads of spam as usual.

It's heinous that programmes such the Brits are shunted off from prime-time viewing and made difficult to find, or watch, for Joe Public. Its depriving we public scattered fart and wide of knowledge, information & entertainment but making life hard for the new artists. Spreading the message of the UK's creativity can boost our overseas trade too - maybe the BPI should be pressing for this, rather than holding their usual series of self-congratulatory dinners?