Kendrick, Timberlake, Stormzy, Dua Lipa and more – every Brits 2018 performance rated

Justin Timberlake

The last time Timberlake played the Brits was in 2013, he came promoting a critically derided new album with a handful of kick-ass singles, so this should feel like Groundhog Day. He comes primed for big-stage performance after his Super Bowl show a couple of weeks back, a pop mashup that was almost avant garde in its insane complexity (or maybe just a bit of a mess) – he didn’t actually seem to do much singing, choosing instead to make occasional personal trainer “hup!” noises and bounding around like a funky televangelist. So what do we have here?

He begins here with Midnight Summer Jam, which takes Bruno Mars’s “shameless disco pastiche” baton and runs it into his own comfort zone – this is classic Timberlake: light, unthreateningly sexy and nimble of foot. He pulls the tempo down, triggers some live vocal samples (hey, people like it when Ed Sheeran uses his loop pedal, right?) before bringing on country star Chris Stapleton for their duet Say Something. This is the cornerstone of the plaid-wearing “woods” bits of his album Man of the Woods – and while the wheel remains very much round and turn-y, it’s sturdy and satisfyingly harmonised. As noted last year, during the 1975’s performance, soulful white performers will bring out a gospel choir at the Brits on a hair trigger and so it proves here, but it works. If this is going to be soulful, dignified, emotive Brits to match the Time’s Up protests, then it’s a good basis to build off.

Rag’n’Bone Man

Last year’s Critics’ Choice award winner, Rag’n’Bone Man, duets with this year’s, Jorja Smith, in an autocratic vision of music industry synergy. After three years of reliably predicting which tremulously emotional white man would be clutched to the bosoms of Asda album buyers (Tom Odell, Sam Smith, James Bay), there was a wobble in 2016 when the tremulously emotional white man Jack Garratt became as culturally relevant as a blacked-up morris dancer. The Brits don’t want that to happen again, so the phenomenally successful Rag’n’Bone Man is being used as a kind of Trojan bear to smuggle Jorja Smith into the consciousness of the ITV faithful.

Rag’n’Bone Man begins with a very stark version of Skin, backed just by piano – a format that of course delivered major chills via Adele when she famously performed Someone Like You here in 2011. Smith arrives, and adds some hickory smoke to the campfire song. There’s some admirably delicate falsetto from Mr N Bone Man as a brass section swells behind him, flames lick up the set and a full band kicks in. Smith acquits herself well but certainly doesn’t upstage her Critics’ Choice forbear, who gives a typically robust performance. Makes you wonder, paired with that Justin performance: is this going to be the moodiest, woodsiest Brits ever?

Dua Lipa

A couple of years ago, there was a sense that Dua Lipa was like the word “fetch” in Mean Girls – ie just not going to happen. After her third single, Mwah, barely scraped the Top 30, I was sure I could hear knives being sharpened in the Warner Bros kitchens. But then Scared to be Lonely arrived, followed by New Rules, giving jilted lovers an entire mope-to-sass axis to work through, and she went supernova. Her aesthetic – as if the creative directors of Missguided, Pretty Little Thing and BooHoo teamed up Avengers-style to make the most zeitgeist-pretty look possible – helped.

She’s performing – what else? – New Rules, dressed like a sexy Moschino-coveting toreador and backed by a small army of female relationship advisers. She stalks her way through a series of neon-hued, no-fucks-given tableaux on the way to breakup nirvana, and, given the song trades in her stronger, deeper register, her performance is utterly assured. If this doesn’t win single of the year then we’re getting some placards made up.

Ed Sheeran

Britain’s biggest pop star continues to be a confounding figure, impossible to truly hate or love – he has more pros and cons than an oversubscribed prison. On the pro side: everyman charm, nifty with a loop pedal, Thinking Out Loud being actually a really nice choice for a first dance at a wedding, and Shape of You even though I never need to hear it again. On the con side: being a glamour vacuum, the creepiness of casting too-attractive women in his videos who definitely aren’t his childhood sweetheart, and a sense that he would make Balinese gamelan instrumentals if it meant he opened up a lucrative Balinese gamelan market and got the Balinese gamelan Christmas No 1. So which side does this performance of Supermarket Flowers fall?

Well, it’s a song about his dead nan, so not even this jaded hack can lay into him too much. It is a pretty rote ballad, but then again some of the best ballads are, and for every person that the “You were an angel in the shape of my mum” lyric nauseates, another will be reduced to helpless blubbing. And Sheeran’s detail (“John says he’d drive then put his hand on my cheek”) is the kind of thing that lifts up this from generic emotional manipulation. Not half as bold as his performance last year, but after selling as many albums as he has, he’s earned a little rest on his laurels.

Foo Fighters

Foo Fighters are a weird band to be playing, because despite them having won four Brits (including one tonight), gone many times platinum and being able to headline any festival on the planet (even some really weird electronic one because everyone ultimately quite likes Dave Grohl), they haven’t written a really big tune since The Pretender, and that was more than a decade ago. What are they even going to play?

The answer is The Sky is a Neighbourhood, performed in a recreation of the song’s video where the band perch atop a house – it was written after Dave Grohl watched a Neil deGrasse Tyson documentary and wanted to write a song about “when you look up at the night sky, you realise that you’re not only part of the universe, but the universe is part of us”. Stop hogging that reefer, Grohl! It’s big, chugging soulful blues-rock, but is it likely to ever break the top half of a best-of? Probs not, but they still bring a measure of rawk gravitas.

Liam Gallagher

Ariana Grande was due to anchor a tribute to the victims of the Manchester Arena terror attack, but pulled out on doctor’s orders, so Liam Gallagher took her place. The same Liam Gallagher that told this paper earlier this week, re the Brits: “They can fuck off if they think I’m going to go there and clap some fucking idiot … Get down there with your little fucking suit on and put your arm around Stormzy and Rag’n’Bone Man, do all this bollocks? That ain’t me, mate.” Well, even Liam, whose ego has its own magnetic field, isn’t above swallowing those words for people from his home city.

The lyrics, of wanting to live and not wanting to die, are painfully poignant, especially set again a spartan acoustic backing. “Now is not the time to cry, now’s the time to find out why” – a fitting note of defiance, even political fervour, and of course the title lyric is wretchedly fitting: the people who lost their lives in Manchester will live forever in the minds of those who knew them. I can’t remember hearing such a raw, unadorned Liam Gallagher performance. He stalks off stage in classic loping style, having delivered a perfect, anti-sentimental tribute.

Sam Smith

Singing through the feathers, he’s perhaps spitting at being rather overlooked here – though he is still, Rag’n’Bone Man-style, eligible for next year’s awards – Sam Smith delivers Too Good for Goodbyes. This is his masterpiece thus far – wryly catty at himself, his top line has the kind of circuitous, searching melody that returns with absolute logic to its starting point, perfectly clear-eyed in his own romantic self-destruction. His slight lisp is his secret timbral weapon, and he can’t help a little swagger as he strides out; on his own, marooned from his backing singers, he still manages to completely command this vast stage. He encourages the crowd to clap on beat, something I generally think destroys the song in question, but here he turns it into a far more powerful gospel moment than Justin Timberlake did with a massive choir earlier on. Underrated – though unlikely to be remembered amid the melee of next year’s pop.

Kendrick Lamar

Tonight’s surprise guests arrives amid a European tour that is frankly incredible, where vituperative broadsides against police brutality are paired with films of him achieving karmic alignment inside a glowing vagina. There seems to be a false start with his performance – and maybe a second and third one – as he begins a rendition of Feel lying above a Lamborghini in a glass case. Ironic wolf whistles sound around the arena, but it coheres eventually.

“This is another satire by Kendrick Lamar” reads the screen, as he segues into a performance of his verse from Rich the Kid’s New Freezer, with cheerleaders filing on to do the track’s viral dance craze. (If you want to do it at home, adopt the neck motion of an aggressively inquisitive, sass-talking ostrich and brace for the whiplash.) Inside the box, Rich the Kid smashes up the Lambo with a baseball bat. Well, what is it a satire of? The relentless covetousness of rap? Perhaps. Whatever it is, Kendrick just raised brows everywhere – those in the crowd, those watching at home, and the Brits as a whole from middle to high.

Rita Ora

There was a worry that thanks to spreading herself across TV, film and music, Rita Ora would never excel at any of them, and instead be mere eye candy for time-poor gossip columnists – a snack of all trades, if you will. But happily, she guested on the only good Avicii single ever, and released Anywhere, which is like a tropical house version of a forgotten Sound of Music song – ie pair it with a jug of woo-woo and all is well in the world.

She performs it after a brief blast of Your Song, dressed in a white tracksuit, perched on a pink geometric stage whose designer has just maybe, just maybe seen Solange’s live tour. Songs with choruses that don’t feature the singer doing any actual singing are a bit dangerous live, but Ora is enough of a pro by now to command the audience with a well-placed hair flick. Finally in the megamix is For You, her Fifty Shades duet with Liam Payne, which on paper is an economy-class version of Zayn and Taylor’s preceding soundtrack effort, on record is something Emeli Sandé rejected for being too Emeli Sandé, but at the Brits is surprisingly heartfelt and head-rushing. Maybe it’s the Kronenbourg I’m drinking at my desk? Her new single Proud, a return to her earlier, defiantly B-list roots, is rather conspicuous by its absence.

Stormzy

Last year, he debuted the really rather good Shape of You remix with Ed Sheeran. This year, it’s time for the man they call The Problem, Stiff Chocolate, Wicked Skengman, or – if you’re even a little bit white – just plain Stormzy, to take to the stage himself. He does so under pouring rain to deliver Blinded By Your Grace Pt 2, backed by a gospel choir – the second of the evening! Stormzy’s though, dressed in the balaclavas of his album cover, is just that little bit gnarlier than Justin Timberlake’s.

Then comes perhaps the most electric segment of the entire show, as he strips off his soaked top and delivers a freestyle that both revels in “black girl magic” and Daniel Kaluuya’s Bafta win, and savages the Daily Mail and Theresa May over Grenfell. He swings the anger into a ferocious Big for Your Boots, stalking around the stage with pent-up rage bursting out in kettle-whistles of steam, rounding off the Brits with a blast of pure energy.