May 4th, 2007 at 11:30 by Stuart Heritage
The Classical Brit awards took place last night - they re much like the pop Brits only Joss Stone isn t around to ramble incoherently and Lauren Laverne isn t contractually obliged to describe a phoned-in, off-key Oasis set as amazing.
They re not the only differences between the Classical Brits and the pop Brits, though - the Classical Brits are unique in that they re the only Brits ceremony that still think Paul McCartney is any good at making music. Paul McCartney s classical, partly Latin oratorio for his dead wife Linda entitled Ecce Cor Meum won the Best Album award at last night s Classical Brits, a choice that some critics are deriding as pandering to celebrity culture.
To those people we say just be thankful that Sting didn t win anything, you dusty old bastard.
Let s call it The Curse Of The Bassist. Inevitably, when a bassist has spent enough time hitting the four same bass strings over and over again while all the girls look at the singer, they re going to want to prove themselves.
Tragically, most of them seem to want to do this by wanking up a pretentious slab of classical music to make them look cleverer and more deep than they actually are.
Last year Roger Waters from Pink Floyd decided to set the standard by winning a Classical Brit for an opera he cruelly decided to subject people to and, eager to maximise on this win, two other bassists decided that they d give this bloody classical thing a go this year too.
That s why both this year; Paul McCartney for his hour-long oratorio for his dead wife Linda and Sting for his abominably bad collection of godawful Elizabethan lute songs that he inexplicably chose to sing like someone was trying to push a length of plastic tubing into his throat during the recording sessions.
And the good news - well, the marginally better news anyway - is that Paul McCartney won the Best Album Classical Brit, allowing him to do his aw shucks, you really like little old billion-selling millionaire megastar me? shtick for the first time in a few years. The Independent reports:
Picking up his award, Sir Paul said: It s such a huge honour for me to get this.
If you d told me as a kid in Liverpool that I would be at the Royal Albert Hall picking up an award I would not have believed you. How proud would my mum and dad have been if they had known this could happen?
Although the classical music purists have dismissed Ecce Cor Meum as easy listening soup, winning a Classical Brit means that Paul McCartney is at once both validated as a classical artist and able to forget that he s being divorced by a one-legged woman who .
Paul McCartney wasn t the only winner at the Classical Brits last night, but he was the only one you ll have heard of, so we won t bother telling you the others.
Plus, Paul McCartney winning a Classical Brit means that Sting didn t get the chance to. While Sting might have temporarily been upset that his unspeakably pretentious 16th Century masturbatolute album Songs From The Labyrinth didn t win the award, thus depriving him of another chance to take his shirt off and aim his nipples at various appalled pensioners, we re sure that Sting can return to , think about all the money he ll make from and sit back safe in the knowledge that - by - he s already obliterated the Classical Brits in terms of pretention anyway.
So our sincerest congratulations go to Paul McCartney for winning a Classical Brit award - and for also making the first classical album ever that says I didn t fucking stab you in the arm you one-legged bastard when you play it backwards. True story.
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