Brit Awards viewers say they 'love to see it' as Paloma Faith makes unscripted remark on stage
Fans have shown support for Paloma Faith after she made an unscripted remark on the Brit awards stage.
The British singer called out the US President Donald Trump and his American voters before she presented the Brit award for best dance act to Charli XCX.
As the 43-year-old praised the voters of the Brit awards, she 'threw shade' at American voters for making the 'wrong' choice – appearing to slam President Donald Trump in front of the live audience at the O2 in London.
READ MORE: 'We're going to lose our home because of what we've been doing for 23 years'
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Viewers took to X, formerly known as X, to react to her comment. One viewer said: "Paloma Faith calling out Trump supporters? we love to see it! #thebrits #BRITs"
Others echoed the sentiment, writing, "Paloma Faith saying the American voters got it wrong love her #brits2025" while another added "Paloma digging Trump is honestly wonderful #BRITs #BRITs2025"
Some viewers were shocked by the remarks, with one viewer writing: "Paloma Faith throwing shade at Trump voters was not on my bingo card. #BRITs2025"
Collecting her second award of the night, the British singer-songwriter Charlie XCX thanked her producers AG Cook, Finn Keane and George Daniel who worked on her hit 2024 album Brat, joking: 'I wouldn't be up here without these three straight white men.'
However, some people didn't welcome the pair's seemingly political comments. One viewer wrote on X: "Trust Paloma Faith to bring politics into it and Charli XCX to bring "straight white men" into it. Bore off man, this is a music show"
Another wrote: "Paloma Faith being cringe af. Nobody cares about your political opinions, just announce the winner ffs"
The BRITS Awards 2025 marks the 45th edition of the ceremony, celebrating the best in British and international music for 2024. Comedian and TV presenter Jack Whitehall returns to host the event for the fifth time, after first taking the reigns in 2018.
English singer Charli XCX was up for the most BRIT awards, being nominated for five different awards, including the highly coveted British Album of the Year award for her hit album Brat. Charli XCX has won Songwriter of the Year, following the album's massive success since its release in June 2024.
The awards are being broadcast live from The O2 Arena in London, featuring performances from Sabrina Carpenter, Sam Fender, Jade, The Last Dinner Party, Myles Smith, Teddy Swims and Lola Young. On February 23, it was revealed via Shaboozey's Instagram Story that, due to circumstances beyond his control, he will no longer be able to perform at the awards.
The Brits take place just one day before the iconic Academy Awards, celebrating the achievements in film from the past year.
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Politico
28 minutes ago
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Death toll grows as Israel and Iran trade attacks for third day
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Atlantic
an hour ago
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When Mick Jagger Met the King of Zydeco
The story I'd heard was that Mick Jagger bought his first Clifton Chenier record in the late 1960s, at a store in New York's Greenwich Village. But when we talked this spring, Jagger told me he didn't do his record shopping in the Village. It would have been Colony Records in Midtown, he said, 'the biggest record store in New York, and it had the best selection.' Jagger was in his 20s, not far removed from a suburban-London boyhood spent steeping in the American blues. I pictured him eagerly leafing through Chess Records LPs and J&M 45s until he came across a chocolate-brown 12-inch record—Chenier's 1967 album Bon Ton Roulet! On the cover, a young Chenier holds a 25-pound accordion the length of his torso, a big, mischievous smile on his face. Bon Ton Roulet! is a classic zydeco album showcasing the Creole dance music of Southwest Louisiana, which blends traditional French music, Caribbean rhythms, and American R&B. This was different from the Delta and Chicago blues that Jagger and his Rolling Stones bandmates had grown up with and emulated on their own records. Although sometimes taking the form of slower French waltzes, zydeco is more up-tempo—it's party music—and features the accordion and the rubboard, a washboard hooked over the shoulders and hung across the body like a vest. Until he discovered zydeco, Jagger recalled, 'I'd never heard the accordion in the blues before.' Chenier was born in 1925 in Opelousas, Louisiana, the son of a sharecropper and accordion player named Joseph Chenier, who taught his son the basics of the instrument. Clifton's older brother, Cleveland, played the washboard and later the rubboard. Clifton had commissioned an early prototype of the rubboard in the 1940s from a metalworker in Port Arthur, Texas, where he illustrated his vision by drawing the design in the dirt, creating one of a handful of instruments native to the United States and forever changing the percussive sound of Creole music. Within a few years, the brothers were performing at impromptu house dances in Louisiana living rooms. They'd begin playing on the porch until a crowd assembled, then go inside, pushing furniture against the walls to create a makeshift dance hall. Eventually, they worked their way through the chitlin circuit, a network of venues for Black performers and audiences. They played Louisiana dance halls where the ceilings hung so low that Cleveland could push his left hand flat to the ceiling to stretch his back out without ever breaking the rhythm of what he was playing with his right. Influenced by rock-and-roll pioneers such as Fats Domino, Chenier incorporated new elements into his music. As he told one interviewer, 'I put a little rock into this French music.' With the help of Lightnin' Hopkins, a cousin by marriage, Chenier signed a deal with Arhoolie Records. By the late '60s, he and his band were regularly playing tours that stretched across the country, despite the insistence from segregationist promoters that zydeco was a Black sound for Black audiences. He started playing churches and festivals on the East and West Coasts, where people who'd never heard the word zydeco were awestruck by Chenier: He'd often arrive onstage in a cape and a velvet crown with bulky costume jewels set in its arches. Chenier came to be known as the King of Zydeco. He toured Europe; won a Grammy for his 1982 album, I'm Here! ; performed at Carnegie Hall and in Ronald Reagan's White House; won a National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He died in 1987, at age 62. This fall, the Smithsonian's preservation-focused Folkways Recordings will release the definitive collection of Chenier's work: a sprawling box set, 67 tracks in all. And in June, to mark the centennial of Chenier's birth, the Louisiana-based Valcour Records released a compilation on which musicians who were inspired by Chenier contributed covers of his songs. These include the blues artist Taj Mahal, the singer-songwriter Lucinda Williams, the folk troubadour Steve Earle, and the rock band the Rolling Stones. In 1978, Jagger met Chenier, thanks to a musician and visual artist named Richard Landry. Landry grew up on a pecan farm in Cecilia, Louisiana, not far from Opelousas. In 1969, he moved to New York and met Philip Glass, becoming a founding member of the Philip Glass Ensemble, in which he played saxophone. To pay the bills between performances, the two men also started a plumbing business. Eventually, the ensemble was booking enough gigs that they gave up plumbing. Landry also embarked on a successful visual-art career, photographing contemporaries such as Richard Serra and William S. Burroughs and premiering his work at the Leo Castelli Gallery. He still got back to Louisiana, though, and he'd occasionally sit in with Chenier and his band. (After Landry proved his chops the first time they played together, Chenier affectionately described him as 'that white boy from Cecilia who can play the zydeco.') Landry became a kind of cultural conduit—a link between the avant-garde scene of the North and the Cajun and Creole cultures of the South. From the July 1987 issue: Cajun and Creole bands are conserving native music Landry is an old friend; we met more than a decade ago in New Orleans. Sitting in his apartment in Lafayette recently, he told me the story of the night he introduced Jagger to Chenier. As Landry remembers it, he first met Jagger at a Los Angeles house party following a Philip Glass Ensemble performance at the Whisky a Go Go. The next night, as luck would have it, he saw Jagger again, this time out at a restaurant, and they got to talking. At some point in the conversation, 'Jagger goes, 'Your accent. Where are you from?' I said, 'I'm from South Louisiana.' He blurts out, 'Clifton Chenier, the best band I ever heard, and I'd like to hear him again.' ' 'Dude, you're in luck,' he told Jagger. Chenier was playing a show at a high school in Watts the following night. Landry called Chenier: 'Cliff, I'm bringing Mick Jagger tomorrow night.' Chenier responded, 'Who's that?' 'He's with the Rolling Stones,' Landry tried to explain. 'Oh yeah. That magazine. They did an article on me.' It seems the Rolling Stones had yet to make an impression on Chenier, but his music had clearly influenced the band, and not just Jagger. The previous year, Rolling Stone had published a feature on the Stones' guitarist Ronnie Wood. In one scene, Wood and Keith Richards convene a 3 a.m. jam session at the New York studios of Atlantic Records. On equipment borrowed from Bruce Springsteen, they play 'Don't You Lie to Me'—first the Chuck Berry version, then 'Clifton Chenier's Zydeco interpretation,' as the article described it. Chenier was in Los Angeles playing what had become an annual show for the Creole community living in the city. The stage was set at the Verbum Dei Jesuit High School gymnasium, by the edge of the basketball court. Jagger was struck by the audience. 'They weren't dressing as other people of their age group,' he told me. 'The fashion was completely different. And of course, the dancing was different than you'd normally see in a big city.' The band was already performing by the time he and Landry arrived. When they walked in, one woman squinted in Jagger's direction, pausing in a moment of possible recognition, before changing her mind and turning away. Chenier was at center stage, thick gold rings lining his fingers as they moved across the black and white keys of his accordion, his name embossed in bold block type on its side. Cleveland stood beside him on the rubboard. Robert St. Julien was set up in the back behind a three-piece drum kit—just a bass drum, a snare, and a single cymbal, cracked from the hole in the center out to the very edge. Jagger took it all in, watching the crowd dance a two-step and thinking, ' Oh God, I'm going to have to dance. How am I going to do this dance that they're all doing? ' he recalled. 'But I managed somehow to fake it.' At intermission, a cluster of fans, speaking in excited bursts of Creole French, started moving toward the stage, holding out papers to be autographed. Landry and Jagger were standing nearby. Jagger braced himself, assuming that some of the fans might descend on him. But the crowd moved quickly past them, pressing toward Clifton and Cleveland Chenier. Before the night was over, Jagger himself had the chance to meet Clifton, but only said a quick hello. 'I just didn't want to hassle him or anything,' he told me. 'And I was just enjoying myself being one of the audience.' The next time Mick Jagger and Richard Landry crossed paths was May 3, 2024: the day after the Rolling Stones performed at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival. During their set, the Stones had asked the accordion player Dwayne Dopsie, a son of another zydeco artist, Rockin' Dopsie, to accompany the band on 'Let It Bleed.' A meal was set up at Antoine's, in the French Quarter, by a mutual friend, the musician and producer C. C. Adcock. Adcock had been working on plans for the Clifton Chenier centennial record for months and was well aware of Jagger's affection for zydeco. He waited until the meal was over, when everyone was saying their goodbyes, to mention the project to Jagger. 'And without hesitation,' Landry recalled, 'Mick said, 'I want to sing something.' ' As the final addition to the album lineup, the Stones were the last to choose which of Chenier's songs to record. Looking at the track listing, Jagger noticed that 'Zydeco Sont Pas Salé' hadn't been taken. 'Isn't that, like, the one?' Adcock recalls him saying. 'The one the whole genre is named after? If the Stones are gonna do one, shouldn't we do the one ?' The word zydeco is widely believed to have originated in the French phrase les haricots sont pas salés, which translates to 'The snap beans aren't salty.' Zydeco, according to this theory, is a Creole French pronunciation of les haricots. (The lyrical fragment likely comes from juré, the call-and-response music of Louisiana that predates zydeco; it shows up as early as 1934, on a recording of the singer Wilbur Shaw made in New Iberia, Louisiana.) Many interpretations of the phrase have been offered over the years. The most straightforward is that it's a metaphorical way of saying 'Times are tough.' When money ran short, people couldn't afford the salt meat that was traditionally cooked with snap beans to season them. The Stones' version of 'Zydeco Sont Pas Salé' opens with St. Julien, Chenier's longtime drummer, playing a backbeat with brushes. He's 77 now, no longer the young man Jagger saw in Watts in 1978. 'I quit playing music about 10 years ago, to tell the truth,' he said when we spoke this spring, but you wouldn't know it by how he sounds on the track. Keith Richards's guitar part, guttural and revving, meets St. Julien in the intro and builds steadily. The melody is introduced by the accordionist Steve Riley, of the Mamou Playboys, who told me he'd tried to 'play it like Clifton—you know, free-form, just from feel.' It's strange that it doesn't feel stranger when Jagger breaks into his vocal, sung in Creole French. His imitation of Chenier is at once spot-on yet unmistakably Jagger. From the May 1971 issue: Mick Jagger shoots birds I asked him how he'd honed his French pronunciation. 'I've actually tried to write songs in Cajun French before,' he said. 'But I've never really gotten anywhere.' To get 'Zydeco Sont Pas Salé' right, he became a student of the song. 'You just listen to what's been done before you,' he told me. 'See how they pronounce it, you know? I mean, yeah, of course it's different. And West Indian English is different from what they speak in London. I tried to do a job and I tried to do it in the way it was traditionally done—it would sound a bit silly in perfect French.' Zydeco united musical traditions from around the globe to become a defining sound for one of the most distinct cultures in America. Chenier, the accordionist in the velvet crown, then introduced zydeco to the world, influencing artists across genres. When I asked Jagger why, at age 81, he had decided to make this recording, he said, 'I think the music deserves to be known and the music deserves to be heard.' If the song helps new listeners discover Chenier—to have something like the experience Jagger had when he first dropped the needle on Bon Ton Roulet! —that would be a welcome result. But Jagger stressed that this wasn't the primary reason he'd covered 'Zydeco Sont Pas Salé.' Singing to St. Julien's beat, Jagger the rock star once again becomes Jagger the Clifton Chenier fan. 'My main thing is just that I personally like it. You know what I mean? That's my attraction,' he said. 'I think that I just did this for the love of it, really.'
San Francisco Chronicle
an hour ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
Forget the American flag. These are the flags to fly on July 4 to celebrate liberty
If you want to celebrate your independence this July 4, put your American flags away. Instead, fly a California flag. Or, even better, run up the banner of your county or municipality. The local level is where you stand the best chance of holding onto your liberty. Because the occupier of the White House never stops declaring that he, not we Californians, are the proper rulers of California. Violating law and the Constitution, President Donald Trump maintains that he can put the military in charge of Los Angeles, strip our schools of billions, tell our universities what to teach, impose tariffs on our businesses at his whim, overrule voter-approved environmental laws, deport our immigrant neighbors — even legal residents and U.S. citizens, take health care from our poor, claw back funds from our localities, steal billions from high-speed rail and even decide who gets to compete in high school track meets. It is altogether fitting and proper that Californians pull down the flag on the Fourth. Because Trump almost perfectly resembles the lawlessness of King George III that inspired the Declaration of Independence 249 years ago. The 'long train of abuses and usurpations' listed in the declaration are familiar today — 'he has refused his Assent to Laws … he has obstructed the Administration of Justice … For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world … He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.' Pulling down the U.S. flag would be even more powerful if California's governments did it, too. It also would be an act of defiance — not just of this new American dictatorship, but also of outdated 1953 state flags laws that unjustly paint California as subservient to the United States. Those flag laws say that both American and Californian flags must be displayed 'in all rooms where any court or any state, county, or municipal commission holds any sessions,' 'upon or in front of … each public building belonging to the State, a county, or a municipality' and 'at the entrance or upon the grounds or upon the administration building' of schools. And when both flags are used together, they must be of the same size — but with the American flag 'placed in the position of first honor,' according to Section 436. 'If only one flagpole is used, the National Flag shall be above the State Flag.' C.C. Marin, director of the Independent California Institute, encourages challenges to the custom of American flag supremacy and urges us just to fly the California flag instead. 'California's state flag is a powerful symbol of resistance and unity in the face of a cruel, lawless presidential administration,' Marin wrote recently. 'Flags remind us who's in charge. California is not and has never been a subsidiary of the federal government. … Voluntarily flying our own flag below the American flag is literally a symbol of inferiority and compliance.' Marin suggests that charter cities — which have their own constitutions, take the lead in pulling down American flags because they are exempt from flag laws. Special districts — governments that carry out a special duty, like running a hospital or a utility — also don't have to fly the American flag, Marin notes. For other jurisdictions, where the flag laws apply, Marin has suggestions. First, Californians could insist that state and local governments follow the flag law provisions that the American flag and the California flag must be the same size when they are flown together. That rule is violated in Sacramento, including at the Capitol, where the American flag is bigger than the California flag. Perhaps lawsuits could force compliance. Second, Californians and their governments should consider flying the American flag upside down — which is legal. Doing so is 'a signal of dire distress in instances of extreme danger to life or property,' according to the U.S. Flag Code. The nascent American dictator's military invasion of California obviously qualifies as extreme danger. On a personal note, I love flying flags outside my home, but I haven't decided what I'm doing for the Fourth. Right now, the Canadian flag is up (I value the True North as an ally, even though Trumpists don't), but I may switch to the California flag or the Los Angeles County flag. Or I might raise the Earth Flag, a half-century-old flag showing a photo of Earth taken during the Apollo missions. The flag expresses our planetary commitment to all living things, though I'd fly it in support of the democratically sovereign Humboldt County city of Arcata. Voters there approved Measure M to raise the Earth Flag above the U.S. flag in 2022. That measure is being challenged in court. Meanwhile, the Trump regime just sent out an order barring U.S. government institutions from flying 'activist' flags. Which makes flying the Earth Flag, or other banners of your choice, the perfect holiday expression of independence.
