Brits viewers say Ofcom 'will be getting a lot' just minutes into show after Sabrina Carpenter opens awards
American pop superstar Sabrina Carpenter opened this year's Brit Awards with a very British, and very sexy performance of some of her biggest hits. Sabrina took to the stage in a sexier version of a King's Guard outfit to perform a medley of Espresso and Bed Chem.
The stage was lit up with a Union Jack before a group of dancers dressed up The King's Guard emerged as she started singing the smash hit Espresso. For the second song, Sabrina then took to a pink heart-shaped to perform Bed Chem in lingerie.
There was plenty of sexy and suggestive choreography and viewers were quick to head to social media to share their thoughts. Reacting to a moment where Sabrina disappeared off camera while one of the King's Guards winked, one fan said: "Ofcom is gonna be getting lots of complaints tonight."
READ MORE: Brit Awards 2025 live: What time is it on TV, award winners and more as it happens
READ MORE: Oscar-nominated band Kneecap added to sold out Green Man - and here's how you still can get tickets
Ofcom is gonna be getting lots of complaints tonight #BRITs2025 pic.twitter.com/5zHTOiFoHZ
— Charlie Watts (@char1iewatts) March 1, 2025
Another agreed: "I love Sabrina so much cos I can see the British public reporting this to ofcom immediately #BRITs2025." One fan also joked: "All the people who haven't heard of Sabrina and Bed Chem writing to The Daily Mail."
All the people who haven't heard of Sabrina and Bed Chem writing to The Daily Mail #BRITs2025 pic.twitter.com/aWYJNcByj6
— Matt Sheriff (@i71Sheriff) March 1, 2025
A fourth person added on X: "she had two minutes and she's successfully triggered the middle aged! well done sabrina love you always."
However, others were less impressed. One wrote: "Well this is just an awkward watch sat with the parents." Another added: "Bit inappropriate for an awards show…."
Get all the up-to-date news from the Brits 2025 ceremony on our live blog now.
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Atlantic
an hour ago
- Atlantic
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.'
The Verge
an hour ago
- The Verge
Would you switch browsers for a chatbot?
Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 87, your guide to the best and Verge -iest stuff in the world. (If you're new here, welcome, happy It's Officially Too Hot Now Week, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, I've been reading about Sabrina Carpenter and Khaby Lame and intimacy coordinators, finally making a dent in Barbarians at the Gate, watching all the Ben Schwartz and Friends I can find on YouTube, planning my days with the new Finalist beta, recklessly installing all the Apple developer betas after WWDC, thoroughly enjoying Dakota Johnson's current press tour, and trying to clear all my inboxes before I go on parental leave. It's… going. I also have for you a much-awaited new browser, a surprise update to a great photo editor, a neat trailer for a meh-looking movie, a classic Steve Jobs speech, and much more. Slightly shorter issue this week, sorry; there's just a lot going on, but I didn't want to leave y'all hanging entirely. Oh, and: we'll be off next week, for Juneteenth, vacation, and general summer chaos reasons. We'll be back in full force after that, though! Let's get into it. (As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What do you want to know more about? What awesome tricks do you know that everyone else should? What app should everyone be using? Tell me everything: installer@ And if you know someone else who might enjoy Installer, forward it to them and tell them to subscribe here.) The Drop Dia. I know there are a lot of Arc fans here in the Installerverse, and I know you, like me, will have a lot of feelings about the company's new and extremely AI-focused browser. Personally, I don't see leaving Arc anytime soon, but there are some really fascinating ideas (and nice design touches) in Dia already. Snapseed 3.0. I completely forgot Snapseed even existed, and now here's a really nice update with a bunch of new editing tools and a nice new redesign! As straightforward photo editors go, this is one of the better ones. The new version is only on iOS right now, but I assume it's heading to Android shortly. ' I Tried To Make Something In America.' I was first turned onto the story of the Smarter Scrubber by a great Search Engine episode, and this is a great companion to the story about what it really takes to bring manufacturing back to the US. And why it's hard to justify. The F1 haptic trailer. That link, and the trailer, will only do anything for you if you have a newer iPhone. But even if you don't care about the movie, the trailer — which actually buzzes in sync with the car's rumbles and revs — is just really, really cool. Android 16. You can't get the cool, colorful new look just yet or the desktop mode I am extremely excited about — there's a lot of good stuff in Android 16 but most of it is coming later. Still, Live Updates look good, and there's some helpful accessibility stuff, as well. The Infinite Machine Olto. I am such a sucker for any kind of futuristic-looking electric scooter, and this one really hits the sweet spot. Part moped, part e-bike, all Blade Runner vibes. If it wasn't $3,500, then I would've probably ordered one already. The Fujifilm X-E5. I kept wondering why Fujifilm didn't just make, like, a hundred different great-looking cameras at every imaginable price because everyone wants a camera this cool. Well, here we are! It's a spin on the X100VI but with interchangeable lenses and a few power-user features. All my photographer friends are going to want this. Call Her Alex. I confess I'm no Call Her Daddy diehard, but I found this two-part doc on Alex Cooper really interesting. Cooper's story is all about understanding people, the internet, and what it means to feel connected now. It's all very low-stakes and somehow also existential? It's only two parts, you should watch it. ' Steve Jobs - 2005 Stanford Commencement Address.' For the 20th anniversary of Jobs' famous (and genuinely fabulous) speech, the Steve Jobs Archive put together a big package of stories, notes, and other materials around the speech. Plus, a newly high-def version of the video. This one's always worth the 15 minutes. Dune: Awakening. Dune has ascended to the rare territory of 'I will check out anything from this franchise, ever, no questions asked.' This game is big on open-world survival and ornithopters, too, so it's even more my kind of thing. And it's apparently punishingly difficult in spots. Crowdsourced Here's what the Installer community is into this week. I want to know what you're into right now as well! Email installer@ or message me on Signal — @davidpierce.11 — with your recommendations for anything and everything, and we'll feature some of our favorites here every week. For even more great recommendations, check out the replies to this post on Threads and this post on Bluesky. 'I had tried the paper planner in the leather Paper Republic journal but since have moved onto the Remarkable Paper Pro color e-ink device which takes everything you like about paper but makes it editable and color coded. Combine this with a Remarkable planner in PDF format off of Etsy and you are golden.' — Jason 'I started reading a manga series from content creator Cory Kenshin called Monsters We Make. So far, I love it. Already preordered Vol. 2.' — Rob 'I recently went down the third party controller rabbit hole after my trusty adapted Xbox One controller finally kicked the bucket, and I wanted something I could use across my PC, phone, handheld, Switch, etc. I've been playing with the GameSir Cyclone 2 for a few weeks, and it feels really deluxe. The thumbsticks are impossibly smooth and accurate thanks to its TMR joysticks. The face buttons took a second for my brain to adjust to; the short travel distance initially registered as mushy, but once I stopped trying to pound the buttons like I was at the arcade, I found the subtle mechanical click super satisfying.' — Sam 'The Apple TV Plus miniseries Long Way Home. It's Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman's fourth Long Way series. This time they are touring some European countries on vintage bikes that they fixed, and it's such a light-hearted show from two really down to earth humans. Connecting with other people in different cultures and seeing their journey is such a treat!' — Esmael 'Podcast recommendation: Devil and the Deep Blue Sea by Christianity Today. A deep dive into the Satanic Panic of the 80's and 90's.' — Drew ' Splatoon 3 (the free Switch 2 update) and the new How to Train Your Dragon.' — Aaron 'I can't put Mario Kart World down. When I get tired of the intense Knockout Tour mode I go to Free Roam and try to knock out P-Switch challenges, some of which are really tough! I'm obsessed.' — Dave ' Fable, a cool app for finding books with virtual book clubs. It's the closest to a more cozy online bookstore with more honest reviews. I just wish you could click on the author's name to see their other books.' — Astrid 'This is the Summer Games Fest week (formerly E3, RIP) and there are a TON of game demos to try out on Steam. One that has caught my attention / play time the most is Wildgate. It's a team based spaceship shooter where ship crews battle and try to escape with a powerful artifact.' — Sean ' Battlefront 2 is back for some reason. Still looks great.' — Ian Signing off I have long been fascinated by weather forecasting. I recommend Andrew Blum's book, The Weather Machine, to people all the time, as a way to understand both how we learned to predict the weather and why it's a literally culture-changing thing to be able to do so. And if you want to make yourself so, so angry, there's a whole chunk of Michael Lewis's book, The Fifth Risk, about how a bunch of companies managed to basically privatize forecasts… based on government data. The weather is a huge business, an extremely powerful political force, and even more important to our way of life than we realize. And we're really good at predicting the weather! I've also been hearing for years that weather forecasting is a perfect use for AI. It's all about vast quantities of historical data, tiny fluctuations in readings, and finding patterns that often don't want to be found. So, of course, as soon as I read my colleague Justine Calma's story about a new Google project called Weather Lab, I spent the next hour poking through the data to see how well DeepMind managed to predict and track recent storms. It's deeply wonky stuff, but it's cool to see Big Tech trying to figure out Mother Nature — and almost getting it right. Almost.
Atlantic
2 hours ago
- Atlantic
Six Weekend Stories
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Spend time with six reads about Carl Jung's five pillars of a good life, an infamous escape artist, Donald Trump's right-hand man, and more. Jung's Five Pillars of a Good Life The great Swiss psychoanalyst left us a surprisingly practical guide to being happier. By Arthur C. Brooks The Escape Artist West Virginia frat boy, hippie expatriate, big-time drug dealer, prison escapee, millionaire mortgage broker—Jim Sargent was many things before he arrived in the idyllic Hawaiian town of Hawi and established himself as a civic leader. But it was only a matter of time before his troubled past would catch up with him. (From 2014) By John Wolfson Trump's Right-Hand Troll Stephen Miller once tormented liberals at Duke. Now the president's speechwriter and immigration enforcer is deploying the art of provocation from the White House. (From 2018) By McKay Coppins What Happened to American Childhood? Too many kids show worrying signs of fragility from a very young age. Here's what we can do about it. (From 2020) By Kate Julian So, What Did I Miss? 'How much can possibly happen when I'm on parental leave?' Alexandra Petri said five months ago. By Alexandra Petri The Power of One Push-Up Several simple ways of measuring a person's health might matter more than body weight. (From 2019) By James Hamblin The Week Ahead 28 Years Later, a sequel to the apocalypse movie 28 Weeks Later (in theaters Friday) Season 2 of America's Sweethearts: Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, a docuseries about a group of women who hope to land a spot on the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders (premieres Wednesday on Netflix) The Genius Myth, a book by Atlantic staff writer Helen Lewis that challenges assumptions about what 'greatness' entails (out Tuesday) Essay The Father-Daughter Routine That Transformed Our Family Life By Jordan Michelman Conceptually, what my family has come to call 'Dad-urday' grew out of a common parenting-duo problem: Sometimes, even though my wife and I believe in sharing household duties equally, one person will end up doing more kid-related labor than the other. This, I will admit (with some discomfort and guilt), fairly accurately depicts my family situation. Although I do parent throughout the week, I travel a lot for work, which means my wife has had to take on many an early morning alone. More in Culture Catch Up on The Atlantic Tom Nichols: Israel's bold, risky attack A parade of ignorance Stephen Miller triggers Los Angeles. Photo Album Take a look at these photos of the week showing a camel bath, protests in California, a rescue operation in the Mediterranean, and more.
