Getting mad at awards is silly and childish, but also the BRITS are an absolute disgrace - Alexander Brown

Sometimes things happen and it’s only afterwards you realise your experience of it was wildly different to someone else.

Whether it is relationships, job interviews or even just a simple human interaction, what for you seemed to go well could turn out to have been hell for the other person.

My most acute recent memory of this was at Glastonbury, an event full of brilliant musicians, and also George Ezra.

Going in I didn’t really know what a George Ezra was, just that friends of mine enjoyed his work, which I’d only ever heard without realising.

Singer George Ezra. Picture: Getty Images

I was fairly sure he’d done a song about Budapest or Barcelona, only to learn later he’d done both, which is great because liking travel makes men so interesting.

Lacking any real view, I went along with my friend Tom, both of us with gaps in our tightly scheduled plans for the day, hoping to see what all the fuss was about.

Festivals are after all about trying new things and, given I’m too anxious to try drugs and think taking cocaine makes you a bad person, I limit branching out to new music.

In hindsight, irrevocably damaging my brain chemistry might have been more enjoyable. What followed was the most mundane hour of music I have ever witnessed live.

I would call it beige, but even that is a colour. It represents something tangible, a contrast to other colours. This was less than nothing, a sexless Elvis crooning songs so dull they blended into each other.

It was not as interesting as outright bad – worse than that it was entirely fine, meaningless lyrics including, and I’m not making this up “green, green grass, blue, blue sky, you better throw a party on the day that I die”.

But instead of disgruntled faces around me, I was surrounded by beaming hordes, hundreds of fans lapping up every single word.

I’ve never gone undercover in my journalistic endeavours, but it was the closest I’ve ever felt to being among a cult. George does seem nice though, so maybe that makes it OK.

With this in mind, I would draw your attention to the BRIT artist of the year awards, a gender neutral category featuring only men, that somehow Ezra has made.

Obviously sexism is bad, but I truly think his presence makes the selection worse. How much must you hate women to instead include a musician whose songs you could not distinguish from each other with a gun to your head and him telling you the answer?

These awards are gender neutral, which make picking just men either a deliberate act or an act of such gross incompetence awards don’t actually mean anything anyway. No, it can’t be that.

Snubbing the likes of Charli XCX and Florence + the Machine suggests these people either actively hate women, or somehow missed their 10/10 albums, raising more questions about the promotion of female artists. Charli XCX closed Glastonbury on the John Peel stage last year. How were they to have heard of her?

Now I shouldn’t get mad at awards, they are just industry validation for millionaires I have not met. But also, if we’re going to hand out meaningless clout, the least we can do is extend that offer to women.