Harry Styles, fake stage invaders and a censored Peter Mandelson joke: the biggest moments at the Brit awards

The ITV censors had their work cut out in a protest-filled, relatively edgy ceremony that hosted ultra-expressive performances from Rosalía, Wolf Alice and more

Harry Styles gave the first performance of his Kiss All the Time era

Styles opened the show with his return single, Aperture, a UK No 1 in release week which is fairly swiftly dropping down the charts, perhaps because it is a real stylistic outlier in pop right now. Euphoric yet faintly distant, it conjures the feeling when you’re on a dancefloor, slightly out of it, and gazing at the human melee around you. And so it proves here, with a performance where Styles is in the moment, jiving with his considerable band and backing singers, and twitching in time with dancers in snail T-shirts and sunglasses – and yet also one level above the moment, not letting himself become too giddy beyond a couple of grins. His vocal lines are reminiscent of that master of airy yet warm observation, Kings of Convenience and Whitest Boy Alive singer Erlend Oye, and I even detected a touch of David Bowie here too: an echo of his tailoring and particular handsomeness as Styles ages, and also the way Bowie would perform, with a thousand-yard stare that also takes in the foreground.

Olivia Dean perfectly expressed the art of loving

The night belonged to Olivia Dean, a deserved four-time winner for the magnificent, cosmopolitan material on her album The Art of Loving. In her acceptance speech she said her winning album “is just about love, and loving each other in a world that feels loveless right now”, and not only is that so well expressed on the record itself – it is so alive to the possibility of love, even as it acknowledges the potential hurt – she also embodied that spirit in her performance of Man I Need. A latent part of Dean’s appeal has been quite how much she actually enjoys what she does, filling her performances with wriggles of pleasure and “ahh this is happening!” facial expressions, and so it was here, as she leaned into every curve of Man I Need’s syncopation. The joy at the first flush of love, and the fun of the romantic chase, was also written through every one of her movements.

Mark Ronson’s influence was made clear

Ronson was given the outstanding contribution to music award, and the accompanying performance showed what an odd and yet profoundly influential path he’s taken through pop. Still looking as nerdish and boyish as he did two decades ago, he happily scratched vinyl as Ghostface Killah gave an avuncular roll through Ooh Wee. Then we went into the Amy Winehouse material, and you see anew how ambitious, even ill-advised Ronson’s vision must have seemed to some at the time: slow symphonic material, or parpy big-band stuff like Valerie, that scurried back to the orchestral pop and jazz of the pre-Beatles revolution? Today, Raye is playing that sound in arenas, and indeed this Brit awards stage, thanks to a world reshaped by Ronson. It’s a shame Bruno Mars didn’t make the effort to perform Uptown Funk here, particularly given he has his own new album to promote – phone calls were surely sent his way? – so credit to surprise guest Dua Lipa for bringing some A-list stardust to Dance the Night and Electricity.

Expressive-core is in

Raye’s performance of Nightingale Lane, a song about the London street where she watched her first love walk away from their relationship, made it seem less a song and more a vehicle for pure unmoored expression, climaxing in a stunningly sung wordless expulsion of pain. There was a similar feel to Rosalía’s performance of Berghain, aided by Björk wearing a tripartite biomorphic gown topped with a badly damaged lampshade, as is Björk’s wont. Again, this is not so much a song in the traditional sense, more a series of sonic flexes demonstrating the keenness of the Catalan artist’s feeling, going from opera to hard techno. It was awesome in the true sense of the word, and yet while this sound and fury didn’t exactly signify nothing, it didn’t signify all that much. Wolf Alice’s Ellie Rowsell did this expressive-core much better: her melodious howl at the end of The Sofa hit so much harder for being at the peak of a worked-through, fully structured song. It was an act of pure freedom, in a ballad about the importance of just that.

Don’t get 90s indie legends to do your tributes

If we’re being generous, there was a certain wayward musicality and interestingly halting metre to Bobby Gillespie’s introduction of Noel Gallagher as songwriter of the year, though his words were quite corny for a usually jaded rock’n’roller: he described Oasis’s reunion gigs as “like being at a cup final with everyone supporting the same team, and everyone winning”. Better that, though, than Tim Burgess’s nervy fluffed lines as he paid tribute to the late Mani. Perhaps the organisers should have got Shaun Ryder and Bez to do everything of this nature, given they entertainingly treated their chat with Jack Whitehall like a chemically enhanced afternoon pub sesh.

Sombr keeps the publicity stunt alive

For a second we thought we might have another 90s-style Brits moment, such as when Jarvis Cocker waggled his bum during Michael Jackson’s Earth Song, or a member of Chumbawamba soaked John Prescott with a bucket of iced water. A man rushed on stage during a performance by that estimable and permanently looksmaxxed US musician Sombr, and was bundled off stage by security. But no, it was a stunt: he was wearing a shirt saying “Sombr is a homewrecker”, a reference to the ethically dubious lovemaking essayed on enjoyable new single Homewrecker.

The Brits can still provide a bit of edge

Despite the stage invader being fake, there were some moments that will have had the ITV censors sweating, particularly after last week’s disastrous Bafta incident where the N-word was allowed to appear on the TV broadcast. Jack Whitehall had fun with this, saying ITV got “the guy who did the Baftas” to be on censor duty, though whoever it was actually proved to be much more risk-averse. Amid plenty of snuffed-out F-bombs, even Whitehall was deemed to have overstepped the mark at one point. Greeting the culture secretary, Lisa Nandy, his riff was silenced entirely: “This must be the politicians’ table. I wonder who else is here? I think I saw Peter Mandelson on the list – no, sorry, that was another list.” Similarly, no one at home heard Geese’s Max Bassin say “free Palestine, fuck ICE” during his acceptance speech – though it was very lip-readable – so perhaps Jacob Alon, filmed silently holding a keffiyeh aloft as Sharon Osbourne spoke, had the more effective protest.

The other bracing acceptance speech came from Wolf Alice’s Rowsell as the band won group of the year. She perhaps tried to pack too much into this rapid-fire survey of the music industry’s ills, but it all needed to be said: “It’s worth mentioning that despite the billions of pounds the live sector contributes to our economy, last year 30 independent venues closed down, 6,000 jobs were lost and over half the small venues reported making no profit at all. It shouldn’t be a battle to survive for bands and artists, we shouldn’t be reliant on favours or anyone funding schemes in order to do things at a level we feel proud of. It shouldn’t feel like a golden ticket, but a viable career decision for anyone from any background. Because you only have to look around us today and see how proud we are of Britain’s musical contribution and how important it is to nurture and protect the UK’s amazing music scene.”