In the running for Best British Single this year are:
Summer – Calvin Harris
Rather Be – Clean Bandit (feat. Jess Glynne)
Thinking Out Loud – Ed Sheeran
Ghost – Ella Henderson
Budapest – George Ezra
Uptown Funk – Mark Ronson (feat. Bruno Mars)
My Love – Route 94 (feat. Jess Glynne)
Stay With Me – Sam Smith
Nobody To Love – Sigma
So let’s break this down…
Timing
The days of the standard issue three-minute pop-wonder have long gone. These days, singles come in all sorts of shapes and sizes – but does length actually matter? Is there an ideal time that songwriters should be aiming for?
This is how the last 25 years looks.
Weirdly, the shortest Best Single and longest Best Single were just one year apart – which would indicate that some sort of pop-deferral system was in place in the late 90s.
The average length of a Brit-winning Best Single is 4:04. Which of the nine nominations is closest to that? Well, Sigma’s Nobody To Love is close. At 4:12, it’s eight seconds too long to be ideal. However, the radio edit of Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars’s Uptown Funk is 3:58, which makes it just six seconds underweight.
So Ronson wins it.
Chart Performance
One easy way to judge how well a single has gone over with the public is to look at its chart history. How high did it get? How many weeks did it stay in the Top 40? That sort of thing. But does any of that cut any sway with the judging panel? Do they care for such things?
Undeniably, it seems that having got your song to the top of the charts will do you well. All of the last 25 winners have made it to the Top 10 (Blur’s Parklife only just scraping in, making it to number 10) but the vast majority are number one hits.
Of the nine nominations for this year, only George Ezra’s Budapest hasn’t made it to coveted top spot – it only made it to number three – which means it’s highly likely this trend will continue. As the most recent number one, Uptown Funk might benefit from being relatively fresh, but Clean Bandit’s Rather Be was a monster seller and Calvin Harris’s Summer was a big streamer over the, erm, summer.
Writers/Performers
We saw that it helped to have a large number of people writing your album for you if you wanted to snag a Brit for Best Album. But what if you want the Best Single? How many writers do you need for that? And how many people should be performing it? Just you? Or a whole band?
The average number of writers per winning single is 3.0 (3.04 to 2dp). The average number of performers is 3.4. This is less than half what you’d ideally want for a full album, but that makes sense – because you’d have different people working on all the different tracks.
With numbers like these though, who are we looking at? Definitely not Sigma, who list 13 writers on the credits of Nobody To Love (that’s just for the one song – as many as Adele had on her whole album). Sam Smith had three listed writers on Stay With Me, but owing to a recent copyright issue, Tom Petty and Jeff Lynne now bump his total to five. That just leaves Ella Henderson’s Ghost – which is extra buoyed by the fact that those writers are Ryan Tedder and Noel Zancanella, who have been behind some global pop smashes.
That’s dealing with writers, but in terms of performer numbers no-one quite fits the bill. There’s a quartet (Clean Bandit), but they have a guest vocalist pushing their total to five. With a 3.4 average that means the duos ever so slightly win out.
Sigma are a duo, but if we’re including guest vocalists, then they also have one – Daniel Pearce (from One True Voice) – who is covering Charlie Wilson’s vocal line. That would bring their total to three, making them best positioned.
A Dispiriting Fact
This has no bearing on this year’s ceremony, as he doesn’t have a nominated single this year, but in the last 25 years Robbie Williams has been responsible – in part or in whole – for six of the songs which won the Best Single award.
They are: Could It Be Magic?, Pray, Back For Good, Angels, Rock DJ and She’s The One.
Bleak, right?
