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Awards Business News
Artist And Manager Awards presented
By Chris Cooke | Published on Friday 25 November 2016
The Music Managers Forum and Featured Artists Coalition hosted the latest edition of their Artist & Manager Awards last night, celebrating the artists most rated by artists, and the people who manage their careers.
In the categories contested on the night, Years And Years took to the stage to receive the Breakthrough Artist Award, while the equivalent prize on the management side went to Stormzy manager Tobe Onwuka. Sponsor Dice also presented its own Live Award for 2016, handing a big FA Cup style trophy to Loyle Carner.
Other winners we already knew about, including Manager Of The Year Jonathan Dickins, most famous for guiding the career of Adele of course, while Zita McHugh won the prize for Writer/Producer Manager Of The Year, using the occasion to call for a better deal for the record producer in the ever-evolving recorded music business.
Bob Harris, meanwhile, presented the Artists Artist Award to the magnificent Joan Armatrading, while those there The 1975 boys were named Artists Of The Year.
In the midst of all that, MMF President Jon Webster took some time out to pay tribute to the long list of artists who we have lost in the last year – which is all the more depressing when presented in one long list – while also remembering those artist managers who have died in 2016.
That list, of course, included one of the true greats, the late David Enthoven – who, as his business partner Tim Clark said back in August, on top of everything else, gave “unstinting help to those [in music] who had taken a self-destructive path, for whatever reason – just as he himself had done all those years ago”. Which made him a manager who not only saved artists’ careers, but also some lives, all of which made him a popular posthumous winner of the AMA’s Industry Champion Award.
Finally, the life-time achievement Peter Grant Award went to veteran manager Peter Rudge who – with a 45 year career packed full of top name artists, many of whom bigged up the man himself in the pre-award clips package – subsequently delivered an epic speech which is possibly still ongoing as we speak. Oh, except I definitely saw Rudge clients James and Imelda May subsequently take to the stage to perform a finale. And why not I say, why not?
