How JADE And Black Skull Built Her Iconic BRITs Performance
In one fell swoop JADE sealed her monymous ascension to the top tier of British music. Winning a solo BRIT at the first time of asking, she was regal onstage, humble in her acceptance speech and graceful to the nominees.
Later in the glitzy ceremony, however, came her performance. A true highlight of this – or any other – year it saw JADE break new ground for the BRITs, bringing her multi-faceted single ‘Angel Of My Dreams’ to life as a five-act play rooted in Greek myth.
Tumbling from the stars only to close the performance by rising once more to the ceiling, it was a stunning piece of musical theatre that took months to bring to fruition.
Throughout the process JADE communicated closely with production team Black Skull, who worked tirelessly against the clock to bring this instantly-iconic performance to life.
CLASH spoke with the team at Black Skull for a glimpse of the fastidious creative process which illuminated this incredible performance.
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Congrats on the incredible BRITs performance! How did the link-up with JADE come about? How involved was she with the creative?
We’ve known Jade since Little Mix days where we were brought in as creative directors for the BRIT’s Woman Like Me performance and then continued with them on all TV and tours until they took their hiatus so the creative flow was easy to pick up again.
Jade was involved every step of the way and every detail had her approval before we took it forward.
How far in advance did you have to prepare for the performance?
We had about a month from our initial call where we came up with the idea of the performance actually happening – it was an ambitious idea to achieve in such a short amount of time! The dialogue was constantly open with Jade and we were forever sharing inspiration and ideas and moulding everything into what you saw on the night.
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The end result was hugely dramatic – was that sense of theatre and story-telling something you wanted to get across from the beginning?
From the initial call Jade was clear she wanted to reimagine the song in a totally different and theatrical way and it soon became clear that the idea of a classical re-telling ‘Angel Of My Dreams’ as a five-act Greek tragedy was going to give us an iconic look whilst also giving us room to have multiple major ‘gag’ moments and get through all the characters we were imagining.
Storytelling was key and the whole flow is underpinned by layer upon layer of metaphor, meaning and undeniable pop culture references. There are so many hidden layers in there for the fans to pick apart!
JADE with angel wings was iconic – what was it like to see that come to fruition?
From the word go Jade was talking about the feeling of falling through a trap door and flying as an angel and luckily we had an amazing artist who was willing to give any trick or stunt a go to make the vision a reality… huge Kudos to Jade because there’s not many artists who would go in with that much risk on their first solo BRITs performance!
With the wings we always said we’d do them if it felt magical and there was no obvious wires that would make her look like something out of a nativity! Luckily we’d done a show a while back where we made someone appear to levitate using a boom arm and so we took that idea and supersized it – taking it from a two-metre long arm to an eight-metre arm that weighed over 2.5 tonnes for Jade!
We always had faith that it was going to look amazing but a gag like that needs all the elements – the technical solution, lighting, video, special effects, costume and 15 crew – all working together in unison. They would have spent weeks perfecting something like that in the West End but we had two hours on stage and a dress rehearsal to nail it and so it was only in the actual show that we saw it all come together perfectly!
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There were lots of subtle references to Greek tragedy in the performance, where did those come from?
As Jade was telling us the story of the music video and then we were thinking about how those characters could find a new home on stage at the BRITs it felt really tragic and with the drive to do something almost operatic in its style we started to think about classical forms of story telling and the Greek Tragedy stuck.
The performance seemed to subtly – and at times, not so subtly – critique the music industry. A daring move at the BRITs! Did those themes feel timely?
Jade had started those themes when she created the AOMD music video so it felt right to continue exploring them and even more interesting to do it right in the heart of the British music industry.
How did it feel to watch the performance unfold?
We were all watching from side of stage on the night with our hearts in our mouths. With a performance that ambitious there is a huge amount of risk that comes with it – especially in a live show setting on a stage where we’ve had limited rehearsal time… so we were understandably nervous, but we also knew we had everything to play for…
But as soon as the trap door had worked and we saw Jade reappear as Prima Donna we knew the most nerve-wracking trick was out the way and we were onto something exciting… not that we could have ever predicted the reaction the performance was going to get. When you’re into the detail of creating something it’s hard to step back and think about the reaction – we just had to make the best decisions that felt right and exciting as we went.
Finally, what else can we expect from you in 2025?
With different skill sets and interests between us we’re lucky we have a real diversity in our output so we’ve got all sorts coming up from a major artist touring through China to Eurovision to a multi-brand fashion presentation for Berlin fashion week to more festivals and TV shows for some of our other artists.
It’s an exciting year but we always keep ourselves open for last minute calls so magic moments like Jade at the BRITs and Bashy at the MOBOs can happen.
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Words: Robin Murray
For more on Black Skull’s work visit their website.
Related: Simulated Reality – JADE Interviewed
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