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WMG ROCKS OUT AT NME AWARDS

Max Lousada’s Warner is the most rock & roll label in the U.K., according to the wealth of signees crowned winners at Wednesday night’s reader-voted NME Awards in London. Parlophone’s band of the moment Coldplay took home the Godlike Genius Award, labelmate Rat Boy was Best New Artist, FoalsWhat Went Down was named Best Album, Atlantic singer/songwriter Charli XCX is this year’s Best British Solo Artist and David Bowie’s Parlophone-released Five Years (1969-1973) was named Best Reissue.

RCA rockers Bring Me the Horizon stole the most memorable moment of the night after causing chaos at Coldplay’s table during a performance of “Happy Song,” presumably as a result of overexcitement due to their Innovation gong.

Jim Chancellor, boss of UMG U.K. subsidiary Fiction, looked pretty pleased after The Maccabees (right) won Best British Band, while Ted Cockle’s Virgin EMI also had cause for celebration. The Libertines’ performance at Glastonbury last year was Music Moment of the Year, while the video for “Cheer Up London” by punk duo Slaves was honoured in the Best Music Video category.

Jamie Oborne’s Dirty Hit has been having an excellent few years thanks to The 1975 and Wolf Alice, the latter of which were named Best Live Band and Best Track for “Giant Peach.” In a surprising turn of events, Big Machine’s Taylor Swift was the inaugural winner of Best International Solo Artist, an award she accepted via video message expressing slight unease over the middle-finger shaped statue, ironically, originally designed as a 'fuck you' to the pop industry in which she resides. Elsewhere, indie act Run the Jewels were named Best International Band.

Other winners included Dave Grohl as Hero of the Year; Capitol’s 5 Seconds of Summer as worst band for the second year running; Blur’s documentary New World Towers as Best Music Film; and Glastonbury as Best Festival, while Yoko Ono took home the Inspiration Award. Donald Trump was crowned, quite aptly, Villain of the Year.

NME has changed a hell of a lot over the last year, finally deciding to go free in September after years of declining readership, and boosting its circulation from under 15k to 300k+ (although how many of those copies are read is impossible to measure).

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