Ezra Collective became the first British jazz band to make a splash at the Brits in 2025, winning Best Group and making headlines with their plea to save the nation’s youth clubs.

For a decade in the 1990s I used to go to the Brit Awards every year. It was part of my job and it had lots of great moments, especially for a news reporter.

Like 1992, when the KLF fired a machine gun at the audience – loaded with blanks – and dumped a dead sheep at the after-show party. And 1996 when Jarvis Cocker got up from the table next to me and invaded the stage to waggle his bum at Michael Jackson.

A year later, as The Spice Girls took the stage, Geri Halliwell exposed rather more than she intended when her bustier slipped off. And in 1999, Chumbawumba’s Danbert Nobacon gave us another front page when he doused John Prescott in a bucket of water.

By comparison, Ronnie Wood chucking a drink in the face of club DJ Brandon Block a year later, followed by a slanging match onstage, barely raised a ripple.

Since then, the 21st century Brits have become a boring corporate event for record companies to celebrate their sales success (same as it ever was – but with any controversy airbrushed out). Until this year.

Collecting their surprise award as Best British Group – and becoming the first jazz band to perform at the Brits – Ezra Collective made headlines of an entirely different kind.

Femi Koleoso made an impassioned speech in support of finding funds to reopen the estimated 1,000 youth clubs that have closed in the last 25 years, in the hope of encouraging and supporting future generations of musical talent.

Across the UK youth clubs continue to decline as council cuts of 75% since 2012 bite ever harder, halving the number of local authority-run centres.

“The dream is we reopen a lot of these youth clubs and pay people salaries so that they can work full-time with these children,” said Koleoso, who still volunteers at his local youth club in Enfield.

“Some of you teach music, some of you teach them how to produce. Some of you teach them how to draw. All different types, all different shapes, all different sizes.”

The pure joy they bring, characterised by this African-inflected track from their glorious 2024 album, the aptly titled Dance, No One’s Watching, is sensational.