If the songs are 30 years old, what exactly is being rewarded? Following Noel Gallagher’s BRIT Award win in Manchester, music journalist and performer Marc Burrows argues that the industry has blurred the line between songwriting and canonisation — in this exclusive for Ikon London.
This weekend at Co-op Live in Manchester, Noel Gallagher collected the BRIT Award for Songwriter of the Year in his hometown, at a ceremony that left London for the first time in its history. It was a satisfying move: it makes sense to honour one of that city’s most treasured sons with a justified acknowledgement that he is, indeed, one of the greats; not that Noel needed telling — he’s often the first to point it out.
Usually, this type of industry canonisation is done through the tried-and-tested ‘Lifetime Achievement Award’, known at the BRITs variously as the ‘BRITs Icon Award’ and the ‘Outstanding Contribution to Music’ award. Unfortunately, Gallagher already had one of those — Oasis were given it in 2007.
This meant producers had to get creative, and the ‘Songwriter of the Year’ gong was right there for the taking. It did mean they needed an answer to a very specific question: how do you get named 2025’s ‘Songwriter of the Year’ when you spent that year exclusively performing songs from the 90s and, even more crucially, didn’t write any new ones?
You can see why people are confused. The BRITs say that the award “recognises exceptional songwriting talent”, which is pretty unarguable where Noel Gallagher is concerned. It does, however, raise the matter of “when?”. Previous winners — Ed Sheeran, Kid Harpoon, RAYE, Charli XCX — were honoured on the back of new work that dominated the preceding year. RAYE’s My 21st Century Blues swept the ceremony. Charli XCX’s Brat was a rare culture-defining moment. It is reasonable to look at that list and wonder what a man who hasn’t released new material since 2023 and spent 2025 playing thirty-year-old songs is doing at the end of it.
And this is where the BRITs found their loophole. Songwriting has never really been about the moment of creation. It’s about the moment of connection. There’s usually a gap between the two: 2024 was the ‘Brat summer’, but Charli wrote most of it in 2023. It’s a short gap, but it’s still a gap. All the BRITs had to do was consider the gap between creation and connection to be irrelevant.
And if we’re measuring connection, then in 2025 Noel Gallagher had, by some distance, the most connected songs in British music. Not because he wrote anything new — Lord no — but because the songs he wrote thirty years ago proved so deeply embedded in the national consciousness that two million people paid to sing them back to him, and three Oasis albums simultaneously occupied the UK Top Five.
The view is even more valid when you consider how songwriting functions in the streaming age. The old model was simple: you wrote songs, released them, and the best ones were recognised. Streaming has flattened the timeline. A song from 1995 is one you can discover today and queue next to a cutting-edge track from last month. In that world, the most successful songwriter isn’t necessarily the one who wrote the best new song this year. It may be the one whose older songs are still doing the most work.
And Noel Gallagher’s songs do an extraordinary amount of work. They function at weddings and funerals, on football terraces and at karaoke nights. They have transcended their creator to become something closer to folk music — communally owned, endlessly recycled. Creating the tentpoles of a culture goes beyond good songwriting. It edges into myth-making.
Given all of that, if Noel Gallagher wasn’t the defining songwriter of 2025, then who on earth was?
It comes down to what you value. This year’s BRITs nominations were some of the strongest in years, almost all of those artists honoured for new music and new creations. Gallagher wasn’t the only Britpop-era legend on the list, either: Pulp had a ‘Best Group’ nomination off the back of their excellent and, crucially, new album More. In an era when, thanks largely to the success of auteur writers like Ed Sheeran and Taylor Swift, the craft of songwriting is being fully appreciated in pop, is it fair to hand Britain’s biggest songwriting award to an oldies act? When Sam Fender, Olivia Dean, Lola Young, Rebecca Taylor and, yes, Jarvis Cocker are right there, doing some of their best ever work?
It made sense to honour Gallagher following such a banner year, but the BRITs need to acknowledge that ‘Songwriter of the Year’ is something of a fudge in this case. There is a real difference between recognising new craft, recognising cultural endurance and recognising canonisation. The BRITs have chosen not to specify which they mean. If this is a craft award, giving it to someone who hasn’t written anything new is odd, and an insult to those who released impactful new music. If it’s an endurance award, then it’s a lifetime achievement gong with the wrong label. But if it’s canonisation — if the BRITs are effectively saying these songs have passed from pop music into national heritage — then it makes a different kind of sense.
British pop has no formal mechanism for declaring that certain songs now belong to everyone, in the way buildings are listed or paintings enter national collections. There is no English Heritage blue plaque for a chord progression. The BRITs’ Songwriter of the Year is an imperfect vehicle for that recognition, but it may be the closest thing we have. Handing it to Noel in Manchester, the city where the songs were born, suggests the committee understands this — even if the title does not.
What Noel Gallagher achieved is not in competition with the class of 2025. It is a different category of success entirely — measured not in units shifted in a calendar year, but in how permanently a set of songs has woven itself into the way a country understands itself.
He would probably find all this analysis faintly ridiculous. He would also probably say he deserves it. And on the slightly unusual question of whether these songs have earned their place in the permanent collection of British pop, he is right.
The award may have the wrong name, but he probably deserves it all the same.
