England legends and part-time crooners Glenn Hoddle and Chris Waddle are to receive a special honour at tonight’s Brit Awards for their late-eighties anti-drugs song Diamond Lights.
The top ten smash shocked the general public at the time with its uncompromising portrayal of heroin abuse, and the destitution and desperation that addiction to it brings. The outcry was such that the Tory government was pressured into forcing through new, tougher measures to combat its widespread availability, particularly in certain inner-city areas.
Waddle penned the socio-political ode when he arrived at Marseilles and saw first-hand the incredibly damaging impact the more-ish brown powder was having on the French port city. After witnessing the fresh corpse of an addict slumped in the street the mulleted Geordie wandered dazed to his hotel room, picked up an acoustic guitar, and strained out the first few lines in between sobs of despair.
‘Eyes that freeze like ice
Cold electric blue those diamond lights
You were hard as stone
Solid stone, for me’
Fellow protest singer Bob Dylan just out of shot.
It is hoped that the rhyming maestros will reprise their famous Top of the Pops performance at this evening’s ceremony where – to further illustrate the international devastation of the drugs trade – they dressed as Crockett and Tubbs from Miami Vice, another city synonymous with the evil skag.
Although tonight’s award is very much a one-off, to recognize the duos selfless act of making themselves look very stupid for the greater good, it is hoped that the bauble – called the Life-Changing Contribution to British Music – will become a regular fixture of the event.
Ex-junkie Brian Westley, whose addiction once sent him spiralling into a seemingly hopeless cycle of petty crime and offering his bottom just for another fix, is now an influential committee member for the Brits. He thinks the accolade it thoroughly deserved.
‘That song changed me man. I was at an all-time low, subsisting on dead cats and flat Tizer in my grotty bed-sit. Going out each evening to score another bag of crack-dope. Then one day I was in Woolies, about to rob a VCR, when the store played Diamond Lights. The words hit me like a sledgehammer to my heart. It literally knocked the air right out of me and I had to sit on the floor, in the aisle. ‘Darling I love you, my diamond lights. I’ll always need you’. It was like I was saying the words myself! From that day forward I vowed to turn my life around. And I owe it all to Glenn and Chris.’
