October 22^nd 2014 was the date of the Q Awards, at London’s Grosvenor House Hotel. Q was a glossy music magazine and Jimmy was there to present the “Best Act In The World Today” award.

The BBC televised the show and the winners are listed here.

Q ran, in print, from 1986 to 2020, launched digitally in 2024 and then folded again, for good, after less than 6 months.

I think, like many people, I’d stopped buying it at least a decade before the print magazine ended as it was the same “blokes” writing it, year in year out, and there are only soooooooo many times that the Best Band in the World can be rotated around The Beatles, Oasis and U2. No matter how great they are – it got to the point where you got a new magazine issue and had a sense of déjà vu.

Back to the awards – the press were, as usual, outraged by one of his jokes (about Oscar Pistorius) but still the Mirror and Daily Mail etc. all printed the joke verbatim. Just so that more of their readers could read it and be outraged too.

End of the day – Q was supposed to be about rock ‘n’ roll and they surely knew what they were getting when they hired him (rhetorical question).

Promo shots from Getty Images can be seen here.