Grammy Awards this Sunday (February 10)

Foo Fighters, headline mainstage, at V Festival, Hylands Park, Chelmsford, August 18, 2007. Pic: Guy Eppel

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• Feb 8, 2008
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The 50th Annual Grammy Awards will take place this Sunday (February 10) in Los Angeles.

The ceremony starts at 8pm (EST) time and will feature live performances from Beyonce and Foo Fighters.

Amy Winehouse is rumoured to be performing via video link after she was denied a visa to the States.

You can follow the awards live here on NME.COM.

We’ll be bringing you the winners as they are announced throughout the ceremony.

Stars up for gongs include Amy Winehouse, Rihanna, Foo Fighters, Kanye West, Paramore, The White Stripes and Queens Of The Stone Age.


The Shockwaves NME Awards 2008 are coming soon – and it’s time to have your say. Vote now by heading to NME.COM/awardsvote and you could win VIP tickets to the ceremony, which takes place in London on February 28.

Grammy awards 2008 - Winehouse to beam into Grammy gig

Winehouse to beam into Grammy gig

Winehouse's nominations include record, album and song of the year

Amy Winehouse will perform live via satellite at this year's Grammy Awards ceremony after having her US visa application turned down.

Her performance in a studio in the early hours of Monday in London will be beamed into the show in Los Angeles.

And she will also make any acceptance speeches by satellite if she wins any of the six awards she is nominated for.

The singer is leaving the rehab clinic where she has been treated for two weeks to prepare for the performance.

The visa decision followed a series high-profile drug problems.

She was fined for cannabis possession in Norway last year and has been questioned by London police in connection with a video apparently showing her smoking a crack cocaine pipe.

"I'm raring to go and really excited to be performing at my first Grammy Awards," the star said in a statement.

AMY WINEHOUSE IN THE US Nominated for six Grammy Awards Sold 1.5 million copies of her album Back To Black Album reached number six in Billboard charts Cancelled North American tour last August Also cancelled appearance at MTV Music Video Awards 2007

"I'd like to thank everyone for their support over the last couple of weeks. I'm really sorry I can't be there but I appreciate that I'm being given a second chance via satellite."

Her spokesman said an invited audience of friends and family would be at the studio, but he did not know what she would sing.

The satellite link will be in place during the whole show so she can speak if she is a winner.

"Anything that happens, she will be there to say thanks," the spokesman told the BBC.

Her nominations include the prestigious prizes for record, album and song of the year.

Kanye West leads this year's field with eight nominations

The star, whose hits include Back to Black and Rehab, will remain under medical supervision while she is out of the Capio Nightingale clinic.

"She is feeling great, looking healthy and looking forward to doing what she does best," her spokesman said.

Back To Black was the biggest-selling album of 2007 in the UK, shifting more than 1.85 million copies, and has sold another 1.5 million in the US.

The Grammys is the most prestigious award event in the music industry's calendar.

Organisers have also announced that Kanye West - who leads this year's field with eight nominations - will also perform.

Other performances include a duet between Beyonce and Tina Turner, John Fogerty playing with Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard, plus the Foo Fighters, Aretha Franklin and Alicia Keys.

50 years of hits and misses at the Grammy awards

Mazur/WireImage

Bob Dylan gets some surprise backup from "Soy Bomb" in 1997. Click to see more of Grammy's most memorable moments.

Judy Garland's live album was tops in 1961.

The Grammys will blow out 50 candles on the birthday cake next Sunday. But the awards themselves boast hundreds of memories - some giddy, some ghastly - that together chronicle the highs and lows of the last half century of mainstream music.

Certainly the decisions about who wins these awards can be as daft as any arts contest - missing entire trends during their most vital periods (grunge, what grunge?). Or snubbing whole genres for years (Tejano, alterna-R&B anyone?).

Yet there's no denying that the Grammys represent a kind of mass consensus of taste, comprising "the official story" of pop in any given period.

A look at the last half century of prizes and plaudits offers a telling survey of how the culture serenaded itself - from the lounge-pop of the Fifth Dimension in the mid to late '60s, to the singer-songwriter peak of the early '70s (with Carole King's big win), to the disco takeover in the Bee Gees' winning season (1977-78).

While much crucial music history takes place far offstage from this event, the Grammys have a way of catching up with it, eventually. And the organizers have made major strides in just the last half decade to live down the show's longtime put-down of a nickname, "The Grannies."

One week before this year's pivotal event, we toast the Grammys' enduring status with a rewind through its 50-year story. For each show, I've named the key trends, standout performances and outright boners that have, if nothing else, made this show music's greatest argument-starter.

(Note: Each year represents the one in which the honored music was released, not the subsequent one in which the show aired.)

2006 The Police opened the show with a pile-driving take on "Roxanne," representing the trio's first major public performance in over 25 years. Award-wise, it was an uncommonly political year. The Dixie Chicks swept all the top categories for songs that answered the flak they received for their pitched Bush bash.

2005 In a rare move, rock dominated this year, with top prizes forked over to Green Day and U2. Meanwhile, the best new artist, John Legend, gave a performance that deftly brought back swank to modern R&B.