Congratulations to Kim Moyes and Julian Hamilton off-of The Presets for picking up the best awards on offer at tonight’s ARIAs (the Aussie equivalent of The Brits or The Grammy’s.) Best Group, Best Dance Release, and the big one; Album Of The Year. The cheers and shrieks of joy at the ARIAs party I attended this evening when that announcement was made were deafening. We were all so, so proud.

I interviewed Julian some time ago. If you didn’t read it when I originally posted it, maybe now that he’s an ARIA award winning artist, you might want to…

Congrats also to Modular, the boys’ record label, also for the wins and for bringing such pop art as The Presets into our lives all those years ago.

As for the rest of the awards, it was all very bland. Aside from show-stopping performances from The Presets (now THAT’S an on stage costume!) and P!NK (kudos to Sam Sparro as well for a pitch-perfect “Black & Gold” – though I’m not entirely sure his outfit would pass the Roisin Murphy fashion checklist and — as the lovely Phil at Worra said some time ago – it was very ‘My First Stage Costume’ in appearance), the rest of the ceremony was pretty much about Gabriella Cilmi, who won all six of the awards she was nominated for.

I’m slightly baffled, I won’t lie.

You all know how I feel about “Sweet About Me” and there were better nominees in each of the categories she was up in. She did thank Brian Higgins and Miranda Cooper though, which was nice. I would like to know if she was insanely drunk (a no-no seeing as she’s only 17) or just a bit of a mess when it comes to public speaking? Each speech she gave was squirm-in-your-seat worthy. So much so, each time she would win a gong, the smokers at the party I was at would clutch onto their cigarette packets and head outside for a quick fag.

I was quite pleased to see Axle Whitehead return to the ARIAs, and also to hear around 3 seconds of Van She’s “Kelly” during the introduction of one of the presenters. That was nice!

Full list of winners here.