The annual Mercury Prize offers one of the few real surprises in the stagemanaged, horse-traded music biz calendar. Its outcome — the best British or Irish album released within a curious July-to-July year of eligibility — is routinely thrashed out behind closed doors by its amorphous committee of radio, TV and print worthies, mere moments before being announced, like the Man Booker that it so desperately wants to emulate. But the way it plays out each year in the rest of the media manages to follow the same utterly predictable script.
Once the shortlist of 12 is announced — as this year’s was on Tuesday — pundits scramble to bemoan the absence of their favourite album (“What? No Doves? It’s an outrage!”). Then they’ll usually wail about the lack of women or black artists (or this year, sweetly enough, men — five out of the 12 are female solo performers, or, in the case of ethereal weirdos Florence + The Machine, a female-fronted band). If truly desperate, there is always the old standby: the Mercury’s nods to jazz, folk and classical are “tokenistic”. This year again you might reasonably describe two nominations as “jazz”: the maverick quintet Led Bib, and the Invisible, who almost avoid capture by melding theirs with dance and church music. There hasn’t been a classical nominee since Joanna MacGregor in 2002.
Within a week, someone will be corralled into composing a piece that sneers, “Where are they now?”, implying that however august the honour, a win doesn’t necessarily convert into record sales. This article will be sure to mention — ready to snigger behind your hand? — the drum ’n’ bass collective Roni Size and Reprazent, and the Anglo-Indian fusionist Talvin Singh, winners in 1997 and 1999 respectively — even though neither was exactly built for the mass market. (Last year, the avowedly anonymous dubstep artist Burial enjoyed a sales rise of 1,004 per cent for his Untrue album, according to HMV. This was still not enough to even get it into the Top 50.) One assumes that Sweet Billy Pilgrim’s laptop-created Twice Born Men, which had reportedly sold about 400 copies before the announcement, will be this year’s Untrue. “I was at work, fitting a toilet seat in Farnham, when I heard about the nomination,” said the band’s Tim Elsenburg.
Sometimes, counter to all the judgely jockeying for cool, the best band wins. The cheerful chairman, Simon Frith, an academic chosen to lend the prize gravitas, is keen to point out that, between shortlist and ceremony (September 8 this year), the judges often change their minds, and on the night discussion rages up to the wire. “People are panicking and banging on the door, saying, ‘Have you reached your decision yet?’ ” he told the BBC. “And I do love the tension that creates.” So do we.
I was with Elbow in Manchester four days after their win for “people’s choice” The Seldom Seen Kid last year, the band still sweetly dazed by what seemed to the often embattled bunch of mates like the cherry on the cake of a damn good year for their fourth album. The “Mercury effect” had already moved 20,000 extra copies and put it back in the Top 10, locking Elbow into another 12 months of global promotion. On it went until even casual bystanders started to tire of keynote single One Day Like This, a song worn out by unimaginative TV producers looking for accompaniment to trailers, sporting montages and Torchwood. Some theorise that this year’s biggest omission — Kingdom of Rust, the fourth album by Manchester’s Doves — was too similar in backstory and style to Elbow to stand a chance. But rappers won in 2002 and 2003 (Ms Dynamite, Dizzee Rascal), so this theory leaks, too.
For my money, I think the Horrors should win for Primary Colours — produced by a previous winner, Portishead’s Geoff Barrow, and an immeasurable leap forward from the one-note Gothgarage that formed their much-hyped debut; proof that a band can rise above NMEcover-star notoriety to musical maturity. My vote for best British album of the year so far is Goffam by Jim Bob, formerly of the early Nineties indie stars Carter USM — older and wiser than the Horrors, he is also maturing into a jaundiced but big-hearted urban singersongwriter worthy of comparison with Kevin Coyne, Robert Wyatt and Elvis Costello.
At least nobody will ever sneeringly mention Elbow in the same breath as Messrs Size and Singh, since the band’s prospects seem assured. I can also vouch for the dazed surprise of Portishead, who won in 1995, and Pulp in 1996. I covered the event for Radio 1 and had to interview both moments after the announcement by Frith. He memorably mispronounced Roni Size as “Roh-nee” in 1997, as if to confirm his duffer’s credentials. The announcements are now safely made by Jools Holland.
Although established by the same British Phonographic Industry behind the Brits, there is no hidden agenda to the Mercury, other than perhaps the promotion of what the former judge Trevor Dann called “the Nationwide League for British music — an annual second prize for artists who don’t quite cut it in the pop Premiership”. It’s a fabulous sponsorship opportunity, too. The award was named after a now-defunct mobile network brand, Mercury One2One, which is a bit like it being called the Woolworths Award. Over the years it has been prefixed by Technics, Panasonic, Nationwide and, now, Barclaycard, a logo-dodging challenge for BBC Two’s cameras.
The Mercury can be a democratic jewel in the awards season crown, or a slick industry backslap dressed in the emperor’s new clothes of critical ballast, depending on your level of cynicism. It certainly provides a freeze-frame of British and Irish pop each summer (this year: it’s a girl thing, and with seven debuts on the list, we seem hungry for the new). I lap it all up and enjoy the suspense, but then I no longer have to attend the gruelling Grosvenor House event.
And for Lily Allen, twice snubbed despite her huge popularity, the Mercury is a golden opportunity to play Little Miss Understood. As she tapped on Twitter following the shortlist: “I’m like Gazza, the judges hate me, but the people, dem love me.”
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