The Mercury Prize 2010 - From M People to The xx

Dummy / Seldom Seen Kid / Stories from the City are albums I return to again and again. Arctic Monkeys is also a very fine album. I own another 8 of the eventual winners of the Mercury Music Prize but would rarely throw them on. I think the Mercury Prize started with good intentions but has always suffered following "Elegant Slumming"'s victory. It just discredited the thing beyond reason. Fellow nominees Wild Wood/Jilted/Parklife didnt just define the year they were released - in many ways these are some of the best records of the 1990s never mind an individual year. It was devastatingly poor judgement from the panel - did they even listen to the records? "Country" / "Poison" / "This is a Low" or "One Night In Heaven"? Oh dear.

But was there more afoot than merely selecting the best record? After all thats far too easy a job! My shot in the dark is that M People's win was a failed attempt to restyle the prize as genuinely genre-free, impervious to critical opinion & devoid of rockist bias. This failed. As a result it is as rare as hen's teeth for the winner to be anything other than curio ten years hence. I realise this is all subjective but the first two winners were solid non-controversial selections that arguably deserved their win. Many albums since then didnt need time for people to realise they were below par. As such its my belief that The xx will soon be forgotten about similar to a Ms. Dynamite or a Gomez.

How has the Mercury prize survived such a chequered history you may ask? The answer is simply that there nothing like it - its an ingenious idea copied in other countries (Ireland and the US to name but two). A prize for the music fan, be they fleeting or committed. How many times per year are people betting on music? Its a unique event in the calendar. My personal interest in it stems from seeing Blur and the Prodigy nominated for the same prize - at the time it was exiting, a competition where a dance act competes with a indie pop band!? Unfortunately each subsequent winner since '94 serves not to see the best record of the year rise to the top but only to nourish the egotism of the faceless panel that hand out the cheque. It is pure luck if on any given year the best record of the year dovetail with the needs of the Mercury prize itself. Usually the award has other needs - to reward the best record made in the previous 12 months not being one of them.

It started out as an alternate means of rewarding an album's merit. It stood in opposition to the the likes of the Brit award that focusses purely on sales. Now the Mercury seems to me to have become a self serving post festival season bash. Its part of the marketing schedule now - the "curse of the Mercury Prize" label notwithstanding.

Interestingly, the efforts a band has to go to to get nominated and then to show up on the night itself is both costly and unusual. For example 125 copies of your album to even get nominated - 125 further copies are required along with the £2000 for a booze free table at the dinner for the night should you actually get nominated. Not great. But the industry laps it up - any port in a storm where sales are going through the floor. Release schedules are managed to fit in with the nominations. It is central to the music industry calendar now.

Breakthrough single -> Support tour with last year's fave -> Album launch -> Buzz worthy performance at Glasto -> Mercury nomination -> Every UK/Euro festival possible - > Awards night -> Potential record sales boost -> winter tour -> Christmas pressie market. Ring any bells?

Granted this won't be the case for a lot of the nominees, but to take Mumfords as an example the above steps are pretty much on the money for the year's "generic indie band marketing plan". Past winners can be categorised in 4 ways:

1. Best album from the list wins. (Screamadelica / Dummy -> the rarest of beasts and album that stands the test of time)

2. Gross errors of judgement. (M People / Speech Debelle)

3. Populist choices. (Arctics / Elbow)

4. Self serving choices. (Anthony Johnsons / Roni Size)

Last night The xx won and it feels similar to the "Klaxons" record for me - a youthful "of it's time and place" record. It has been toured to death and has seeped into various other media - be it sports highlight packages or US TV shows. The Klaxons never got that far granted but you get the idea. Why it merited winning this year's prize is that the Mercury is back in defensive populist mode. Like it or not The xx was one of the most straight forward winners by the early bookies favourite in years. The record itself is perfectly ok. Its different rather than great. It has a slinky wee-hours appeal that is bewitching in places. In others it is amateurish and dull. Its laboured. Laura Marling on the other hand made something great that unfortunately wasnt deemed "different" enough. Marling's album will be returned to again and again, mark my words.

The winner of the Mercury is not only subject to the whimsy of the judges in the current year but also the winner or the the genre of the winner of the preceeding year. It is not an open and level playing field by any means. Gravity is continually shifting the landscape, not according to the merits of the records nominated, but by how these records relate to the roll call of previous winners. Thus I'm sure that Radiohead would have won had Pulp not won... Massive Attack would have won had Roni Size not won etc etc. I am confident to suggest that the panel will feel freer to award the prize on more predictable grounds next year. 

To sum up: the MM prize has taken on a join-the-dots aspect whereby its winners are connected inescapably from the marginal to the main stream and back again. A populist winner in one year allows for an elitist one the next and vice versa. Thus we get Pulp followed by Roni Size or Elbow followed by Speech Debelle. It is growing so tiresome at this stage. Good records get nominated but cannot win due to the constraints placed by this pathetic need to stay in balance. Theres a rule that the token Irish / Jazz nominee never wins of course. Again the bias in the nomination process. Why are these records even given the nod in the first place?

I guess what I'm trying to say is that it no longer represents the "best album of the year" - it is now a unique entity "A Mercury winner". The entrants are not merely selected against their fellow nominee peers but must also negotiate the chicane of the previous winners and the cookie-cutter outline of the nomination process. Each year an album emerges to be feasted upon by music industry cred seekers and cynics.

Lastly - I dunno where I read it but what might improve the whole thing is if we got to see the deliberations / judging process. The debate that weighs up a jazz record over a pop record or a veteran of 25 albums against a debut artist would be intruiging to see. The faceless predictability one year and cynicism the next of the process is such a waste. If a "mistake" is made then the award "corrects itself" the following year. It might take a couple of years to break the cycle created by M People's win. We'll see what happens.