10 REASONS WHY I STOPPED WORRYING AND LEARNED TO LOVE THE MERCURY PRIZE
1 Otherwise you are left with the smarm buckets of the agressively sectarian BPI to confer status and privilege in their annual wing ding. Y’know - the one that rhymes with Shits.
2 Id have to check but isnt the amazingly haired multi talented Seb Roachford the only musician to be nominated for `a Mercury twice in two separate incarnations? That is to say a man in more bands than most music execs have even heard. A real musician who loves and indeed plays jazz. Someone at the heart of the music business told me that everyone he has met in the UK music industry IN THE LAST 10 YEARS HATES jazz.
3 The View - the ballsy attitude and rocking scrummage of Kyle and co. Use it up and wear it out, who is gonna complain about their undoubted right and energy to be listed among the 12? Really? Thats why its good the Mercury is there awarding the likes of them and other little, and even very BIG, Monkeys.
4 You wanna sniff that the richness of plurality and creativity - the essence and colour, the teeming variety of UK music? The perfumed garden of John Peel? This is where it exists, now - certainly not in the late DJ’s former home station where vapid Dames De Pop like Joe (her lesbian name for when she , yawn, gets moist toward Angelina Jolie*) Wiley do reside.
5 Amy Winehouse - it simply would not be right if she wasnt there. Hard to see why she wont win either. But then, remembering Antony without the H Hegarty, someone says the smart money (ie theirs) will go on Bats With Lashes.
6 I can accept the fact that my own aural predilictions aren’t all catered for (actually I’m never sure whats eligible and whats not, as “time is running backwards and so is the tide”). But the absence of The Bees, The 747s, Shack, Lily Allen, whoever from this list need not - and should not - separate them from the debate it engenders.
7 I have never been asked to be a judge so I dont have that I would never join a clubb that would have me as a member dillemma.
8 I know for independents its a lot of money to pay to be eligible - £250 last time I asked - but for a towering musical force like Seth Lakeman, the brilliant musicians who play with him, even the musical community he comes from, mere nomination brought forth light and ears and good things generally. See also kt Tunstall etc.
9 Simon Frith asked me to write for New Society when I was 17. I was too scared/lazy/intimidated/bored/busy to take him up but the sense I had of a man with a good sense, a real enthusiast. That was my sense then and, for all the piss n vinegar I and others have expunged on the Merkin Prize over the years (Now there’s an idea to brighten up the Rotd Awards!), nothing that has happened since has caused me to change that opinion.
10 YOU probably have a real gripe against it…
*A publicity scam as sad as The Thrills we’ve just recorded in the toughest hood in Toronto claim
