There was a time when the Mercury prize was associated with controversy. Angry blogs would be written decrying the shortlist’s conservatism, the judges’ final choice would be greeted with hoots of derision, artists would publicly turn down their nominations, protests would occasionally be staged outside and the theory would be posited that the whole business was ultimately damaging for the winner, especially if they were a relatively new artist: it would focus too much attention on them too early in their career, creating unrealistic expectations and a subsequent sense of diminishing returns.
But in recent years, the Mercuries have been attended by something infinitely more damaging: the sense that hardly anyone actually cares. The nominations no longer attract much controversy, and what there is feels drummed up for the sake of it. The winners seem to pass unnoticed: winning the 2013 Mercury apparently made no difference to the career of Young Fathers, who happily continue as a cult concern; last year’s victor Benjamin Clementine saw his sales briefly double, catapulting his album to the giddy heights of No 37 for one week before it vanished from the charts entirely; most people would probably find it a challenge to remember who actually won in 2014 without recourse to Wikipedia (it was James Blake).
Perhaps the sense that the awards aren’t holding the public’s interest as they once did accounts for the fact that this year’s nominees are noticeably better-known than last year’s: only the Comet Is Coming, who operate in a fascinating middle ground between jazz, electronica and psychedelia, are obscure enough to cause an outbreak of head-scratching among the general public. In fact, it’s a pretty strong list of albums. Radiohead’s A Moon Shaped Pool was greeted in some quarters as a career best; David Bowie’s Blackstar was rapturously received even before it became apparent that it constituted part of a brilliantly stage-managed death; Jamie Woon’s Making Time, Michael Kiwanuka’s Love & Hate and Laura Mvula’s The Dreaming Room all offer the hugely appealing sound of artists pushing confidently at the boundaries of what they do: the latter in particular, with its complex arrangements and brilliant, unconventional approach to songwriting, looks like a good bet to win.
In recent years, the Mercury nominations have been rightly criticised for failing to reflect the artistic and commercial resurgence of grime. One of the reasons the shortlists had an unerring tendency to make the year in British music look less vibrant and interesting than it actually was, despite the undoubted quality of a lot of the albums included, was that they kept ignoring a genuinely exhilarating home-grown street-level music scene. This year, the situation has finally been rectified by the appearance of Skepta’s chart-topping Konnichiwa and Kano’s reflective, nostalgic Made in the Manor. Whether it’ll be enough to rekindle public interest in the Mercury prize remains to be seen: what you can say with confidence is that the shortlist is strong enough to ensure that a genuinely good album is guaranteed to win.
