Massive kudos, then, to Wolf Alice. But before we go it’s worth pondering what the point of the prize even is. As Jude Rogers noted in these pages recently, there were seven Top 10 albums on the shortlist and six artists who have been nominated before – if the prize is designed to “help introduce new albums from a range of music genres to a wider audience”, is is simply not fulfilling that remit well enough. She argued as much on Radio 4’s Today programme this morning too.
The industry obviously wants to prop up the album as a format, as a younger generation dissects them into playlists, and that’s fine – the aforementioned King Krule album is a reminder of the LP’s power. Truly exceptional popular records should of course be nominated. But the Mercury’s audience is essentially passionate record dweebs like me – their promotion is likely to sell very few extra Noel Gallagher albums, but a lot more by Sons of Kemet. Let’s hope for a bit more diversity and risk-taking from the prize chaired by the head of music at Radio 2 and 6 Music, OH WAIT.
Well, maybe now is not the time for snark. Wolf Alice will hopefully break into the consciousness of a few more people who weren’t aware of their work, and that is reason enough for now. Congratulations to them – can someone find them those Jagerbombs?
Updated
So the bookies were foiled yet again – none of the top three favourites won. Instead, the judges went for a band who prove they have really universal appeal: soulful, romantic, angry, laconic, they have ended up in the playlists and record collections of a really wide set of music lovers. You only need to see the almost religious fervour of their millennial fans at gigs – who, like them, have the radical anti-tribalism of having grown up with access to any and all music – to acknowledge how powerful they can be.
And the winner is... Wolf Alice!
It’s Wolf Alice! The quartet have alighted on a really passionate and yet supremely cool version of British rock’n’roll, that shrugs at what a band is meant to be. Are they dream-pop, punk, indie-rock? Zero fucks are given. They just get on with being beautiful, energetic, vital.
Ellie Rowsell looks out of breath and overwhelmed: “This means so much to pick this up with my three best friends!” Her bandmate Theo Ellis takes over, reminiscing about how a record company exec knocked them back saying: “’You lot don’t look like a band at all - all your songs sound different, you don’t look like each other.’ But here we are - so fuck you!” He asks for a Jägerbomb before heading back to the stage for another rendition of Don’t Delete the Kisses.
Updated
Annie says that some years the judges “all hate each other” – not with our Harriet in the room surely! We recap the night’s performances. Mmm, that Lily song.
The drum roll is beginning... Annie introduces a montage of former winner celebrations. Baby faced Monkeys, possibly quite high Klaxons, blessing-bestowing Skepta and more.
Wolf Alice are the final live performance tonight, playing Don’t Delete the Kisses: a frankly magical song with sprechgesang lyrics from a barefoot Ellie Rowsell (perhaps bringing touches of cult post-punkers Life Without Buildings). Its an anthem for hipsters in love: trying to be aloof but letting your true feelings stumble out in a rush of feeling. Still one of the most unique songs released by a British guitar act in recent years.
Energy gang! Novelist does Nov Wait Stop Wait, his club heater that is almost like a bit of UKG toasting. It’s a bit of a lazy performance to be honest, his mic kept well below the vocal his DJ is playing - but his shoutout to his mum and his back and forth with the audience seems to fire him up for a final salvo of the chorus. A reminder that grime can still shake down a crowd, even if it’s been overtaken by the sensuality of Afro-swing in the last couple of years.
King Krule performs Dum Surfer, his brilliant, stumbling booze odyssey – “We’re mashed, we’re mashed ... I need another slash” – set to choppy post-punk and a guitar solo that wanders around trying to find its mates. His sahf Lahndon delivery works so beautifully, rooting him on the pavements and edgelands of the capital – his record is one of the great London listening experiences and would be an extremely worthy winner tonight.
This parish’s Dave Simpson recently ranked all of the previous Mercury winners in order of true greatness – for him, No 1 is the very first winner, Primal Scream’s Screamadelica. Check out his selection below. James Blake is way too low down imo.
Arctic Monkeys perform One Point Perspective in a specially recorded live performance as they continue their tour in their home city of Sheffield, Alex Turner now shorn of his Bob-from-Twin-Peaks do. Ah, let me count the ways I love this song – it could have been performed in the abandoned Vegas of Blade Runner 2049, or perhaps a working men’s club in the Red Riding trilogy. Turner grabs a guitar for a solo like a man with something brand new to say, then gets rid like he’s said it all before. Because of the way it conjures a complete world of semi-ironic razzle-dazzle, I think of all the albums on this shortlist, this will be the one that really endures, for all its occasional longeurs.
In her beautiful silvery beehive, Lily Allen performs Apples, a really smart choice – a magically minimal album track looking back sadly at the honeyed days of “staying in bed all day having sex and smoking fags”, and apologising for the breakdown of that relationship. Bed death, money issues, booze – the issues stack up, but the song never gets maudlin thanks to its simple syncopated guitar line keeping it up in the air. Lesser songwriters would have smothered this in strings or backing vocalists, but Allen knows that her brand of candour doesn’t require any of that. Certain nominees could learn a lot from it.
Updated
Nadine Shah, with an incredible thousand-yard stare, plays a blistering version of Out the Way. Her band are reminiscent of PJ Harvey’s bunch of burly blues-rockers, or the Bad Seeds, but their crunchy rhythms are full of post-punk fury. Shah swaggers like a boxer as she wraps her mic cord around her neck, looking close to laughter, tears or madness at the song’s close. The night’s most focused and furious performance.
Everything Everything were nominated years back for their debut Man Alive, which set out their stall: math rock-influenced guitar pop with fussy time signatures and dictionary-munching lyrics, but which nevertheless cohered into mega choruses. The formula remains the same in 2018, but with even bigger arena energy, and Night of the Long Knives is a brilliantly nervy bit of almost U2-level silliness. The tinny, delayed guitar solo is a nice drop of anti-rockstar energy. I find it incredibly difficult to listen to more than about five songs of these guys in a row without my palate needing a thorough spritz – it’s stuffed to the gills with information – but this could be a curveball winner tonight.
Updated
Jorja Smith performs Blue Lights, her breakthrough track that is loaded with the anxiety of a police stop-and-search. For me the breakbeat backing to this track is fairly rote, and keeps it from being truly arresting, but there is something so satisfying in the way Smith dances on a balance beam between rap and song. Having reimmersed myself in her album recently, it would be a worthy winner tonight – though I feel like it’ll be album three or four that really connects. Will she get that far in our hype-machined music culture? People expected big hits from her which she didn’t deliver, but hopefully she can modulate into a different kind of artist.
Updated
Scenes from the red carpet
A sergeant, an accountant and a mermaid walk into a bar...
Your hostess with ... I can’t do it. It’s Annie Mac, looking “100 emoji”.
Jorja Smith, almost certainly wearing Tiffany here, given she announced a partnership with them earlier this week. This will be my one and only designer spot I’m afraid.
Wolf Alice having a good ol’ giggle.
Lily Allen with a silvery beehive. When asked by our Laura Snapes if she might win, Allen replied “absolutely not!”, accompanied by hooting laughter.
Sons of Kemet next, with Shabaka Hutchings – a journeyman in British jazz who has played with everyone from Kamasi Washington to Floating Points to former Mercury nominees The Comet is Coming – getting a big whoop from the crowd as Annie Mac introduces them. They play My Queen is Harriet Tubman. If it’s Theon Cross’s tuba, and its magnificently limber bass weight, that propels their album forward, the sound man at the Apollo is giving a bit more weight to Hutchings here, whose tightly circular sax lines keep the energy ramped up. They spike even further as he hops up an octave for the climatic passages, as the two drummer splash a rampant rhythm out on the ride symbols. Their standing ovation is instant and euphoric!
Annie explains that Noel’s band, the High Flying Birds, weren’t able to make it, so that’s why he’s here but not performing tonight. Fair do’s. Instead there’s some VT of their performance of Holy Mountain on Later with Jools Holland – the big, blowsy, brassy, Roxy Music-jacking stomper of a lead single from Who Built the Moon? Shame that he couldn’t play live, as this – while basic in its way – is a big gust of simple, effective songwriting after the faff of Everything is Recorded.
Boo! Hiss! It’s Everything is Recorded, performing Close But Not Quite. Bandleader Richard Russell amasses an impressively sized squad, including Sampha on keys, and Russell himself cueing samples and a drum machine. A pregnant dancer flails her limbs around arrestingly. Is that Green Gartside on guitar? Well, as on record, these expensive ingredients turn to ash on my tongue. The central melody is tepid, and the song needs a big Curtis Mayfield sample to get even close to release-worthy. No-one is going to be listening to this album in even a few months from now. “That looks like a very fun band to be in,” says host Annie Mac. Well, quite, but not to listen to.
The live performances kick off
Florence + the Machine kick things off with a stripped-back, harp-laden version of Hunger.
Florence Welch still sounds like someone permanently coming up off a pill, with all the vague, face-touching wonderment that entails. “You make a fool of death with your beauty” – for me these lyrics fall short of real insight, and only reach a kind of sixth-form Romantic poetry. But Hunger does have a really strident gospel energy, and it makes for a starry opening to the show. Host Annie Mac thanks Florence for flying in specially.
Updated
Nadine Shah has criticised the Mercury prize organisation this year, arguing there aren’t enough lesser-known artists in the shortlist.
Now the Mercury is actually run by the same company, the BPI [British Phonographic Industry], I think it needs to find its feet again. It’s controversial of me to say so, but I do criticise it for that. It needs to establish once again, what is it that they’re trying to do. Why is Noel Gallagher being nominated? Why are there only two debut albums?
Everyone will have their own bugbears about what got left off, but of records that are likely to have been submitted, the omission of Sophie’s Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides grates on me the hardest: this sexy, sad and silly album has a wider emotional range than anything on the shortlist, and daringly does so with the very shiniest pop production. She is at the vanguard of contemporary music and absolutely deserves that “wider audience”. *hustled off soapbox* Still mad about Richard Dawson last year too! *bundled into unmarked vehicle*
Among those who are performing, Novelist’s album has flashes of greatness, and his repetitive, sloganeering approach certainly instils lines in your head, but he ultimately has a workaday lyrical vision, and the judges aren’t about to reward grime now the genre has fallen back down the pop-cultural pecking order.
You’d hope that Everything is Recorded won’t win – by some chalk the weakest album on the shortlist, indeed in the history of the prize, it’s dinner party music for coke-bloated 90s relics who have switched allegiance to expensive red wine and edibles; a tame, tuneless collection of trip-hop that conspires to bring the laziest writing out of its excellent guests Giggs, last year’s winner Sampha, Kamasi Washington et al. The man behind it, XL founder Richard Russell, has shepherded the careers of everyone from the Prodigy to Adele and should be lauded for that – but it’s hard not to feel his inclusion here is a case of the industry nepotistically rewarding one of their own.
Despite really strong albums, I can’t see Wolf Alice or Jorja Smith having quite enough pan-panel appeal. Lily Allen’s record is underrated, and giving it to her would be a great redemption story – she certainly thinks so – but despite its arrestingly candid lyrics its Caribbean-facing tracks might be seen as too lightweight for this rather grand prize.
But former nominees Everything Everything have amassed lots of goodwill after a series of vivid, popular albums, and A Fever Dream has some of their most politically charged and anthemic material – they could perhaps amass enough champions to push them over the line. Unlikely, but then the Mercury panel are often quite unpredictable.
Least likely to win are Arctic Monkeys, who aren’t attending thanks to touring commitments. Given the prize is decided by the panel on the night, they’re not going to give it someone who isn’t there and can’t perform a winner’s number. A shame, because their album is funny, atmospheric and in American Sports has the slyest takedown of Trump this year.
Noel Gallagher is there but isn’t scheduled to perform, probably because if you’re one of the most beloved songwriters in the UK who has sold tens of millions of albums, the approval of MistaJam isn’t something you’re particularly coveting. I think even these populist judges wouldn’t give the prize to someone so celebrated, for a solid but not earth-shattering entry in his catalogue.
That panel, incidentally, features the Guardian’s own Harriet Gibsone, deputy ed of the Guide, tonight sporting a blue corduroy flared suit that demands I use the word “natty”. Alongside her are: Clara Amfo off Radio 1; Ella Eyre, she of fabulous hair and Rudimental collaborations (in every sense); jazz champion Jamie Cullum; soul singer Lianne La Havas, killing it with those sleeves; Marcus Mumford of Mumford & Sons, not at the ceremony, lazy; Mike Walsh, head of music at Radio X; MistaJam from BBC Radio 1Xtra; Phil Alexander, who holds down jobs at both Kerrang and Mojo; and Will Hodgkinson, chief pop critic of the Times.
Joining them for the first time is Danielle Perry from Absolute Radio, who, in replacing Jessie Ware, perhaps skews the voting a bit more indie.
Their chair is Jeff Smith, head of music at 6 Music and Radio 2 and thus the chief driver of your dad’s taste. As chairman of the Mercury prize, David Wilkinson “co-ordinates” the judging, which hopefully doesn’t throw his weight around and make the panel give it to Everything is Recorded.
Sorry, some technical issues have meant some of these liveblog posts have become jumbled around.
The bookies’ top pick rarely ends up coming good, it must be cautioned: last year saw an odds surge for Glass Animals, replacing Kate Tempest as the most fancied, but Sampha ended up winning for his neo-soul weepie Process. In 2016, David Bowie was predicted to get a posthumous win, but Skepta took it home; while in 2015, Benjamin Clementine beat the favourite, Jamie xx.
But it’s worth saying that in all three cases, the eventual winner was only just behind the favourite in the odds, so it could well be that one of the top three wins tonight.
Who works this stuff out anyway? Can’t help but think it’s whoever DJs the Christmas party in the William Hill offices: “Here, Darren, which of these musicians is the most likely to win over a panel of industry experts vested in maintaining the mythic allure of the album format?”
Second fave is Sons of Kemet, the quartet who have been at the heart of an incredibly vibrant new British jazz scene in recent years. Powered by the nimble tuba lines of Theon Cross – the musical equivalent of an elephant ably doing ballet – their album Your Queen is a Reptile is a series of dedications to black female political activists, and the couple of lyric-based pieces go in hard on racism, Ukip and the Tories. If another aim of the prize is to “help introduce new albums from a range of music genres to a wider audience”, there isn’t a better candidate, and it’s another very 2018 album; I can see the jury wanting to acknowledge the scene around them too. If you held a gun to my head – hey, it’s just a middlebrow album competition, guy! – then I’d say they’re the likeliest winners.
Welcome to the Mercury prize 2018 liveblog
Yes, it’s time once again for a British album to be anointed alongside the likes of M People, Gomez, Speech Debelle and alt-J as the finest music this country is capable of producing – it’s the Mercury prize 2018! We’ll be rounding up the red carpet action, then following along with the BBC4 broadcast from 9pm, with the winner announced at 10.20pm.
At the ceremony itself is the Guardian’s Laura Snapes, who’ll be pinging through hot gossip in between doing some actual journalism. She has already got up close and personal with one of the nominee trophies, casually perched on a stack of chairs, and resembling something you have to try and unlock in The Crystal Maze.
Updated
The other criterion for the prize is “to recognise and celebrate artistic achievement”, and the third favourite deserves that: King Krule’s album The Ooz is an absolutely visionary blend of hip-hop, jazz, rockabilly, dub and more, that distills down all the dirt and jangled nerves of London life. Alongside Arctic Monkeys’ magnificent Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino concept, it is the most album-y album: one that works best listened to in full. Beloved by critics, it’s definitely a smart outsider bet. His suit vibe meanwhile is very much “Stop Making Sense David Byrne cosplay from Poundstretcher”.
Meet the favourite: Nadine Shah
Who do the bookies think is going to win? According to Oddschecker who collate various different odds, Nadine Shah is the favourite. She already won album of the year at the Aim awards earlier this month, and her record is certainly very 2018. A reflection on the refugee crisis, immigration, Trump, and the ennui of contemporary life, it very much fits with one of the stated aims of the prize: to “provide a snapshot of the year in music”. Also, with its rugged, forthright backings, it’s a little reminiscent of the most recent work by two-time winner PJ Harvey, and will likely have fans right across the judging panel. Also, points for that camo suit!
Updated
The shortlist
So here is the full shortlist, with links to our reviews of the records in question:
-
Lily Allen: No Shame
- Arctic Monkeys: Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino
- Everything Everything: A Fever Dream
- Everything Is Recorded: Everything Is Recorded
- Florence + the Machine: High as Hope
- Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds: Who Built the Moon?
- King Krule: The Ooz
- Novelist: Novelist Guy
- Nadine Shah: Holiday Destination
- Jorja Smith: Lost and Found
- Sons of Kemet: Your Queen is a Reptile
- Wolf Alice: Visions of a Life
Updated
Also at the ceremony is Iman Amrani, selfie-ing below, who will be posting action to the Guardian’s Instagram stories. If you’re following the ceremony here, on BBC4 and on Instagram you have some kind of screen addiction and should seek help, but please do so after enjoying our content this evening.
