Erm, dunno, give it to the Arctic Monkeys again? ... Alex Turner accepts the Mercury prize in 2006. Photograph: Joel Ryan/PA
I'm starting to feel a bit sorry for the people who organise the Nationwide Mercury prize, whose shortlist is announced on Tuesday. After all, no one seems to like it. It's either too abstruse in its choices, or too safe. People moaned when the Arctic Monkeys and Franz Ferdinand won it, on the not-entirely unreasonable grounds that the Arctic Monkeys and Franz Ferdinand didn't need the moderate boost to sales that the Mercury provides, but when they gave it to the more left-field Antony and the Johnsons, people moaned about that as well. There was a brilliantly mad article in The Times that stops just short of blaming Antony and the Johnsons' victory for the imminent collapse of the entire British music industry.
People complained that it pretended you could judge modern classical music by the same criteria as Beverley Knight, but then they stopped including modern classical stuff and people complained about that as well. (In fairness, this state of affairs probably wasn't helped by Mercury panel chairman Simon Frith's explanation that the reason there wasn't any modern classical albums nominated in recent years is that there wasn't a modern classical album fit to join the glittering array of shortlisted albums).
I know nothing whatsoever about classical music, modern or otherwise, but I still find it hard to believe that British composers didn't produce anything last year that could match the glittering musical standard set by, say, the Editors' debut album. People complained that it was tokenist to include one folk or jazz album every year that never ever won the prize, then they complain if it doesn't.
So what - if anything - can be done to improve it, to somehow win it a place in the nation's heart? Perhaps they should ignore the charges of tokenism and go back to the days when the shortlist was eclectic: whichever way you slice it, and whoever actually won it, a list of records that includes Sir Peter Maxwell-Davis, Underworld, Black Grape, Norma Waterson and Mark "Return of the Mack" Morrison has got to be more interesting than a list of albums on which Thom Yorke's The Eraser counts as pretty much the most left-field choice.
Perhaps they should try and include more second albums: the preponderance of debuts seems to underline the firework-band trajectory of British rock at the moment. Perhaps they should make it like the American Shortlist prize, which concentrated entirely on albums that had sold less than 100,000 copies (not much by US standards - you could lower that figure for Britain). Perhaps they should give it to a warbling transvestite every year and thus bring about the collapse of the entire British music industry.
What do you think? How could they improve it? Is it fine as it is? Your suggestions, please.
