Mercury Misses

As we prepare for tomorrow night’s Barclaycard Mercury Prize, spare a thought for Kit Downes. His jazz album, ‘Golden’, recorded with his band, the Kit Downes Trio, is one of the twelve nominees for this year’s prize. Currently it’s the rank outsider at 50-1.

Now, although Speech Debelle was loitering in a similar position this time last year, starting the day at 33-1, her win turned into something of a PR disaster. Thrusting such an unexpected choice into the limelight – and inevitably, the headline news – made the Mercury panel’s decision feel like some serious attention-seeking. I mean, fair enough if you’re determined to piss Radiohead off by nominating their every album and never letting them win – that’s mildly amusing – but just picking some relatively obscure musician cos you want to look like you’re know-alls? That’s a bit “look at us!”, innit?

Thus, poor old Kit. He really must be wondering what the point of him going along is. Whilst the judges love to chuck a curve ball every now and then, throwing two in two years might just be testing the nation’s patience. Instead this year we are going to be subjected to something predictable. Something safe. 2010 will surely be Paul Weller’s year. The bookmakers think so, that’s why they currently have him at 1-10.

For those of us still looking for an upset, though – i.e. the people sitting on Kit’s table – here’s an encouraging thought: the panel can’t keep nominating random classical or jazz acts without ever letting them win, can they? Haha! No! Chin up, Kit! This really could be your year! Maybe! Come on big guy!

Nah, only joking. You’ve got no chance. What’s important here is that you’re in good company. Over the years, some great albums have missed out on the prestige of being named Mercury Prize winners. These guys all painted their pièce de resistances, but lost out to a drawing of a cock and balls scrawled on the back of a fag packet:

1993
Winner: Suede ‘Suede’
Missed Out: PJ Harvey ‘Rid Of Me’
Not quite a cock and balls – Suede saved their crudely etched rubbish for 1999’s ‘Head Music’ and 2002’s ‘A New Morning’ – but not winning the 2nd ever Mercury Prize must have come as a kick in the ovary to PJ Harvey. ‘Rid Of Me’ is a harrowing portrait of a breakdown (I’ve just been re-acquainted with the brilliance of it via Spotify and have completely ruined the middle of the album by pausing to watch this:

- nice smoky organ in the intro, Richard), written during a period of intense personal difficulty. Steve Albini, producing, has said that during the recording sessions, PJ would eat nothing but potatoes. Still, after all that personal anguish, at least she lost out to the best Suede album of all time (which is probably the most underwhelming accolade attributed to an album, ever).

1994
Winner: M People ‘Elegant Slumming’
Missed Out: Blur ‘Parklife’
Unthinkably, in 1994, armed with one of the most important pop albums of the decade, Blur still lost out… to a band who made the Lighthouse Family sound like Slipknot. Shocking.

1995
Winner: Portishead ‘Dummy’
Missed Out: Oasis ‘Definitely Maybe’
Two very different sides of the coin, here. Whilst Portishead’s ‘Dummy’ is the discerning music fan’s album of choice; extending a far-reaching influence over the atmospherics of modern indie, Oasis’ gargantuan success throughout the latter 90s and early 00s was founded on the greatness of ‘Definitely Maybe’. It’s the only of their albums that sounded – ‘Columbia’ in particular – genuinely feral. Plus, they spelled “definitely” right, which, for them, turned out to be an intellectual high-point. Yet, still, no cigar.

1997
Winner: Roni Size/Reprazent ‘New Forms’
Missed Out: Radiohead ‘OK Computer’

2002
Winner: Ms. Dynamite ‘A Little Deeper’
Missed Out: The Streets ‘Original Pirate Material’
It seems like a bad memory, but UK garage really was big in 2002. While Ms. Dynamite’s intense-lee-hee-hee grating R&B guided her to the top ten and the Mercury Prize, Mike Skinner’s Lord-Byron-in-tracky-bottoms schtick was the real crossover success, merging the beats of the burgeoning scene with the wider indie conscience. Still, he didn’t win.

2005
Winner: Antony And The Johnsons ‘I’m A Bird Now’
Missed Out: Everyone else.
No, that’s not George Dawes in a Beatle wig, it is in fact Antony Hegarty, a controversial winner for several reasons, the least controversial of which being that his singing voice sounded like a trapped sheep. Those who missed out included Kaiser Chiefs, who sold 17 billion copies of ‘Employment’, Bloc Party and their teeth-rattling debut ‘Silent Alarm’, stadium bore-offs Coldplay with ‘X&Y’, and Hard-Fi, who would surely have snatched the prize, had they decided not to phone in their album artwork at the last minute. What’s that? It won awards? Well, not this one, it didn’t…

2009
Winner: Speech Debelle ‘Speech Therapy’
Missed Out: Florence And The Machine ‘Lungs’
Though not everyone’s cup of tea, Florence Welch is certainly more most people’s cup of tea than merely some people’s cup of tea. That is to say, excluding further talk of cups of tea, ‘Lungs’ has sold in excess of 100,000 albums. We would tell you how many Speech has sold, but there doesn’t seem to be any data out there. This is probably because it performed so pitifully. Even with the massive hype and increased media profile surrounding her win, she had still only sold 10,000 copies by November 2009. A recent estimate by industry insider, Mr. JJ Dunning of The Fly magazine, now puts that figure at somewhere in the region of 10,004.