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English Teacher are worthy Mercury winners – but the question of the prize’s future hangs heavy
The smart, strange Leeds quartet clearly have a bright future ahead of them. But with no sponsor and a straitened ceremony, the same can’t be said for the Mercury
The bookies – who invariably go for the most commercially successful album – thought it would be Charli xcx, while the smart money was probably on Corinne Bailey Rae’s daringly eclectic Black Rainbows. The music, meanwhile, seems to delight in continually throwing the listener curveballs; the melodies twist and turn in unexpected ways, there are proggy shifts in time signature, a folky bent coexists with electronica, garage-rock guitar riffs, what seems to be a dub-influenced sense of space. It’s a climate in which the kind of cast-iron authority the Mercury has always purported to wield over musical worth – “I never, ever think we have got a winner wrong,” claimed then chair of judges Simon Frith in 2006 – looks shakier than ever, and, accordingly, no one seems that bothered.
Or read this on The Guardian
