Since 2010 the “Barclaycard” Mercury Prize, around since 1992 to hand out a coupla grand to worthy winners, have gotten it rightish three out of four times. And this year and 2010, while I would’ve given the award for the best album of the year from the UK and Ireland to Laura Marling, I’ll live with their choices. And applaud their choice of James Blake who might suck live but whose Overgrown doesn’t have you wishing he’d buy a guitar and change his name to Blunt.
Here are the last four winners
2010 – The xx – The xx
2011 – PJ Harvey – Let England Swing
2012 – Alt J – An Awesome Wave
2013 – James Blake – Overgrown
The problem here is Alt J, who were awful at Gov’s Ball and really didn’t much deserve it last year. Blake is not a problem, I don’t listen to him all the time but both of his albums are excellent and while live… well, let me quote myself for you: “It is lively and enliving music but it is a bore to watch. The visuals are a dark when not lit (if you see what I mean) stage with men sitting and playing and that’s about it. There is no close circuit on the stage so you can’t really see what they are doing, Blake is facing us so we can’t see his hands, and Blake mumbles so if he has anything of interest to tell you, and from what I could make out he doesn’t, you can’t understand it anyway.”
Barclaycard should sponsor best live show award while they are at it by the way, but they haven’t so OK, I will let Jake win this one without too much whining about my girl losing.