
Alright? A Very Sarcastic Person here. So I suppose you’re expecting me to pour cold water over this year’s Mercury Nominees, aren’t you? Because that’s what you’d expect of someone totally sarcastic, wouldn’t you just? In fact that’s what you’d expect from Vice isn’t it? Something disparaging about how the Mercury Prize is as edgy and relevant as a grandmother made of cotton wool. And you’d sit back and feel oh-so-bloody-superior in your shitty office job knowing that someone had conformed entirely to your narrow weave of prejudice, and then you’d lean over to your dumb as muck colleague and relate this, and you two would chortle heartily about how bloody good you are at reading between media lines, ha ha ha, then you’d go back to fiddling with Microsoft Excel and wishing you were dead. Well screw you, I’m doing it anyway.
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Did someone say “tasteful urban”? Oh, you said “turban”? My mistake. Still, here I am, just rapping my conscious winky wanky woo at you; y’know – you got to educate to accelerate. You got to realise to have real eyes. You got to dream to do you got to do to be you got to do-be-do-be-dooo. Everybody! Free-ee jazz!! Hope this is non-threatening enough, honkies.Florence and the Machine
Look at me. Look at me. You can’t stop looking at me, can you? Because I appear in every magazine you’ve ever read in the same photo over and over - the one where I’m holding a bag of rusty gold sequins! You’re transfixed, oh bovine media consumer. Look at me! I’ve got legs! Oh, they’re sure to vote for a candidate with legs! If I win this prize, I promise I will let the nation’s media outlets all go up onto the platform and collect it for me, because they’ve truly earnt it. Yes, hype is the real winner here.Bat For Lashes
Woooo! I’m like a ghost, only spookier. *wafts around room, waving arms wildly and knocking over candelabras*Kasabian
Alright? Alright. Alright. Alright? Yeah. Alright. Alright, so yeah, so we’re here cos you’re looking for someone to give an acceptance speech so gak-ed up it’ll make Bowie at Victoria Station look like JM Coetzee’s Nobel Prize dinner? Sound.The Invisible
Do you really wish you could have nominated TV On The Radio? Us too. Dear Science just made us all musigasm, didn’t it? First of all it name-checked Science (brain alert!). Then it delivered music which was hard to pigeonhole (lengthy list of influences in review alert!). They’re Americans though. Well how about some anodyne math-funk fiddlebottoms who are all 78 years old but entirely British? Yer on!
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Oh, go on. Give it to Scotland. Those plucky Bravehearts with their haggis and their Stones Of Scones and their ritual street beatings and their verbiage that sounds like their windpipes have been cut – they need the money so they can buy some consonants to go with all those vowels, singing about their social workers and voting SNP when taxes from Westminster pay for those selfsame social workers. Devolution is real and that means it’s Scotland’s turn.La Roux
Give it to me and I promise to become even more big-headed so you can laugh at me even harder.Lisa Hannigan
I’ve probably been on Jools Holland. I was probably quite decent. Jools, is so charming, with his twinkly fingers, his wry wit, his effusive arm gestures. I wish he was the Mercury Music panel.Friendly Fires
Dance. Is. Back. AGAIN.The Horrors
Narrative. A bloody narrative, that’s what this is all about. Everyone wants a story of hope over fate, of a phoenix tearing hell for leather out of the fucking flames and blowing the music industry to smithereens. And we’ve got one. Boy have we got one. Here it is. Band makes second album better than first. There you go. No, well, now that you mention, it doesn’t sound quite so transcendent when you write it down like that. But given how everyone keeps banging on and on about this fact so hard… there’s got to be something special there, if you really think about it? No?
