Spotlight

Congratulations to Skepta for winning the 2016 Hyundai Mercury Music Prize!

The Mercury Prize, this year sponsored by Hyundai, has been the staple of what defines the British and Irish music industry by shining a light on the acts that are shaping modern music. Renowned around the world, a spot on the shortlist can drastically move an act form being on the periphery of a glistening career to the very forefront. Not only do you get to be on an exclusive list which acknowledges your musical merit, you have the chance to multiply your income (in an industry which we all know is getting harder and harder to make a living in) through the subsequent album sales and extended tours, which arise from purely receiving a nomination. Then if you clinch the top spot you get a £25,000 cheque, as well as the acknowledgement of being the very best in British and Irish music for the year.

For the first time in its 24 years, the format of the awards has been changed. In past times a panel of musicians, music presenters, producers, journalists, festival organisers and other figures in the music industry put together a list of six albums that have been put forward by labels, which are then judged by the respective panel on the day of the awards. This year the panel have put forward twelve albums that will be whittled done to six via an online vote, which will then be judged by the panel on the day of the awards. Whether this will have a profound effect on the end result is yet to be seen, as worries that the acts with the biggest fan bases taking rule in the inaugural vote are already being voiced.

As per usual, a diverse and eclectic mix of music has been nominated – electropop, art rock, baroque pop, electronic R&B, grime, soul, post punk, pop and jazz. This year’s list is one of the more commercially successful in Mercury Prize’s history with the majority of albums having taken the UK number one spot or held itself in the Top 10. Only two acts have debut albums featured and, incredibly, half of the nominations have appeared on the shortlist before.

Here is a brief look at the albums up for the this years Mercury Prize award:

"Back to being pissed off," is how bassist Tom Fleming put it, in describing Boy King, the fifth album from this Cumbria-to-London alt-electro-indie band. "What I think he means by that," says Chris Talbot, drummer with the band, "is this is album number five and although we're not getting on a bit just yet, we're thirty years old and I suppose it's the next bench mark after you've turned 18 and 21. It feels like the end of your youth. But I think if you want to still be creative and making music and art you have to have fire in your belly. I think that's what he means by being pissed off."

And they've got their guitars back out for this one, in creating a bigger, more snarling and funked up sound. "I think Boy King is an apocalyptic record," says singer and lyricist Hayden Thorpe. “It's about swimming in the abyss. When you think about sex, you've got to think about death, they're one and the same.”

Indeed. Sex and death are continuing themes for the aptly named band, one who has never shone away from describing our basest desires in sometimes, frankly, lurid ways, but always with a touch of poetry to soften the, er, blow.

Meanwhile, Chris has been spending a fair amount time in France, watching England getting battered in the Euros, as he explains to me while he is briefly back in England, in-between games, promotional duties calling. “You’ve caught me at an end of a long day,” he says. “We've had a couple of photoshoots, couple of interviews, and I've just come back form France this morning, from the football. I'm heading back out there today.

“I missed the Wales game but I was at that Marseilles (versus Russia) and the St. Etienne game (versus Slovakia). The football has been mixed,” he laughs. “I imagine the violence aspect of it has been getting a lot of coverage, but I haven't seen that. It’s difficult to portray the actual spirit of the places I've been in. It's so big. There have been pockets of disruption, but a lot more people are just chilling out and enjoying a sporting event. I'm having a fun time!

“I’ve been with a few friends from back home; it may be the last chance they get to enjoy something like this without the girlfriends, before life gets more serious,” he laughs.

It was almost 40 years ago that the founding members of Killing Joke staged a fire ritual that burnt down their London flat; an aptly chaotic birth for a band that would spend the next four decades tearing through conventions both musical and spiritual. It also provided one of the big laughs of Geordie's life in watching Jaz Coleman run down the street naked.

"We've used Killing Joke as one enormous experiment in manifesting each one of our personal dreams."

Eleven years in the making, already delayed by a year or so, The Death and Resurrection Show finally gets to see the light of day this summer, although it has been shown at the odd film festival, including Brighton's Cine City. But that was back in late 2014. I'm not sure why it's been delayed, beyond issues of finance, legal problems and notions of perfectionism but it'll be worth the long wait. Not only for Killing Joke fans in particular, but the wider public, who may in turn be repulsed and fascinated by this extraordinary story and the characters who inhabit it. It's an epic, clocking in at just under two-and-a-half hours, a fairly thorough documentary of one of the greatest, most uncompromising bands of the post-punk era. A band unbelievably still going strong, who still feature the original four members, one who have only ever recorded one cover song in their whole history (Sex Pistols' 'Bodies'), and who musically have remained true to the paranoid/visionary outlook of Jaz Coleman, the main protagonist.

The Death and Resurrection Show (TDARS) goes some way to explaining their durability but, thankfully, it doesn't get too dewey-eyed. Like the fact Killing Joke have never written a love song, TDARS avoids asking too many questions about friendship, comradeship and love. But, it's obvious there is an uncommon bond between Jaz Coleman, 'Big' Paul Ferguson, Martin 'Youth' Glover and Kevin 'Geordie' Walker, one that has survived many disruptions as well as the heightened intensity as only being in a band can do. Their 2015 album Pylon was their third highest ever chart placing (16), and the first Top 20 since Pandemonium in 1994, such is their unlikely durability.

But despite their legendary status, they've always been a cult band, albeit one who had a brush with fame in the mid-80s with the hit single ‘Love Like Blood’. However, their sometimes ‘us and them’ outlook, antagonist posturing and their tribalistic bearing has had the effect of turning some people off, as has their uncompromising music (unlike, say, the similarly independently-minded, durable and politically savvy The Levellers, who were and still are a much more fan-friendly unit, musically and personality-wise), a music that fused the raw energy of punk with a metal sheen, and a funk-dance rhythm set off by the explosive drumming of Ferguson and the grungey-meets-metallic guitar work of Walker. Beautifully dark rhythmically for those who got it, demonically noisy for those who didn't. Moreover, on stage the tone was always set by Jaz, his dark features creasing with fury, that thousand yard stare looking for all the world like a man possessed. Frankly, it’s understandably not everyone's cup of tea.

But for those who got it, indeed rejoiced in it, Killing Joke became more than just a band, but a metaphor for the world, and all its growing problems, its alienating propensities, and its tendency to self-destruct.

We are halfway through 2016 but you'd be forgiven for thinking that we're further in – it has been a roller-coaster of a year so far. In amongst the non-stop throttle of crazy news stories and a seemingly endless supply of celebrity deaths to mourn, we've actually had a phenomenal dose of new music to gorge upon. We invited our writers to offer us a shortlist – a favourite album of 2016 that they have reviewed for us, a favourite live show in Brighton they have attended and a favourite album that we somehow missed! Here's what they had to say…

American Kacey Underwood met Brit Alice Costelloe whilst living in London in 2010, teaching her some songs on the guitar. Not only did love blossom but so did Big Deal, the band they formed as a duo. They quickly released the lo-fi acoustic/electric grunge-pop Lights Out the following year, followed by June Gloom, released on the legendary Mute label in 2013. Around this time they expanded to a four-piece, bringing in drums and more guitars, with Jessica Bator on drums and Jesse Wong on bass. But, despite touring with Depeche Mode and winning critical and popular acclaim, Mute, in an ever-challenging financial world, decided not to renew their contract. This, however, only gave them the impetus to move forward.

“We parted with our label, Mute,” says Kacey, speaking on the phone while the band make their way to Leeds for the first date of a UK tour. “Our contract was up, and we didn't want to wait around. We just went back in and made a record. We generally try and take things in our hands. The only way we could do that was fund it ourselves and then shop it around to labels afterwards, which is what we did. It was nice. We didn't have people from the label coming down to check on us, and giving us any deadlines that created any extra stress. Funding it ourselves gave us a bit more freedom.”

How did you raise the money? “We thought about raising the money publicly, doing the whole crowd-sourcing, social media thing. But that gives us the heebee jeebies. So, we borrowed the money from our parents, and luckily our parents are fans.”

How about those Disclosure brothers? They've done good, haven't they? From nowhere to international jet setters in the blink of an eye; from playing guitar and the usual paraphernalia of teenagers, they switched overnight to all things electronic, posted a few things online, and voila! Their timing could not have been more perfect, with the house music re-revolution coming like a tornado through the dying hinterland of EDM, they've been huge catalysts in re-igniting a scene that was fast decaying and had become, frankly, rather boring.

It perhaps helped that they had no previous in dance music. Guy Lawrence was a drummer in a guitar band, who listened to some hip hop and his younger brother Howard listened to singer-songwriters, funk and soul, for instance Seal. It was only when Guy turned 18 and started to venture into clubs, some in Brighton, and hearing sets from the likes of Floating Points, Burial, James Blake, and Joy Orbison ("forward thinking music," says Guy) for the first time, that he persuaded younger brother Howard to make electronic music with him, Howard learning how to make beats on a laptop. But with the help of their rock guitarist father turned auctioneer they used a room above an auction house to practise in, to make some noise, Guy ending up mixing and producing what Howard had done on his laptop. Somehow they found management and a record deal almost immediately after putting their earliest experiments on Myspace. So inexperienced were they that early meetings dealt with how to clear samples and how to get hold of the isolated acapella vocals they needed to make remixes. At the same time they were being offered big money to get behind the decks, despite the fact that neither of them had DJ’d in their lives.

The Southampton-based Band of Skulls were the prime movers in kick starting a British back-to-basics rock'n'blues approach that saw the likes of Royal Blood recently take full advantage, although of course it was the American White Stripes and Black Keys who helped to pave the way for all concerned. They in turn can trace their ancestry to the likes of Led Zep et al. Such is the great turning wheel that is rock'n'roll.

Their no-nonsense approach, allied to a bag of great tunes, helped them to get out of the blocks quickly back in September 2009 with their critically acclaimed debut album Baby Darling Doll Face, released just barely months after they decided upon the name Band of Skulls. In fact, as I mention to lead singer and guitarist Russell Marsden, upon the release of that album they were still playing small venues such as Latest Bar in Brighton. "I remember that one," he says. You worked on a ticket sales split I say (hands up: I booked the band). "Really?" he says with a note of disbelief. "Well it was only a few miles from Southampton," he laughs. It was right on the cusp when interest in the band started ballooning, to become one of the biggest guitar bands of the last few years.

As part of the preparations for album number four, By Default, which is being released at the end of May, they've just done a couple of similarly small warm up shows, helping to get the train chugging along once again. "In the last week, we've just done a couple of warm ups, secret shows. We played up in Guildford, a really small show. If you can do that, you can do anything. If you can play those small clubs you can play a big stage," he reasons. "You've got to be able to convince a hundred people before you can convince any more than that. You do miss it when you're in the studio, to get out there and do some gigs. Sometimes those small ones are the best, everyone is close to each other.

"It's the calm before the storm," continues Russell, who along with drummer Matt Hayward and bassist Emma Richardson, make up Band of Skulls. "The weather is nice, isn't it? It would be very easy to go to the pub, but I'm doing well not doing that," he laughs. "We've been working on the record intensely, and now it's just a little moment before it comes out, and it goes crazy. It's the calmest moment you have got me at!”

But, it’s still exciting? "It's still exciting. It's a funny thing, with the first record you don't know what to expect. Just talking to you, knowing that we'll be coming to Brighton soon, you start to feel it and look forward to it. The moment of sharing that on the record never goes away, it’s always quite a thrill."

Eagulls. An unlikely name for an unlikely band. Do people ever struggle with your name, Eagulls? "Of course they do!" says singer George Mitchell. "I like that. It's a nonsensical word. It’s a joke that's gone too far. And it's still there. I find it funny."

You don't know what to expect with a name like that, I say. "Yeah. It's like a deterrent. Why would I want to listen to a band with that name? You know what I mean? In a sense, it's the people who are going to listen to a band with that name who had to really want to even give it a chance. I wouldn't want to be clicking on a link, and listen to this band called Eagulls. Fuck that!"

This is the thing about Eagulls. They are funny, acerbic even, but also deadly serious, as they channel the spirit and sound of 80s post punk into the here and now. They are a band respectful of an era they weren't alive in, rather than chained to.

The Leeds five-piece were initially formed in 2010 by Henry Ruddel (drums) and guitarist Mark Goldsworthy (aka Goldy). They then recruited Liam Matthews on guitar, before Tom Kelly arrived on bass, followed by singer George Mitchell. “We had faith in him ’cause we knew his character and had seen drawings that he’d done,” Mark has previously explained. “All of that was what we wanted to project with our lyrics. We didn’t want them to be too deep or too serious. Not loads of metaphors, just something real.”

"Before the band I did used to write nonsensical poetry, whilst I was drawing," says George. "I've always been more of a drawer than a writer. I used to write words that I liked and rhymed them with things. Like Dadaesque rhymes, really.