Mercury Music Prize: In Defence Of Young Fathers

It wasn't quite the token jazz act winning the award, and it wasn't quite Speech Debelle but there were audible gasps inside London's Roundhouse when Edinburgh-based hip-hop band Young Fathers were announced as the winner of the Mercury Music Prize on Wednesday (October 29, 2014).

Though Young Fathers are hardly the most well-known band in Britain, they're hardly the most obscure. Which makes Neil McCormick's article in the Telegraph today all the more hilarious. McCormick - a journalist who genuinley asked why Ed Sheeran wasn't on the Mercury shortlist - seemed genuinely perplexed by the sheer existence of Young Fathers, as if they were three blokes from outer-Mongolia banging sticks together.

"Apparently the Best Album of the past 12 months was an obscure mash-up of hip-hop groove, psychedelia, world music and politically conscious lyrics that nobody paid the slightest bit of attention to at the time," he wrote, furiously. In fact, Dead received glowing reviews in the music press and in most of the major British newspapers. McCormick's own colleague Ben Thompson profiled the band in an extensive piece.

More: check out our Young Fathers pictures

Singles from Dead have also been played regularly on BBC6 Music and BBC Radio 1. Hell, the album even won Scottish Album of the Year in June. It's not as if nobody saw this coming.

As John Kennedy, a Mercury Prize judge, said: "The aim of The Mercury Prize is to try and highlight albums that might have been slightly overlooked. The winner has to reflect a particular year in music but also potentially to have created a classic piece of work that can stand the test of time."