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Off the record
Evening Standard 07.09.07
Not losing out: Sales for Mercury nominee Bat For Lashes have gone up by 185 per cent
Look here too
David Smyth looks at the record sales since the Mercury Music Prize and finds it is not just the big winners who are benefitting.
THE REAL MERCURY WINNERS
So Klaxons stumbled drunkenly off with the £20,000 cheque at the Nationwide Mercury Prize on Tuesday. But if you watched the ceremony you may have noticed that each of the 12 nominees received a trophy. Yes, in classic school sports day style, they're all winners. It's just that some are bigger winners than others - and they aren't necessarily the ones in the spotlight this week.
Look at the sales figures since the ceremony took place. According to HMV, in just one day Klaxons saw a fivefold increase in sales of their victorious album. That's to be expected, but the other success stories are more surprising. Irish solo artist Fionn Regan, a rank outsider, was next best, his album sales going up by 212 per cent. Then there's Bat For Lashes at 185 per cent, followed by Maps at 150 per cent and the classical/jazz entry, Basquiat Strings, at 96 per cent. Arctic Monkeys album sales went up by just six per cent .
"Of course it's all proportional, but a big increase in sales for someone who wasn't previously getting much attention is huge for their careers," says Gennaro Castaldo, HMV spokesman.
Just ask folk singer Seth Lakeman, a past nominee. Before he was shortlisted in the summer of 2005 for Kitty Jay, an album he recorded in his brother's kitchen, it had sold 1,000 copies. By Christmas that year it had sold 30,000 and he was on the way to signing a major label deal with Relentless, whose bosses were at the Mercury ceremony with their charge KT Tunstall, and were so taken with Lakeman's performance at the event that they began to chase his signature that night.
Every year the shortlist includes a real outsider, with no chance of winning. This year it was the jazz cum classical quintet Basquiat Strings. But the idea that they are "token" entrants, there to make up the numbers, infuriates Steve Kersley, managing director of Proper Music, which distributes their album as well as work by past Mercury minnows including Lakeman, Eliza Carthy, Polar Bear and Soweto Kinch.
"As far as independent and specialist-music goes, the Mercury is the biggest, most supportive thing going," he says. "Before the nominations were announced, we'd sold 270 copies of the Basquiat Strings album. Now it's 6,000, which is massive for a classical quintet playing jazz. The Mercury is one of the few things that really can pluck someone from nowhere and give them a chance."
The judges are wilful enough to suppose that one day a token entry really will take home the big cheque. Until then, the little people are doing very nicely all the same.
AN EARLY LISTEN TO ...
Foo Fighters
Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace (RCA)
Dave Grohl's Foo Fighters are now such an established A-list force in US rock that it's hardly worth mentioning that he used to be in Nirvana. His band's sixth album, released at the end of this month, is shaping up to be one of the biggest of the year once again, thanks to wideranging songwriting that will appeal to both the kids just discovering guitars and fans who stopped smelling like Teen Spirit decades ago.
The new songs veer all over the place, counterbalancing the album's mellow title with the barking anger of new single The Pretender and the pounding, classic rock of Cheer Up, Boys. Home is a rare piano ballad, and other acoustic moments offer relief from the onslaught in the gaps between fierce guitars on epic tracks such as Let It Die and But, Honestly. Grohl has nothing more to prove, but it sounds like he's still enjoying his music here, and he's so long into his career that's an impressive feat in itself.
NEW ON THE NET ... KLAXONS
So you've lost your shirt because Amy Winehouse didn't win the Mercury and now you're wondering why these Klaxons fellows think they're pushing music forward. Selective downloading is the best way to introduce yourself to their day-glo sound, which is sometimes a mess and sometimes not that different from every other indie band around, but here and there succeeds in bringing the excitement of dance music to the rock world.
The iTunes store has the victorious album, Myths of the Near Future, and plenty more, though I only found the band's punky cover of novelty rave hit The Bouncer, which first showed where they were coming from, here: www.pinglewood.com /2007/May/Forget_Our_Future_Plans.html.
From the album, siren-packed early single Atlantis to Interzone and the tracks Gravity's Rainbow and Magick best demonstrate their noisy, bonkers inventiveness. But it's the numerous fantastic dance remixes by hot producers that show why the disco loves them. Check out the Switch mix of Golden Skan's, Simian Mobile Disco's take on Magick and the Blende version of It's Not Over Yet.
