Album recorded in a garage wins Mercury Prize for indie trio The xx

Louise Jury, Chief Arts Correspondent
Updated 13:14pm on 8 Sep 2010

Mercury Prize winners The xx said they were shocked to have beaten established names — and voiced caution about letting it go to their heads.

In Pictures: Mercury Awards 2010

The unassuming trio, who met and formed the band at school in Putney, pipped music veteran Paul Weller and former winner Dizzee Rascal to the prestigious £20,000 prize last night.

But they said they had had no expectation of winning, and had only invited a few friends for quiet drinks after the ceremony.

Bassist and vocalist Oliver Sim, 21, said he thought the prize would go to either nu-folk darling Laura Marling or the Cumbrian quartet Wild Beasts.

And asked what they would do with the winner's cheque, singer and guitarist Romy Madley Croft suggested a practical use for the cash — a new studio. “We made this album in a converted garage the size of a bathroom,” she said.

But there is no rush towards a second album. Sim said they intended to “take things slowly,” adding: “There's no master plan.”

Their win would appear to be a coup for their school, Elliott comprehensive, which nurtured previous Mercury nominees Hot Chip and Burial. But Sim said the school had not played a major role in their musical career. “I don't want to give them too much credit because technically they just neglected us,” he said.

“There was so much time to do our own thing and they gave us a room to hang out in during break-time and gave us time to figure things out for ourselves, which worked quite well for us because I always find it hard being taught something creative.”

But he knew nothing of previous musical successes Hot Chip and Burial when he was there. “The school's claim to fame was Pierce Brosnan.”
The band were first spotted by independent label Young Turks after posting demo tracks on MySpace. The Barclays Mercury Prize judges predicted a wider audience for the sparse, electronic pop.

Jury chairman Simon Frith said the band's debut, xx, “had legs” and would gather more people who had not yet heard it: “It has the most amazing sense of mood and atmosphere and there's nothing quite like it.”

COMMENTARY
David Smyth
For once, the public, the bookies and the famously obtuse judging panel appeared to be in full agreement: The xx were worthy winners.
As one of the 12 judges, I can confirm that giving the £20,000 cheque to the minimal trio from Wandsworth was a remarkably pain-free decision. Although the strong shortlist of 12 threw up an impressive number of plausible victors, The xx's self-titled debut was the obvious standout from the beginning of the decision process.

The Mercury has been a nebulous beast since its 1992 inception, valuing artistic merit over sales, and its insistence on putting arena-filling rock alongside turbulent jazz leads to confusion and controversy. It does not claim to name the “best” album of the year.

The judges are instead encouraged to look for the album that best sums up the past 12 months in British music — which explains why some past winners, such as Talvin Singh and Ms Dynamite, have dated so badly. In that respect, Oliver Sim, Romy Madley Croft and Jamie Smith were a shoo-in.

Taking their inspiration from dark London dubstep, American R&B and minimal indie rock but sounding distinctively themselves, theirs is an album that could not have been made at any other time.

The wider public is already subconsciously familiar with their work. Since its release last August no moody TV clip has been complete without the extra atmosphere provided by the echoing guitar of their track Intro.

It has most in common with one past Mercury winner — Dummy by Portishead. That too took elements of dance music, slowed them to a crawl and draped them in painfully intimate vocals that only really make sense at 3am. Madley Croft and Sim's whispered duets almost sound too personal for public consumption, despite them being platonic best pals since toddlerhood.

I worry that shining this glaring spotlight on such an introverted band could ruin them with unwanted pressure, but to withhold the award from this extraordinary album would have been a bigger mistake. As the prize's detractors know, there is no right answer but this is as close to one as the Mercury has come in a while.