{"id":142256,"date":"2025-10-24T07:37:18","date_gmt":"2025-10-24T07:37:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/142256\/"},"modified":"2025-10-24T07:37:18","modified_gmt":"2025-10-24T07:37:18","slug":"londons-dominance-of-the-mercury-prize-mercury-prize","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/142256\/","title":{"rendered":"London\u2019s dominance of the Mercury prize | Mercury prize"},"content":{"rendered":"

As chair of the Mercury music prize judging panel from 1992 to 2016 (while living in Scotland), I always thought that its geography problem (Artists outside London \u2018underrepresented on Mercury prize shortlist\u2019, 16 October<\/a>) was that the judges primarily lived and worked in London, wherever they were from originally. (The year with the most\u00a0Scots acts on the shortlist was also the year with the most Scotland-based judges.)<\/p>\n

But this is an inevitable result of London\u2019s long and increasingly dominant place in the arts business and, for example, the decline of BBC local radio \u2013 early panels included local radio DJs.<\/p>\n

The table published with your article assigned acts to regions according to where \u201cthey are generally recognised to have started\u00a0their careers\u201d, but it is hardly surprising that musicians, wherever they come from, move to\u00a0London for such a start.<\/p>\n

It is certainly the case that there has been something of a London-centric movement if you look at Mercury winners: by my reckoning, in the first 10 years only two of the winners came from London; since then, the statistic is 12 winners from London to 10 from everywhere else. But then this reflects the creativity of London\u2019s black music scene, which provided nine of the 12 winners.
Simon Frith<\/strong>
Hexham, Northumberland<\/p>\n

Have an opinion on anything you\u2019ve read in the Guardian today? Please <\/strong>email<\/strong><\/a> us your letter and it will be considered for publication in our <\/strong>letters<\/strong><\/a> section.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As chair of the Mercury music prize judging panel from 1992 to 2016 (while living in Scotland), I…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":142257,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[264],"tags":[18,117,19,17,337],"class_list":{"0":"post-142256","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-eire","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-ie","11":"tag-ireland","12":"tag-music"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/115428002568168652","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142256","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=142256"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142256\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/142257"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=142256"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=142256"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=142256"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}