Alt-J wins Mercury prize
Posted November 2, 2012 5:52 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
Up and coming British indie band Alt-J have scooped the coveted Barclaycard Mercury Prize with their debut album An Awesome Wave.
Speaking to the media shortly after the award ceremony at the Roundhouse in Camden, north London, the band said they were ‘bowled over beyond belief’ with the win.
Vocalist Joe Newman said: “Basically adrenaline is running through all of our veins.”
Newman, Thom Green, Gus Unger-Hamilton and Gwil Sainsbury met at Leeds University in 2007 and went from playing gigs in student pubs to getting a deal with Infectious Records in 2011.
The band has been a favourite with bookmakers from the start of this year’s Mercury race. When asked about their album, keyboardist Gus Unger-Hamilton said he listens to it a lot saying: “I love it because we made it and it’s just us who were all at uni together it’s the same four guys who were always in a band.”
On the way into the event, Unger-Hamilton joked that some of the people they met at university who never came to see them are regretting it now.
Alt-J beat off competition from 11 other nominees including Plan B, Django Django and Richard Hawley.
Before heading into the award show, Hawley explained why he’s such a big fan of the Mercury Prize: “The winning is irrelevant in a lot of ways, the reason I like the Mercury Prize is very simply because it celebrates the album,” he said.
Although Django Django did not win band member Vincent Neff said just the nomination had created a massive buzz.
“Yeah we went to America a few days after we got nominated and I hadn’t really realized how far a reach the Mercury’s has but like the first question from all the American journalists was ‘how do you feel about the Mercury’s’ so I was a bit surprised by that so yeah we have had really good responses and it’s kind of opened us up to people who might not have listened to us before,” Neff said.
The Mercury Prize, which has gone to a wide range of musical genres since it began in 1992, honours music by British or Irish artists and is based solely on the music on the album.
Previous winners include Franz Ferdinand, Arctic Monkeys and Dizzee Rascal.
