So far there has been 21 winners of the Mercury Prize, or Mercury Music Prize as it was once called. It’s now officially called the Barclaycard Music Prize for sponsorship reasons, but we’ll stick with Mercury Prize from here on in, I think. Since it began all the way back in 1992 the Mercury Prize…
Who says there are no great protest songs any more!? PJ Harvey proved this year that there is still plenty of room in the music world for a politically charged protest album about the horrors of war – winning the Mercury Prize along the way. The most striking thing about Let England Shake, though, isn’t…
To be perfectly honest from the off, the three words that are almost guaranteed to send a shiver down our spine are ‘anti’ ‘war’ ‘album’. Thoughts immediately turn to rock stars trying too hard to convey their liberal, empathetic tendencies by making heavy-handed, ego-centric music that, more often than not, patronises its subject matter and…
