Pop goes the Mercury?

The Mercury Music Prize is widely regarded as a more credible alternative to the record industry backslapping that has come to typify the BRIT Awards, in which Fearne Cotton is still perplexingly seen as the voice of modern youth and the biggest prize frequently goes to the biggest star in their respective category who deigns to turn up. Instead, the Mercury tends to reward, in strictly relative terms, the little man. From long serving cult acts who never quite crossed over into multi-platinum mainstream success (PJ Harvey, Elbow) to exciting up-and-comers (xx, Badly Drawn Boy, Dizzee Rascal back when he had credibility), the prize tends to reflect acts that are a little more raw, a little less airbrushed, generally a little less ITV Primetime palatable.

So it’s easy to understand why some critics are muttering about the inclusion of Adele’s 21 on the recently-announced shortlist this year. This album hasn’t just been a huge success, it’s been a phenomenon. 17 weeks and counting atop the UK album charts, 9 weeks on top of the US album charts, and long-running #1 singles on both sides of the atlantic, with sales showing no sign of slowing down. It’s fair to say that 21 hardly needs the leg up. There is also the perception that the album, while clearly very well realised, is essentially a middle of the road affair that doesn’t offer the kind of boundary-pushing that the Mercury supposedly looks for.

Nothing irritates me more than phrases like “real music”, or the perception that pop music is less worthy of being taken seriously than other genres, but nevertheless I actually tend to agree with those who say Adele doesn’t really need to be here. I like her album a lot, but other than offering further evidence that she’s perfected the near impossible combination of high-end critical respect and superstar sales and market saturation, the nomination strikes as somewhat pointless.

There are two other acts with what could be described as mainstream pop albums on the shortlist too; Katy B and Tinie Tempah. They’re both a little more in-line with the Mercury’s remit; a little bit edgy and not quite household names just yet. But they’ve both scored huge hits in the past twelve months, and although the boost of a win would be more significant to them than it would Adele, they’re still doing perfectly well without it.

What would be lovely to see, would be for Mercury to nominate a pop album that was fantastic, but unfairly slept on. I would have loved to have seen ambitious but commercially ignored albums from the likes of Siobhan Donaghy, Roisin Murphy and Marina & The Diamonds nominated in past years, for example. Saint Etienne have been ploughing away for years creating beautifully realised, intelligent pop music, but haven't seen a nomination since their brief commercial peak in the early 90s. From Adele, Tinie and Katy this year, to La Roux and Jamelia in years past, the pop nominations have always felt as tokenistic as the twiddly jazz nominee whose album has sold in double figures and who everyone knows is never going to win. There’s nothing wrong with prizes that shun the mainstream and champion the underdog, but if that’s what the Mercury is then they’d do well to try to level the playing field.

Counting the real cost of Gaga’s cut-price album

This week Lady Gaga solidified her position as the biggest pop star on the planet when her new album Born This Way opened at number one on the US album charts with a massive 1.1 million copies sold in its first week – the biggest one-week sales for any album since 2005. Given Gaga’s rabid fanbase and the hype surrounding the record, it was inevitable that it would open big. But her numbers have doubtless been significantly inflated by the fact that almost 450,000 of those sales came from Amazon.com, where digital copies of the album were priced at a mere 99 cents.

In defence if Gaga and her record company, this decision hasn’t come from them. Amazon have taken the risky move of selling the album at a huge loss to draw in new buyers and to publiscise their new cloud music service, in an attempt to put them ahead of their competitors at Itunes. It’s a huge gamble, reported to have cost Amazon almost $3.2 million, but if it secures them a larger market share then it may well turn out to be a smart move.

My concern, however – in addition to my inner chart geek bemoaning the fact that we’ll never know how much Gaga would have sold without the benefit of unprecedented discounting – is the message that this sends out to music fans. Over 400,000 people now feel that it is acceptable to buy a fourteen-track album by a major recording artist for less than the price of a bottle of water. How many of these will now be willing to pay full price for their music in the future?

At least they paid something, one might argue, and this is true. But I suspect that few people are likely to pay for something they have no qualms about procuring for free. Therefore the buyers will largely represent hardcore fans who would have bought it anyway, and undecided people who took advantage of a serious bargain. The vast majority of people who routinely illegally download their music probably did so with Born This Way regardless.

Gaga herself has muddied the waters even further by openly supporting the devaluation of her creation. When asked if she felt the album was worth more than 99 cents she replied, “No. I absolutely do not, especially for MP3s and digital music. It's invisible. It's in space.” I imagine this made the people who paid a higher price for the album from Amazon's competitors feel really special.

Convincing people that they have a responsibility to pay a fair price for what they can easily get for free has for a long time been one of the most challenging issues facing the music industry. A common counter-argument is that music industry fat-cats and pampered pop stars have had it too good for too long, and denying them a few dollars in royalties is essentially a modern day act of Robin Hood-ism.

The problem is that Gaga, with her apparent diregard for making money is that, well, she already has rather a lot of it. Having sold over 15 million copies of her first two albums, toured the globe and packed her videos with expensive product placements, she could continue to tour, record and live comfortably if she gave all of her subsequent music away for free. And as we know all too well, the people at the top of the industry food chain are never the first to feel the pinch when the money stops rolling in.

The people who suffer most from music piracy are the people who depend on the royalties produced by record sales - usually the songwriters and the vast majority of recording artists who don’t operate on a similar level of global megastardom to Gaga.

What is a fair price for a digital release then? It should certainly be less than a physical CD, because you’re getting less, and it costs less to produce. But it has still cost the time and effort of the aforementioned producers, session musicians, songwriters and other professionals who have been involved in its creation. Money made from the blockbuster sales of A-list artists can be ploughed into less commercial, more interesting music.

In a perfect world every artist would have the same opportunities to record at a high level and to make their voices heard. We don’t live in that world and the model on which the music industry currently operates is far from perfect. But whether it’s by attending a concert or buying an album, as consumers we have a responsibility to support the artists we love in some way that makes being a professional musician a financially viable pursuit. If Gaga, having made her millions, wishes to pay for her future recordings out of her own pocket and give them away for free, that’s her prerogative. The vast majority of the artists I love don’t have that luxury. By undermining the value of recorded music for a short term gain, Gaga and Amazon are doing them a grave disservice.

There's Something About Nicola

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that Girls Aloud were ace. Their seven-year run of hit singles – excluding the handful of boring, housewife-baiting cover versions – represent some of the most exciting, dynamic and forward thinking commercial pop music of the last decade.

Great pop music inspires devotion, and with devotion comes tribalism. Everyone had their favourite Beatle, their favourite Spice Girl. Lord help them, a few quality-starved pop fans of today probably have a favourite Saturday. However, a cursory look around the forums and blogs that have become the debating floor of the modern day pop obsessive clearly indicates that in the hearts of the true fans there is only one star in Girls Aloud – and it isn’t Cheryl. It isn’t even Nadine. No, the potential Robbie of this group is one Nicola Roberts. Now she’s finally releasing a solo record, featuring collaborations with the likes of Diplo, Metronomy and Dragonette. It could end up as one of the most exciting pop albums released by a British artist this year.

Despite her comparatively low profile, Nicola was always the best thing about Girls Aloud. She rarely sang lead, but she always got the best lines; the shimmering middle-eight in ‘Call The Shots’, a heartbreaking turn in ‘Whole Lotta History’, the spectacularly disdainful “Frankly I don’t even care” that closes ‘No Good Advice’. Vocally, the other girls could be fairly interchangeable, but she always stood out, her voice switching from brittle fragility to aloof and imperious with ease.

The first taste of what she might be capable of outside the group came with ‘It’s Magic’ her self-penned solo turn on the undervalued Chemistry album. A sensual and bewitching track with ambiguous lyrics and an unusual structure – the chorus occurs only once – it suggested that Nicola could mature into a fascinating electro ice-queen in the Roisin Murphy mould if given the opportunity.

She has the all-important likeability factor too. From day one she felt like one of us. The rest of the group were a little too perfect –too thin, too tanned, too conventional. Nicola grew into her looks, rather than emerging seemingly fully formed. From an incredibly young age she had to deal with being witlessly labelled ‘the ugly ginger one’, enough vitriol to send a lesser person off the rails. However she’s never played the victim, risking above petty insults and emerging as a genuinely stylish woman, unafraid to make leftfield fashion choices and embrace the power of big hair. She remains a champion for individuality and unconventional beauty as a genuine quality rather than a backhanded insult - fronting a documentary about the dangers of sun bed abuse and developing a successful make-up line for pale-skinned girls.

She’s got attitude, too. There’s a clip of her onstage during a Girls Aloud concert some years ago. She spots a fan banner that reads, “Chris Moyles is a cunt”, referring to the Radio 1 DJ who had recently referred to her as ‘a sour-faced old cow’. Nicola - looking beautiful in a sparkling gold dress - cackles with unconcealed delight and blows a kiss to the standard-bearers before turning on her heels and getting on with the show.

Some have complained that she comes across as grumpy, but where they see moodiness I see honesty and a refreshing alternative to blandly polite media training. She can be charming and articulate, but doesn’t suffer fools. The veteran newsreader Huw Edwards has dealt with some of the most powerful and influential people on earth during his long career, but I’ve never seen him look more unsettled than when he was on the receiving end of one of Nicola’s celebrated acid glares during a particularly awkward interview.

At time of writing we’ve only heard a snippet of her forthcoming single Beat of my Drum, but in that 30 seconds alone there is more of the fun, creativity and attitude that marked out the best of Girls Aloud’s work than can be found in the three albums of collective solo material from Cheryl and Nadine. It's a little bit Robyn, a little bit MIA, a little bit MGMT, and unmistakably Nicola. It feels like a genuine evolution of the Girls Aloud formula, rather than a retreat into bland RnB or an attempt to ‘do a Gaga’. If the full track lives up to it, it’s going to be one of the best pop songs of the year. This will probably surprise many people, but those of us who were paying attention always knew she wouldn’t let us down. The USA can keep Cheryl, the true star of Girls Aloud has finally arrived.

Why Dannii's X Factor Departure is Devastating

So it’s finally happened. After surviving years of rumours about her supposedly imminent departure and months of exhausting speculation about the line-up for this year, Dannii Minogue is officially off the X Factor. Did she jump or was she pushed? We don’t know yet, but one thing is certain – the show is going to be infinitely poorer without her. For me it’s probably the final nail. No Simon? – meh, he’s been a pale imitation of his former self for years now. No Cheryl? – no loss. But no Dannii? Unthinkable!

Being a Dannii defender isn't always easy. Her credentials as a judge have always been the subject of some derision. This largely seems to be down to the fact that she’s scored a mere fourteen top twenty chart hits, compared to the forty-seven her sister has achieved. God, what a loser.

There’s also the allegation that she can’t sing, despite the fact that she cut her teeth on an Australian variety show, starred successfully in a production of Notre Dame De Paris on the West End, and could sing absolute rings around the tone-deaf Cheryl Cole, who somehow even manages to sound flat on record, never mind live.

Nepotism-fuelled pop singers of the kind poor Dannii is so often and unfairly associated with are ten a penny, from Julian Lennon to Willow Smith. The vast majority of them don’t last five minutes. It should seem obvious to anyone that a woman who has survived for over fifteen years in the harsh pop landscape is perfectly placed to mentor the hopefuls of the future.

In her time on the show, Dannii proved just that. Where the other judges relied on soundbites and meaningless platitudes, she was the only one who offered genuine constructive criticism. Last season her advice to One Direction that they needed to watch their harmonies was on-point and entirely fair. It was, of course, drowned out in a sea of boos, an indignity Dannii frequently suffered for committing the terrible crime of doing the job she was being paid to do.

Her relationships with her own charges was the most enjoyable part of the show for me. While other mentors transparently barely saw their own acts between shows (several weeks into the Finals last year, Simon Cowell could not – when pressed – name all five members of his aforementioned group One Direction) Dannii seemed to genuinely care about her acts, forming lasting bonds with many of them. To this day she regularly tweets motherly updates about the achievements of long forgotten contestants such as Lucie Jones and Daniel Evans, even if these achievements are largely limited to the world of regional theatre.

She was by far the most daring in her song choices too. For all his bluster about wanting to find a relevant, new pop act, Simon Cowell gives the impression that he doesn’t actually like any pop music released after 1988. While he was content to let his acts bellow out karaoke covers of pub rock standards like Unchained Melody and Crying, Dannii tested her acts with edgy recent hits by Robyn and David Guetta. These risks didn’t always pay off, but they always made for interesting performances.

Her greatest match was with the Spanish firebrand Ruth Lorenzo – in my opinion the most exciting and subsequently squandered talent the show has ever discovered. The developing friendship between the two was truly heart-warming, as was Ruth’s battle to remain in the show without the benefit of any of the regional or teenage support that her competitors enjoyed. It took Dannii a little while to figure out what to do with Ruth, but after the latter’s stunning rendition of Purple Rain in the sing-offs, everything fell into place. Her decision in Take That week to pair Ruth with their little-remembered hit Love Ain’t Here Anymore was a gamble that resulted in one of the greatest performances ever seen on the show. It’s that kind of genuine narrative between mentor and artist that makes Dannii so eminently watchable, and what makes the other judges so desperately boring by comparison. Cheryl Cole’s song choices are frequently so predictable and lacking in strategy that during artist theme weeks I often found myself wondering if she actually knew more than three songs by the likes of Elton John and The Beatles.

My one consolation is that Minogue ended her tenure on the show with a high. Her popularity soared in the final season and she came into her own as a beloved TV personality and fashion icon, with a best-selling autobiography and highly successful fashion line. She carried herself with grace and dignity, subverting the expectation that she would be as threatened by Cheryl Cole as the embittered Sharon Osbourne was by her. Under her guidance, and again with the help of some leftfield song choices, Matt Cardle sailed to victory against the might of Simon’s One Direction and Cheryl’s Cher Lloyd.

So what now? Personally I hope the rumoured return to music bears out. Her last full studio Neon Nights was for my money a more forward-thinking and cohesive long player than her sister has ever managed and, despite yielding four top ten hit singles, unfairly overlooked at the time. The 80s-influenced electro sound she was toying with way back in 2001 is now routinely heard in the upper echelons of the charts from the likes of Rihanna, Lady Gaga and Ke$ha. But then that’s Dannii all over, quietly defying expectations and generally being much better than most cynics think she has any right to be. I suspect the X Factor Producers have no idea what they’ve just lost…

Why the Eurovision Song Contest is no joke

My name is John and I am a fan of the Eurovision Song Contest. Not an ironic, one-night-a-year, let’s get pissed and laugh at our silly, backwards European neighbours and jokily bemoan the inevitability of the UK finishing last fan. A bona-fide, hardcore, 365-day Eurovision obsessive. I could tell you every winning entrant in chronological order and hum most of them. I have every single entry since the contest began in 1956 on MP3. My idea of a perfect night in is watching the 1993 contest on DVD and marvelling at the down-to-the-wire final voting results (between scouse popstrell Sonia for the United Kingdom and ultimate victor Niamh Kavanagh for Ireland, if you’re interested) for approximately the 72nd time.

Chances are your primary thought at this point is not "Wow, I'd really like to sleep with this guy". Not an entirely unfair reaction – obsession with any piece of light entertainment has more than a whiff of tragedy about it. But the British Eurovision defender gets a particularly raw deal. Our generally appalling performances in world sporting events are forgivable. We still rally behind our nation with heart-warming pride and optimism. A dismal failure in the World Cup and we furiously analyse what went wrong, assign blame where it is usually due and vow to do better next time. A disaster at the Eurovision song contest and at best we shrug, at worst we snort with derision at the poor taste and politically motivated voting of our lesser neighbour nations. Surely nobody of sound mind actually takes it seriously?

Here’s a statistic for you. Since we last won the World Cup in 1966, we’ve won the Eurovision Song Contest five times. Three of those songs, by Sandie Shaw, Brotherhood of Man and Bucks Fizz, were number one hits. The other two, Lulu and Katrina & The Waves, were also top 5 records and sizeable hits worldwide. Sweden, in many ways the natural home of the Eurovision Song Contest, have only fielded four winners – and of those four only two made any waves internationally (ABBA in 1974 and to a much lesser extent Charlotte Nilsson in 1999).

The point is, when we make the effort we’re actually good at the Eurovision Song Contest, as opposed to Football, a sport at which we plough grimly on despite a near-complete lack of national talent compared with the top-tier nations.

So why do we have such a terrible attitude towards it? In recent years the statistics have admittedly been poor. In the past decade we’ve finished in the bottom half of the table eight times, including three last-place finishes and even the dread null points in 2003 (Whither now, Jemini?). We also scored two top 5 finishes – former Pop Idol alumni Jessica Garlick came third in 2002 and Jade Ewen, now clinging for dear life to the revolving door that is the Sugababes line-up, finished 5th in 2009. Chances are you can’t remember their songs – the media all but ignored them and they made little impact on the charts.

“Politics!” I hear you cry. “Europe hates us!” “They all vote for their neighbours!” I’ve even, on more than one occasion, heard the bewildering argument “It’s all because of the Iraq war!” If any of the above represents your knee-jerk opinion, I suggest you brace yourself and actually listen to any of our recent failed entries. These are, without exception, terrible terrible records. Naff, dated Carry-On Pop from Steps-lite early 00s also-rans Scooch, dreary disco from early X Factor runner up and charisma vacuum Andy Abraham, a truly unsettling schoolyard rap by forty-something Adrian Chiles lookalike Daz Sampson. These are not songs that represent the UK music scene, nor, despite the misguided and borderline xenophobic beliefs of many media figures, do they represent that mysterious demographic of the ‘great Eurovision song’ (a.k.a. a naff piece of crap that those culturally stunted peasants in Slovetzia will just go wild for!).

I love the Eurovision because every year I discover a handful of genuinely thrilling pop songs. It’s not all great; I defy anyone to sit through last year’s Russian entry more than once, but the vast majority of countries send big local stars and credible entries, even if not all of them translate particularly well on the world stage. Yes it can have a certain charming awkwardness, and political voting does exist, but rarely enough to determine the winner. Besides, if not for an extremely questionable set of points from Ireland last year our entry would barely have scored anything at all.

Another statistic for you. Last year’s winning entry by Germany’s Lena Meyer-Landrut was a number one hit in six countries, and a top ten in seven more. Her album also charted well across the continent. 2009’s Norwegian winner Alexander Rybak did even better, even hitting the UK top ten. The rise of Itunes has reinvigorated the contest, allowing successful entries to instantly capitalise on the massive exposure that Eurovision still promises. In a time when the music industry is scrambling to find ways to promote their artists, it’s a goldmine which has yet to be properly exploited in this country.

So while some will roll their eyes at the announcement last night that faded boyband Blue will be our 2011 representatives, I applaud the decision. It isn’t ideal – early rumours included Pixie Lott, Charlotte Church and Katherine Jenkins, all of whom are much more high-profile and credible. But they’re a professional group, the song, we have been assured, is a serious effort with nary a hint of novelty, and in their heyday they scored numerous big hits all over Europe. If they do well they’re recognisable enough that their song might become a hit single from which they can launch a serious comeback. If this is the case, and I fervently hope that it is, perhaps bigger and better names will see the benefit of representing themselves and their nation on this massive stage, instead of dismissing it as beneath them. Because by patronising this silly little contest, we only make fools of ourselves.