Newcastle 2025: How the Mercury Prize has taken an important step outside of London
I can still remember the musky smell of the Berry’s Superfast coach I would hop on from Somerset to London in my late teenage years. Buoyed by the promise of the country’s capital, I would make my way to a relatively pokey gig—one that could easily have been in a smaller, nearby city—to watch a band I can no longer remember a decade on. I guess, the point wasn’t the music, it was the trip, this grand idea that in London, one night may change my life. I didn’t know it then, but it was an outlook subconsciously ill-informed by a decade of Mercury Prize winners based in the nation’s capital.
You see, I’m not typically one for award shows. I find them to be relatively baseless in terms of their merit and ultimately just another media-frenzied event for the narcissism of megastars to be harvested. I mean, the red carpet alone has garnered more video views than the ceremony itself, and the build up interviews for last years’ Brits were hosted by the unflushable turd of entertainment, Jamie Laing.
But the Mercury Prize always represented something more important to me. It was designed to highlight genuine artistic merit within the industry and provide acclaim to those who had achieved something entirely transcendental.
But in the past decade, I’ve seen it slowly fade into something teetering on the edge of unrecognisable in the face of commercial pressure. In February this year, I speculated over the dangerous trajectory the ceremony was hurtling towards, with nominations of Harry Styles offering a worrying indictment of the prioritisation of eyeballs over eardrums. It was a nomination that came just one year prior to the ceremony’s downscaling from the Eventim Apollo to Abbey Road studios, in a bid to compensate for the lack of sponsors.
“Despite efforts to match up with a suitable new partner, in what is clearly a tough arts funding environment, we weren’t able to secure one within the timeframe and the level of funding required,” BPI chief executive Jo Twist told Music Week in the build up to the Mercury Prize, as they saw their partnership with a major sponsor come to an end. “With no sponsor, we unfortunately aren’t in a position to put on a live show this year to the high production values and standards we hold ourselves to.”
It felt like the beginning of the end, a troubling fact buoyed only by the surprise reveal of English Teacher as the winners of the 2024 award. The Leeds band broke the cycle of a decade, whereby the winners of the award were London-based and in the year before, 75% of the nominees were from the capital.
Now, it’s not to undermine the obvious quality of the capital. It’s like any global city; a hotbed for diversity, creativity and innovation, and understandably home to some of music’s most interesting artists. But if music history has taught us anything, it’s that the subcultures of Britain’s second cities have crucially unheard stories.
And those people within those areas have spent the last decade brutally affected by a government hellbent on austerity, shunning every ounce of opportunity to travel to London. Be it to make the financially crippling full-time move that requires them to work gruelling hours to stay afloat, or maybe to book travel and accommodation which slowly becomes unfeasible in a landscape that pays artists pennies in streaming royalties. Slowly but surely, music became an industry that squeezed its radius of success, and the Mercury Prize became its beacon.
I’m aware you’ll point out the working-class roots of success stories like Little Simz, Ezra Collective and Dave in your rebuttal to my point. Good, please do. For they are artists brimming with the sort of self-awareness to understand they are not complicit in an issue orchestrated by faceless industry heads and who, too, would relish and understand the introduction of more widespread voices to the conversation.
They are artists who have thrived on the back of their innate talent in the face of economic and social adversity. But let’s not pretend that within the inner circles of London’s commercial success are a generation of musicians and industry executives who have fed off of a closed network of entertainment’s elite.
As Sam Fender recently said, “The music industry is 80%, 90% kids who are privately educated. A kid from where I’m from can’t afford to tour, so there are probably thousands writing songs that are ten times better than mine, poignant lyrics about the country, but they will not be seen because it’s rigged.”
Well, the streets upon which Fender used to roam, carving his view that would go on to unite wide-eyed indie fans is now set to become the future home of the awards ceremony. Authenticity has finally delivered its one-two jab combination, following up English Teacher’s Mercury Prize win with a healthy step change in the ceremony’s proceedings.
Taking place at the Utilita Arena, Newcastle, on October 16th, 2025, the prize will once again become a fully produced show that provides a much-needed reminder that music does, after all, exist outside of London.
BPI chief executive Dr Jo Twist described the move to Newcastle as a “groundbreaking moment for the Mercury Prize”. She added, “Newcastle-upon-Tyne is a true music city and we are excited to work with our partners at The City of Newcastle & North East Combined Authority to deliver this inaugural moment and a memorable Mercury Prize 2025.”
The tectonic plates that shift the landscape of music will largely remain the same, an industry run by ‘The Big Four’ record labels who squeeze out profit wherever they can from green, wanting and desperately ambitious young musicians. And an annual ceremony outside the pearly gates of London won’t fix that immediately.
But as the wheels of their Range Rovers roll up on the M1, it gives way to a nationwide sigh of relief. Across the country, in the halls of Brudenell Social Club, The Louisiana and The Adelphi are fans and bands encouraging each other as they always have, feeling a little safer in the knowledge that the industry acknowledges their existence.
