The nominations have been announced for the 6th
annual Northern Ireland Music Prize, the annual award given for the best album
from Northern Ireland over the past 12 months. This year’s ceremony, on
November 15th, promises to be the biggest to date. It will
be held in the Ulster Hall for the first time, and in addition to the best
album category, it will also feature new awards for Best Single (which will be decided by a public vote), Best Live Act, and the Oh Yeah Contender award for the best up and coming act. And for the first time, there will be a cash prize
for all the winners on the night.
The nominees in each of the categories are:
Best Album
And So I Watch You From Afar - The Endless Shimmering
Ash - Islands
Bicep - Bicep
Brand New Friend - Seatbelts For Aeroplanes
Ciaran Lavery - Sweet Decay
Girls Names - Stains on Silence
Hannah Peel - Mary Casio: Journey to Cassiopeia
Malojian - Let Your Weirdness Carry You Home
Robocobra Quartet - Plays Hard To Get
Ryan Vail - Distorted Shadows
Snow Patrol - Wildness
The Wood Burning Savages - Stability
And So I Watch You From Afar
Brand New Friend
Robocobra Quartet
Ryan Vail
The Wood Burning Savages
To discuss the 2018 Northern Ireland Music Prize, the captain of The Metaphorical Boat, Christopher McBride, is joined on the podcast by Robert Brown, the editor of Northern Irish music website Chordblossom, to talk through all the nominees, and who we think will win each of the prizes on the night. Plus, find out what happened to the captain when he found himself sat beside the lead singer of Snow Patrol at a prior Northern Ireland Music Prize ceremony.
As we mentioned last week, the nominees for the 2016 Northern Ireland Music Prize have been announced. To recap, here are the twelve albums to make the cut for this year's prize -
The Bonnevilles – Arrow Pierce My Heart Ciaran Lavery – Let Bad In David C Clements – The Longest Day In History Documenta – Drone Pop #1 exmagician – Scan The Blue Foy Vance – The Wild Swan Girls Names – Arms Around A Vision Jealous of the Birds – Parma Violets Michael Mormecha – LOFi LiFE Ports – The Devil Is A Songbird Ryan Vail – For Every Silence Sea Pinks – Soft Days
As has been the case for the NI Music Prize the past few years, I decided to do a bit of number crunching using data gleamed from available resources to see which artists and albums nominated are the most popular. Due to its near ubiquity in the streaming world, as well as the fact that it makes its data about listening readily available for anyone to read, I will be relying solely on information taken from the world's most popular music streaming service, Spotify.
First, I wanted to find out which individual track taken from the 12 nominated albums is the most popular. Below you can find the most popular song from each of the nominated artists, as well as a ranking from most to least popular -
Most popular individual track from each nominated album on Spotify (streams): (Snapshot from 21/09/16):
1
Foy Vance
She Burns
3,131,014
2
Ciaran Lavery
Okkervil River
1,599,617
3
Jealous of the Birds
Miss Misanthrope
269,519
4
exmagician
Kiss That Wealth Goodbye
125,775
5
Girls Names
Reticence
117,850
6
Ports
Gameplay
109,462
7
Sea Pinks
Depth of Field
106,234
8
Documenta
Love As a Ghost
44,184
9
Ryan Vail
Wounds
36,481
10
David C Clements
My Dear Mother
26,763
11
The Bonnevilles
No Law In Lurgan
18,415
12
Michael Mormecha
Mixtapes
Less than 1,000
(For comparison's sake, one of the most popular songs of 2016, "One Dance" by Drake, has been streamed over 807 million times)
As I'd somewhat expected, the artist whose most streamed song tops the rankings is former NI Music Prize winner Foy Vance with the lead single from his album, "She Burns", which has amassed over 3 million plays for the track taken from his Ed Sheeran-signed album. It's also unsurprising to see Ciaran Lavery ranking #2 with "Okkervil River", the only other artist nominated to have a song collected over 1 million streams to date. Lavery's recent success has been largely as a result of his music becoming incredibly and unexpectedly popular on the platform over the past few years, to the extent that he even recorded a live album for them. What's more surprising is to see Jealous of The Birds at #3 on the list - having only started recording music barely a year ago and being quite an unknown quantity even when the album was released this year, it is still surprising to see her song "Miss Misanthrope" outstream the top songs from more established names like Girls Names, Sea Pinks & exmagician (albeit under a different name for the latter). To show just how ubiquitous Spotify has become for artists, this year the top 7 artists all have at least one track which broke through the 100k stream barrier, compared to just one from the list in 2015. The others have at least 1 song with a five-figure stream count, with the exception of Michael Mormecha's "Lofi Life", which fails to get a single song even to the four-figure amount on Spotify.
Of course, as I mentioned last year, there are a few disclaimers to go with this data - this is just a snapshot from a certain point in time before the contest - for all I know, Michael Mormecha could get a song featured on a popular Spotify playlist tomorrow, gain 30,000 streams overnight and parachute into the top 10, so this shouldn't be treated as scientifically rigorous. Also, I have only included versions of songs taken from the parent album on Spotify, so I haven't taken into account other versions of any of the songs (There is a single version of Ports' "Ancient Wave" which has been streamed over 130k times, but as it seems to be slightly different from the album version I have excluded it from the above table. If included, Ports would have moved from 6th to 4th).
After looking at individual tracks, I decided to see how popular each of the albums are as a whole on Spotify. As each of the albums have different track numbers, I thought that the fairest methodology to decide which album is the most popular as a whole is to take the same amount of tracks streamed from each album, then divide it by itself to get an average amount of streams overall. Therefore, I picked the six most popular songs from each album (6 were chosen, given that the album with the least amount of songs, "Drone Pop #1", contain 8), added up the totals, then divided by six to give an average amount of album points for each. The results of my findings were as follows -
Most popular nominated album on Spotify (stream average): (Snapshot from 21/09/16):
1
Foy Vance
The Wild Swan
1,170,535
2
Ciaran Lavery
Let Bad In
631,832
3
Jealous of the Birds
Parma Violets
99,759
4
exmagician
Scan The Blue
54,570
5
Girls Names
Arms Around A Vision
52,231
6
Sea Pinks
Soft Days
27,825
7
Ports
The Devil Is A Songbird
22,128
8
David C Clements
The Longest Day In History
10,570
9
Documenta
Drone Pop #1
10,451
10
Ryan Vail
For Every Silence
9,593
11
The Bonnevilles
Arrow Pierce My Heart
8,147
12
Michael Mormecha
LOFi LiFE
500*
*All songs on this album have been played less than 1000 times on Spotify, so for the purposes of working out an average, I assigned all tracks a play amount of 500. (For comparison's sake, one of the most popular albums so far in the same period, "25" by Adele, has an average of nearly 163 million based on this methodology). So once again, Foy Vance & Ciaran Lavery find themselves well ahead of the rest of the pack, with album stream averages of well over over half a million for each of them. The top five remain identical to the highest track table, and there's a couple of shifts around the mid-table positions (David C Clements is #8 in this table compared to #10 in the single track rankings, which would seem to imply that more people are likely to listen to his album in full compared to his peers), whilst Michael Mormecha remains firmly anchored to the bottom position. What is notable about this year's averages is that last year's average appear to be lower than those of this year, even though last year's list had more higher profile names. I'm guessing that the fact that most of the names on the list have managed to find themselves on some popular Spotify playlists has really helped (particularly Jealous of The Birds, which explains the explosion in popularity in such a short space of time). It seems even getting onto a playlist for an upcoming festival can be quite beneficial (quite a few of these artists have managed to amass pretty hefty streams from these self-made playlists), so one can never underestimate the power of the playlist, regardless of its size.
Once again, I should stress that due to the nature of the working, this is not entirely scientific, given that it only takes into account the top 6 streamed songs on Spotify. It also doesn't take into account when the album was released - a few of these albums were released near the beginning of the cut-off period for the prize, whilst others were released much more recently. Still, I hope that this gives an interesting overview as to which album nominated for the prize has the largest number of fans, and therefore might give some indication as to who we might see take home the prize come November 11th. To give you a flavour of the nominees, here's a Spotify playlist of the most popular song (as of today) from each of the twelve nominated albums - The Northern Ireland Music Prize will be awarded in the Mandela Hall on November 11th. Ports, Jealous of The Birds & Girls Names will perform at the ceremony, as will Ash, who will receive the Oh Yeah Legend Award & perform their album "1977" in full.
On Thursday 15th September, the twelve albums nominated for the 4th annual Northern Ireland Music Prize, In association with Blue Moon, (Yay! the award's got a sponsor now! Groovy biscuits! Aww, it's a beer company) were announced. After tallying nominations from over 70 people within the Northern Irish music industry (full disclosure - The Metaphorical Boat was one of the outlets to submit a nomination, and has been every year since the prize's inception), this is the shortlist that was arrived at -
The Bonnevilles – Arrow Pierce My Heart Ciaran Lavery – Let Bad In David C Clements – The Longest Day In History Documenta – Drone Pop #1 exmagician – Scan The Blue Foy Vance – The Wild Swan Girls Names – Arms Around A Vision Jealous of the Birds – Parma Violets Michael Mormecha – LOFi LiFE Ports – The Devil Is A Songbird Ryan Vail – For Every Silence Sea Pinks – Soft Days
So those are the nominations, what are our thoughts? Now that the prize has been going for four years, as one might expect we have quite a few artists this year who are enjoying their second nomination for the NI Music Prize. The Bonnevilles & Girls Names were both nominated for the first NI Music Prize back in 2013, As was Foy Vance, who was the inaugural winner that year, and could potentially be the first nominated artist to do the double. Both Ciaran Lavery & Ryan Vail are enjoying their first solo nominations, after being nominated for their collaborative effort last year. Michael Mormecha is also nominated for the first time under his own name, after being first nominated in 2014 as a member of Mojo Fury.
Secondly, compared to last year's list, which featured quite a few well-known names, this year's list is a little lacking in terms of artists that could be called 'household names'. The biggest name on the list, and the only artist on it who achieved a top 40 album last year, is Foy Vance, whose album "The Wild Swan" peaked at #28 when it was released. He also the only artist on the list whose ever had a hit single too, having breached the top 40 last year in collaboration with Rudimental, plus Ed Sheeran took a cover of his song "Make It Rain" into the charts in 2014.
Apart from him, there's a few artist who'd be well respected on a wider scale within their respective genres, with Girls Names' album receiving rave reviews among fans of post-punk & Ryan Vail gaining plaudits among fans of electronica. Then of course there's Ciaran Lavery, who continues to collect Spotify streams and playlistings like they're conkers.
Although it's good to see less well known artists make the list, the inclusion of bigger names mean that it's more likely that people from outside of Northern Ireland will learn about the NI Music Prize, increasing its reputation on a par with the SAY Award in Scotland and the Welsh Music Prize. As I said before, the prize should act as a loudspeaker, not an echo chamber, although admittedly this year, it is more a case of better known names not releasing albums during this period. The only other artist from Northern Ireland that we thought had a top 40 album during this period was Rend Collective, whose album "As Family We Go" charted at #19 in the final half of 2015, but having looked into it the album was released one week too early to be included in the 2016 NI Music Prize. Not that that album would have made the shortlist even if it was eligible, mind you.
Genre wise, it seems that 2016 is definitely the year of the singer-songwriter among this year's nominations, with Ciaran Lavery, David C Clements, Foy Vance, Jealous of The Birds & Michael Mormecha all flying the flag for solo musings. That's not to say there's not much variety this year. We've also got electronica, blues-rock, shoegaze, psychedelia, post-punk & electronica artists among the 12 albums nominated. Given that to date all three winners of the prize have been singer-songwriters (Soak, Robyn G Shiels & Foy Vance), it would follow the pattern if one of those five ended up for the prize, although perhaps 2016 could be the year that a band finally takes home the top prize.
As for albums that didn't make the list but should have been included, there were two fantastic albums that I would have loved to see make the list but unfortunately didn't make the cut. The first was the self-titled debut album from Best Boy Grip. It made our top 10 albums of 2015, and is an exquisite set of piano-pop songs written by one of the finest, most prolific and most affecting songwriters we have to offer. Perhaps a few of my fellow judges overlooked it given that it was released in September last year, which would have been a real shame.
The other album that we'd hope would make the list is "The Ebony Trail" by Ciara O'Neill. The album is a beautiful and haunting dark-folk album, and Ciara has one of the most gorgeous voices on these islands, although I feel that if the prize continues, she'll definitely receive a nomination within the next few years, as the quality of the songs she plays live are even stronger than the ones on this album (and as she joked during her album launch, much happier, due to the influence of writing in Nashville). One song of hers in particular, "Dreamer" has the hallmarks of a future classic about it.
This blog will be revisiting the Northern Ireland Music Prize before it is awarded at a ceremony in the Mandela Hall on November 11th, to do a bit of number crunching on the albums and artists nominated for the prize. As for who we would like to win the prize, we'll keep that information to ourselves for now. In the meantime, here's a few songs from some of the nominees -
As we mentioned last week, the nominees for the 2015 Northern Ireland Music Prize have been announced. To recap, here are the twelve albums to make the cut for this year's prize -
A Plastic Rose – Flickering Light of an Inner War And So I Watch You From Afar – Heirs Axis Of – The Mid Brae Inn BeeMickSee – Belfast Yank Ciaran Lavery and Ryan Vail – Sea Legs Duke Special – Look Out Machines The Lost Brothers – New Songs Of Dawn And Dust Malojian – Southlands Not Squares – Bolts SOAK – Before We Forgot How To Dream Therapy? – Disquiet Tim Wheeler – Lost Domain
As has been the case for the NI Music Prize the past few years, I decided to do a bit of number crunching using data gleamed from available resources to see which artists and albums nominated are the most popular. For the past 2 years, I have used last.fm in order to give an idea of how popular each of the artists nominated have been around the time that the album has been nominated. However, given that the data I gleamed from the website in 2013 and 2014 is not as easily usable as it was last year, I will be relying solely on information taken from the most popular music streaming service, Spotify.
First, I wanted to find out which individual track taken from the 12 nominated albums is the most popular. Below you can find the most popular song from each of the nominated artists, as well as a ranking from most to least popular -
Most popular individual track from each nominated album on Spotify: (Snapshot from 26/09/15):
SOAK - B a nobody - 7,883,384
A Plastic Rose - Somebody's Daughter - 86,884
And So I Watch You From Afar - Run Home - 68,524
Therapy? - Still Hurts - 54,983
Duke Special - Nail on The Head - 39,650
Tim Wheeler - Snow in Nara - 22,896
Ciaran Lavery and Ryan Vail - The Colour Blue - 20,651
The Lost Brothers - Days Ahead- 17,950
Axis Of- Wetsuit - 4,058
Malojian - Communion Girls - 1,324
Not Squares - Oops Said Hi - 1,267
BeeMickSee - Belfast Slang – Less than 1000
(For comparison's sake, one of the most popular songs of 2015, "Cheerleader" by OMI, has been streamed over 424 million times)
So as expected, the most popular song from a nominated album belongs to BBC Sound of 2015 nominee SOAK, with her song "B a nobody" being streamed nearly 8 million times. A very distant, yet credible 2nd place comes from A Plastic Rose with "Somebody's Daughter", which has proven to be much more popular with the Spotify crowd than the most popular songs by well known acts like Therapy?, Duke Special & Tim Wheeler. In the bottom half of the table, it's surprising to see Ciaran Lavery & Ryan Vail's most streamed track on just over 20,000, especially given that the former's most streamed track on his own has already amassed more than 10 million streams, whilst spare a thought for BeeMickSee, whose most popular track is almost 8000 times less popular than the #1.
Of course, there's a few disclaimers to go with this data - this is just a snapshot from a certain point in time before the contest - for all I know, BMS' could get 10,000 streams tomorrow and parachute into the top 10, so this shouldn't be treated as scientifically rigorous. Also, I have only included versions of songs taken from the parent album on Spotify, so I haven't taken into account "single" versions of any of the songs (the single version of "Somebody's Daughter" has been streamed an additional 85k times).
After looking at individual tracks, I decided to see how popular each of the albums are as a whole on Spotify. As each of the albums have different track numbers, I thought that the fairest methodology to decide which album is the most popular as a whole is to take the same amount of tracks streamed from each album, then divide it by itself to get an average amount of streams overall.
Therefore, I picked the six most popular songs from each album (6 were chosen, given that the album with the least amount of songs, "Sea Legs", contain 7), added up the totals, then divided by six to give an average amount of album points for each. The results of my findings were as follows -
Most popular album from each nominated album on Spotify: (Snapshot from 26/09/15):
SOAK - Before We Forgot How To Dream - 2,373,045
And So I Watch You From Afar - Heirs - 57,169
Therapy? - Disquiet - 36,320
A Plastic Rose - Flickering Light of an Inner War - 31,187
Tim Wheeler - Lost Domain - 17,545
Duke Special - Look Out Machines - 13,819
The Lost Brothers - New Songs Of Dawn And Dust - 10,728
Ciaran Lavery and Ryan Vail - Sea Legs - 9,678
Axis Of - The Mid Brae Inn - 2,339
Malojian – Southlands - 734*
Not Squares – Bolts – 628*
BeeMickSee - Belfast Yank – 500*
*These three albums had songs within their six most streamed which were listed as < 1000 plays. For the purposes of working out an overage, these songs were assigned a play count of 500. (For comparison's sake, one of the most popular albums released in 2015, "The Chaos & The Calm" by James Bay, has an average of nearly 45 million based on this methodology).
So once again, SOAK finds herself as the queen on the nominees, with an average album stream total of over 2 million, whilst A Plastic Rose drop back to fourth, which suggests that "Somebody's Daughter" is much more popular than the album as a whole. It still ends up more popular than the established Duke Special & Tim Wheeler, which is possibly a result of the album being available on Spotify 3 months before it was available to buy. ASIWYFA are a strong yet distant 2nd place, whilst BeeMickSee once again brings up the rear.
Once again, I should stress that due to the nature of the working, this is not entirely scientific, given that it only takes into account the top 6 streamed songs on Spotify. It would be interesting to see how well each of the albums has sold overall, rather than just streaming, as it would give a better idea of how popular each artist is. Unfortunately, that data is not freely available, although I do know that three of the albums did make the UK Albums Chart - SOAK (#37), Therapy? (#79) & Duke Special (#92)
Still, I hope that this gives an interesting overview as to which album nominated for the prize has the largest number of fans, and therefore might give some indication as to who we might see take home the prize come November 14th.
The NI Music Prize ceremony will take place in the Mandela Hall. There will be performances from nominees The Lost Brothers, Malojian & Ciaran Lavery and Ryan Vail, as well as from The Divine Comedy, who will receive the Oh Yeah Legend Award.
On Monday 14th September, the twelve albums nominated for the 3rd annual Northern Ireland Music Prize were announced. After tallying nominations from over 70 people within the Northern Irish music industry (full disclosure - The Metaphorical Boat was one of the outlets to submit a nomination), this is the shortlist that was arrived at -
A Plastic Rose – Flickering Light of an Inner War And So I Watch You From Afar – Heirs Axis Of – The Mid Brae Inn BeeMickSee – Belfast Yank Ciaran Lavery and Ryan Vail – Sea Legs Duke Special – Look Out Machines The Lost Brothers – New Songs Of Dawn And Dust Malojian – Southlands Not Squares – Bolts SOAK – Before We Forgot How To Dream Therapy? – Disquiet Tim Wheeler – Lost Domain
So looking at the nominations, there are a few points of interest worth discussing. Firstly, for the first time we have several artists who are receiving their 2nd nomination for the NI Music Prize. A Plastic Rose, ASIWYFA and Axis Of were all nominated for the inaugural prize back in 2013, so this year could be second time lucky for any of those three artists.
Secondly, in comparison to last year's list, which didn't contain many artists with a reputation outside of Northern Ireland, 2015's shortlist contains a fair few artists who would be quite well known on a national or international scale. There's Therapy?, who were the winner of last year's Oh Yeah Centre Legend Award), who've picked up a nod for their highest-charting album since 1999. There's Duke Special, whose album "Look Out Machines" became the highest charting UK album of his career. And So I Watch You From Afar continue to be one of the biggest and most respected proponents of post-rock in the world, and of course there's SOAK, who has enjoyed being playlisted on Radio 1, as well as reaching the Top 40 with her album "Before We Forgot How To Dream".
Although it's good to see less well known artists make the list, the inclusion of bigger names mean that it's more likely that people from outside of Northern Ireland will learn about the NI Music Prize, increasing its reputation on a par with the SAY Award in Scotland and the Welsh Music Prize. As I said before, the prize should act as a loudspeaker, not an echo chamber.
It's good to see a bit of variety this year genre wise. We've got rock from A Plastic Rose, Axis Of & Therapy?, singer-songwriters (Malojian, SOAK, Tim Wheeler), dance (Not Squares), electronica (Ciaran Lavery & Ryan Vail), and even some rap courtesy of BeeMickSee, so there's bound to be something for everyone.
As to the albums that didn't make the cut, perhaps the biggest surprise is that the most recent album by Ash didn't make the shortlist, especially given that frontman Tim Wheeler made the list with his solo album. The other big omission is The Answer, whose album "Raise a Little Hell" despite being one of the highest charting albums from a Northern Irish artist in the last 12 months. Of the less major artists, it was surprising that Sea Pinks didn't get a nod for "Dreaming Tracks", although given that was released in September last year, it might have gone unnoticed by many of the panelists. It's also disappointing that there's only one female artist on the shortlist this year in the form of SOAK, although we have a feeling that she's going to be the favourite to win the overall prize this year. What is an album?
There's one last thing we'd like to discuss about the nominees, and it's to do with the eligibility criteria. There's one album which made the list that we weren't sure should have made the list, and that's "Sea Legs" by Ciaran Lavery & Ryan Vail. Although they have described it as an album, it has been described as an E.P elsewhere, and with an overall length of 18 minutes and just 7 tracks, we were initially inclined to agree with the latter.
To check if we were correct, we decided to check with one official arbiter of these such things, the Official Charts Company, to see what they consider an album to be, and see whether it meets their criteria. According to their rules, an album must be -
Over 25 minutes OR more than four songs where the format does not qualify as a “Maxi” single or remix single as defined by singles eligibility.
As the album is less than 25 minutes, it would appear it falls down on this criteria. However, as it has seven songs and isn't a single, it would appear to pass the album test on this criteria, even if three of those songs are less than 2 minutes long. (There's also stuff in the rules about having a specific dealer price to qualify as an album, but as "Sea Legs" was self-released, we're willing to overlook the financial aspects).
So it goes against our initial judgement, it does seem that "Sea Legs" can qualify as an album, thus its inclusion in the NI Music Prize seems reasonable. I do feel that in the future, it would be helpful if the NI Music Prize were to define what they understand an album to be, rather than assuming that everyone knows what exactly an album is. It might seem silly and unnecessary, but it would be rather helpful when it comes to grey areas such as this.
This blog will be revisiting the Northern Ireland Music Prize before it is awarded at a ceremony in the Mandela Hall on November 14th, to do a bit of number crunching on the albums and artists nominated for the prize. As for who we would like to win the prize, we'll keep that information to ourselves for now. In the meantime, here's a few songs from some of the nominees -
So, on Friday the 15th November, the Northern Irish music industry came together and declared, in their collective wisdom, that the best album of the last twelve months was "Blood of the Innocents" by Robyn G. Shiels, beating out eleven other rivals to scoop the big prize. Here are some brief thoughts from The Metaphorical Boat on the ceremony and the award itself:
1. For the 2nd year running, an older singer-songwriter came home with the prize - After the inaugral prize was won last year by Foy Vance, the victory for Robyn G. Shiels sees the current strike rate for male singer-songwriters of a certain age remain at 100%. If this trend continues next year, then you're unlikely to win if you are under the age of 35, lack a Y chromosome, and have friends.
2. Robyn G. Shiels would not have been my choice of winner - As any keen reader of this blog will undoubtedly know by now, our vote for the prize went to Wonder Villains, so it was disappointing that "Rocky" didn't take home the prize. However, I thought that if it wasn't them, then either Mojo Fury or VerseChorusVerse would have taken home the prize. "Blood of the Innocents" never really hooked me, and his performance on the night didn't do enough to win me over. Still, that's the thing about the democratic voting process, there's always going to be at least one person unhappy with the outcome. And at least he was there on the night to pick up the prize, unlike last year's winner.
3. The ceremony part of the evening remained pretty decent - Just like last year, the visuals and videos for each nominated album were well put together, adding to the excitement of the event, and once again Rigsy did a good job of compering the evening. Just three nominated acts played this year (five graced the stage in 2013). Aside from the aforementioned winner, folk duo Sullivan and Gold and storming rockers More Than Conquerors graced the stage. Perhaps not as much diversity as last year's performers, but I dare you to find one person that wasn't blown away by how fantastic More Than Conquerors were on the night. Had the votes been counted after that performance, I daresay the eventual winner might have been a little bit different.
4. Despite my misgivings, the inclusion of Therapy? was a canny move - when it was initially announced that 90s alt-rock legends Therapy? would receive a lifetime achievement award at the ceremony, I was initially sceptical, as I felt it would detract from the ceremony. Whilst that might still have been the case, it was still a great decision - their inclusion got a lot of people talking about the ceremony beforehand, and Mandela Hall was completely packed by the time the band took to the stage. If just a handful of people who had came especially for Therapy? discovered some hitherto undiscovered artist as a result, then that can only be a good thing. Mike Edgar's speech before handing the band the award, which contextualised the band's music in terms of the music scene that came both before and after them was just wonderful - if he ever writes a book about the Northern Irish music scene, I would be the first in line to buy a copy. And of course, Therapy? blew everyone away with their performance of their 1994 album "Troublegum" in full (an album which, incidentally, was nominated for the Mercury Prize that year).
5. The ceremony has got some press - A quick Google search reveals that the announcement of the winner has been covered in the Belfast Telegraph and Hot Press Magazine, as well as other local media outlets. It's also nice to see that one of the more respected music blogs worldwide, Nialler9, has written about it, so hopefully quite a few people outside of Northern Ireland will be made aware of the award. I've said this before, but it bears repeating - unless the ceremony is covered extensively both within here, and further afield, then the prize runs the risk of falling into self-congratulatory back slapping, rather than a ceremony that deserves to be taken seriously, so if you see any decent coverage of the award from further afield, please do let me know.
6. The NI Music Prize should be back next year - even if more than half the crowd were there just to see Therapy? rather than the ceremony itself, the hefty turnout for the event should see the NI Music Prize back again next year. If (or when) it does, I imagine that they'll follow the same format as this year and finish with a performance from a legendary Northern Irish act to supplement the ceremony. If so, the smart money would be on either Ash or Divine Comedy.
7. I've smashed my own record for "closest distance I've ever been from Gary Lightbody of SnowPatrol - I was sat 5 feet away from Gary Lightbody of Snow Patrol for a large proportion of the ceremony, which smashes my original record of approximately 200 feet (from when I saw the band at the Odyssey Arena a few years ago). Why I am so excited about this development, I still cannot fathom.
So congratulations to Robyn G. Shiels at winning 2014 NI Music Prize, so here's a song from the winning album, "Hello Death" -
