![\"Sam](\"https:\/\/cdn1.faroutmagazine.co.uk\/uploads\/1\/2025\/10\/Sam-Fender-Mercury-Music-Prize-2025-Newcastle-Far-Out-Magazine-1024x768.jpg\")
<\/div>Beyond the prestige of the pending christening of \u2018Album of the Year\u2019, people buzzed about seeing acts that they had never heard of, talked about supporting the industry, and thrived on a feeling of local pride.<\/p>\n
As a local myself, you could spot the familiar faces of fellows who attend 200 gigs every year, local record store owners, buskers, young bands who hunger to be on the stage themselves one day, and first-timers, drawn in by the glamour, who might now have a life of live music ahead. These are all vital figures who keep the arts afloat, but often feel cut off from its functions in every sense. The admittedly rather corporate arena had a fitting grassroots, community feel.<\/p>\n
In fact, the actual notion that an \u2018Album of the Year\u2019 was soon to be announced had all but disappeared by the time \u2018Spike Island\u2019 stunned the crowd and Pulp kicked off the party in timeless style. That\u2019s how it should be. If awards are arbitrary, then supporting the arts and music industry is its polar inverse, and the more often the former can join the latter, the better.<\/p>\n
These are trying times, not just for music but in myriad troubling ways, so if a trophy awarded by \u2018expert judges\u2019 can represent more than a bookshelf ornament and quiz question a decade down the line, then more power to it. If the already perilous existence of the music industry is about to shrink a further 20% owing to AI in the next four years, then what feels more important: fastidiously fussing over prestige and critical critique or honouring the wider picture?<\/p>\n
While a win for a local hero might have looked like an icky loss of integrity among some of the Sam Fender naysayers back home, that stance, though justifiable on paper, would be reliant on two factors to carry any weight in reality: a) an obvious winner being overlooked, and b) Fender\u2019s own effort being obviously unworthy. Both of those fail to hold water.\u00a0People Watching<\/em>\u00a0is a good record, and nothing really towered above it.<\/p>\n Thereafter, the energy in the room swung a Fender win towards an inevitability. Far from people pleasing, from inside the Utilita Arena, that made the victory announcement feel like a giant leap forward for the Mercury Prize. In fact, one small moment in\u00a0Fender\u2019s own victory speech\u00a0and the song he chose to play came to personify the triumph of the evening in every which way.<\/p>\n When collecting the award, Fender dedicated the win to Annie Orwin. Without the late local actor, whom he described as a \u201csurrogate mother\u201d, encouraging him onto the stage and supporting him throughout his rise, he wouldn\u2019t have been an artist, let alone a Mercury Prize-winning one.<\/p>\n He wrote \u2018People Watching\u2019 about his trips back from the care home where she died in 2023, aged 68. And the record that followed was flush with the black and white, dark and light, of stark social realism, and the contrasting boon of a progressive and cohesive community\u2019s potential to overcome those troubled, inequitable realities.<\/p>\n It might not be everyone\u2019s favourite album of the year, and maybe it wasn\u2019t even the best (but what was?), but it was an album of hope and unity, unflinchingly capturing the plight of the working classes and art\u2019s capacity to elevate. In times of division and darkness, honouring that was vital, especially in a room where it resonated with thousands because they recognised the same plight that Sam Fender sings of.<\/p>\n So, as thousands of Geordies flocked to the nearest pub, blabbering about a full roster of fantastic performances, from Pa Salieu to Martin Carthy and the show-stopping Jacob Alon, collective hope, heartening unity, and an appreciation for music seemed to abound \u2013 that\u2019s what the Mercury Prize should be about.<\/p>\n