The Mercury prize almost always produces surprises – among them, Gomez not The Verve in 1998, and English Teacher not Charlie XCX in 2024 – but perhaps the biggest surprise is that the prize has survived for so many years. That it has been won this year by Sam Fender in his native Newcastle speaks very much of the time that has passed in those 34 years.

Conceived as a kind of credible alternative to the Brit Awards – a prize for those beyond the razzamatazz of mainstream pop music – the (then) Mercury Music prize was introduced in 1992.

This was the year of a general election which, while won by the Conservative party, did not see the re-election of Margaret Thatcher. But Thatcher’s work had been done: the introduction of neoliberal policies which ravaged many UK industries and the regions in which they were located.

Fender can be understood as a voice of that ravaged Britain. He was born two years after John Major’s election victory, and grew up in a disintegrating family in a disintegrating former industrial region. He survived the chaos and has written about that collective suffering with great skill and passion over three albums.

It is telling, too, that the (renamed) Mercury Prize lost its corporate sponsorship along the way. Being publicly allied with music is no longer the marketing “must have” it once was. This year’s award event was paid for jointly by Newcastle City Council and the regional authority.

As Britain attempts to cope with the evaporation of major industries and the suffering that permanent loss of employment infrastructure induces, many UK regions now foreground the creative abilities of their residents as a reason to invest in their particular area. Demand for music, and for the creativity it carries and expresses, has become a key feature of social and economic as well as cultural life.

This begs the question: what is it that creative people actually contribute? The 2025 Mercury prize shortlist gives us some clues, especially if we look at three of the nominees who missed out on the prize: Pulp, Wolf Alice and Martin Carthy. Both Pulp and Wolf Alice are previous winners (1996 and 2018 respectively), but Carthy has won very few awards over the 84 years of his life.

“Notable” musicians tend to be of their time. This is partly because their choice of instruments and combinations of keys, notes and tempos resonate with the moments they and their audiences are living through. But there is more to being a musician than this.

Real, affecting performance draws on and mobilises symbolic information far beyond musical soundmaking – even though that demands skill and ability. Fender, for example, is unequivocally a Geordie, even as he fits the mould of a kind of Bruce Springsteen for his times.

Both Pulp and Wolf Alice are challenging to discuss. Where Jarvis Cocker is concerned, the word “uncompromising” comes to mind, but what does that mean? Here is someone who is unique – yet what his vision of the world is, is never quite apparent. Cocker is “about something”, and he is about it so strongly that people stand back and admire him for it.

Wolf Alice are something different: a successful rock band in a time when rock bands have gone into decline. It is almost the band’s own self-awareness that, somehow, “they shouldn’t be” that gives them their energy – mining rock’s extensive back catalogue to support essentially introspective lyrics about (mainly singer Ellie Rowsell) self-adjusting to the demands of an evermore turbulent world.

In this, there are shades of Cocker. And with Fender singing about negotiating this turbulence too (only with a more explicit set of references to a world beyond his interior), so the core strengths of contemporary music begin to emerge.

Popular musicians go on providing a soundtrack for our lives because they express themselves through the idioms of the moment. If we take Fender’s previous album, Seventeen Going Under, as a point of reference, every aspect of the recording and its video speaks to his growing up in the northeast of England and his continuing loyalty to the place.

His moving acceptance speech and rapport with the audience were evidence of this. His performance of People Watching was almost pure Bruce Springsteen – mainstream rock inflected and defined by a hometown sensibility.

Which brings us to Martin Carthy. It is impossible to capture Carthy’s significance in words, because his voice cannot be heard on the page – and it is so powerfully distinctive that it needs to be heard.

Carthy was the soul of English folk music in the 1960s and ’70s. His brand of folk music speaks to a resilience through suffering – the suffering of pre-industrial society articulated through song. Now, Fender is speaking to the suffering of post-industrial society. They both should have won.

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Mike Jones, University of Liverpool

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Mike Jones does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.