10 Mercury Prize winners to have performed at the Southbank Centre

It’s a bold and noble pursuit, one which, perhaps inevitably, often leads to think-pieces and op-eds centring on who is missing from its annual shortlist, as much as who has made it. This year the twelve nominees span a broad spectrum, from the brazen rock of Wolf Alice to the gentler dulcet tones of Arlo Parks. 

Among the other ten are three acts who are no stranger to us at the Southbank Centre. Scottish post-rockers Mogwai, nominated for As the Love Continues, joined us for Robert Smith’s Meltdown in 2018, whilst Black Country, New Road are on the shortlist with For the First Time, an album which they celebrated the release of here at the Southbank Centre in March, with a specially streamed live performance from our Queen Elizabeth Hall.

And also nominated for her album Source is Nubya Garcia, who we’ll be welcoming to our venues in August when she takes over our Riverside Terrace, curating a free reunion weekend of music and performance. Should any of these three acts lift this year’s prize, then they’ll be in good company, joining this impressive list of Mercury winners to have played at the Southbank Centre.

Jarvis Cocker

A soundtrack to the life of anyone coming of age in Brit Pop Britain, Pulp’s Different Class lifted the Mercury Prize in 1996. Since then, the unmistakable figure of the band’s frontman Jarvis Cocker has often been sighted at the Southbank Centre, most notably curating Meltdown in 2007. His genre-defying line-up swung from The Jesus and Mary Chain to John Barry conducting the London Philharmonic Orchestra and even featured Grace Jones and Pete Doherty performing songs from Disney. In 2010 Cocker returned to our Royal Festival Hall to narrate the Philharmonia Orchestra’s performance of Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf.

Talvin Singh

Beating big-name favourites Manic Street Preachers and The Chemical Brothers to the 1999 Mercury Prize was the comparatively obscure Talvin Singh, with his fusion of classical Indian tabla music with drum and bass, Ok. Singh came to the Southbank Centre twice in 2013, appearing both at Alchemy and Meltdown festivals. For the former he showcased his tabla skills by improvising new scores to two Bollywood classics, Raja Harishchandra and Devi (Goddess). And at the latter he joined Siouxsie, Sean Lennon and Yoko Ono on stage for the festival’s closing performance.

Badly Drawn Boy

Damon Gough ensured Mercury Prize infamy in 2000 when he tossed away his cheque after winning the award with The Hour of Bewilderbeast in a gesture he’s since suggested sat somewhere between protest at the remunerating of art and drunkenness. He had thankfully managed to retrieve it before he appeared at the Southbank Centre in 2002, playing an intimate gig in our Queen Elizabeth Hall as part of David Bowie’s Meltdown.

Young Fathers

Young Fathers are the Mercury Prize winners to have played at the Southbank Centre most recently, getting our Royal Festival Hall up on its feet in the summer of 2017 as they launched M.I.A.’s Meltdown. Now on three albums into their career, it was for their debut Dead that the Edinburgh-based hip-hop three-piece lifted the Mercury Prize in 2014

Speech Debelle

Such was the meteoric rise of Speech Debelle in 2009, that just a few short months before lifting that year’s Mercury Prize the ‘Terrific young, soulful London rhymesayer’ as Time Out described her, was performing for free at one of our Friday Tonic shows in The Front Room at Queen Elizabeth Hall. Post Mercury victory Speech Debelle returned to the Southbank Centre in 2013 as curator of the Strength & Vulnerability Bunker within the Koestler Trust’s annual exhibition of art by prisoners. And here’s a video of her performing just outside our venues, on the South Bank.

PJ Harvey

The only two-time winner of the Mercury Prize, having lifted it in 2001 for Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea and again in 2011 for Let England Shake, PJ Harvey is similarly no stranger to the Southbank Centre. In September 2007, Harvey stepped out on the Royal Festival Hall stage to give a performance of her stripped-back and haunting atmospheric White Chalk album. And in 2016 she returned in a different light to launch The Hollow of The Hand, a book which paired her first published poems with the photography of Seamus Murphy.

Benjamin Clementine

Artist, poet, composer and musician Benjamin Clementine had already appeared at the Southbank Centre not once, but twice by the time he won the 2015 Mercury Prize with his debut album At Least for Now. ‘He was incredible’ said Evening Standard reviewer David Smyth of Clementine’s first appearance here, a 2013 gig in the Purcell Room. In 2015 Clementine was back and on a bigger stage, taking a seat at the piano in Queen Elizabeth Hall as part of David Byrne’s Meltdown.

Anohni

Antony and the Johnsons’ 2005 Mercury Prize win for I Am a Bird Now, was one of the more contentious in the Award’s history; owing to lead singer Anohni having moved to the US aged 10. ‘He’s an American, really,’ protested Kaiser Chiefs drummer, Nick Hodgson. Having performed at Patti Smith’s Meltdown in that Mercury Prize winning year, Anohni, still then known as Antony Hegarty, returned to the festival as curator in 2012. Anohni delivered what Guardian reviewer Kitty Empire termed an ‘alternative Olympics for vulnerability and shape-shifting’ in a line-up that gave us notable performances from Lou Reed and Marc Almond.

Elbow and Guy Garvey

As Antony and the Johnsons did before them and Speech Debelle and Benjamin Clementine would go on to do, Elbow also notched the double of playing here at the Southbank Centre in the same year as they lifted the Mercury Prize. Ahead of the triumph for The Seldom Seen Kid, Elbow appeared with us as part of Massive Attack’s 2008 Meltdown. Eight years later, frontman Guy Garvey was back again, this time as curator of his own festival, delivering a bill that included one of the acts Elbow had pipped to the 2008 Mercury, Laura Marling.

Michael Kiwanuka

The most recent winner of the Mercury Prize is Michael Kiwanuka, who picked up the award last year for his self-titled third album. It was back in December 2012 when we first welcomed Kiwanuka to the Southbank Centre, as he topped off a remarkable 18 months with a Royal festival Hall performance. Little over two years earlier he’d still been working as a session musician, before the combination of supporting Adele on tour, being named BBC’s Sound of 2012, and a brilliant debut album Home Again catapulted him to solo success.

And there’s more…

We’ve kept this list at ten artists, so as not to steal your entire day from you, but such has been the Southbank Centre’s contemporary musical output in the past two decades we could’ve crowbarred in a few more had we really wished. Among them the 2013 winner James Blake, who played our Purcell Room two years before his Mercury triumph, and both Geoff Barrow and Adrian Utley – winners with Portishead in 1995 – who later appeared at our Ether festival.