Much to the surprise of several midland-based illegal betting syndicates, the annual Mercury Music Prize was last night awarded to dour navel-gazers The Double-X at a darts-tournament-themed presentation ceremony in London.

However, the misguided brummie gangsters were not the only ones to get a fuzzy reception on their crystal ball, as pointed out last night by Slackdad on these very pages following Matthew’s accurately dismissive review of the Londoners’ debut album almost a year ago.

Nevertheless, much as it balks me to stick up for Matthew, I do still think his review was pretty much spot on at the time; and remains so a year later.

What Matthew didn’t take into account last year was the music industry establishment’s fear of appearing “out-of-touch” or “un-cool”, which I believe was the main reason the nu-goth â„¢ outfit was given the prize.

As the traditional music business with its rigid regime of pigeon-holed genres fragments, and the fault lines that divide the artistic and creative side of music from the light entertainment side widen, the moguls holding the purse strings at the record companies and the corporations that sponsor events like the Mercury Awards are finding themselves in a state of fitful panic.

The XX didn’t win the award because theirs was the best album of the year, or even on the shortlist. It wasn’t. Theirs was simply the best image for the Mercury Awards to adopt for a year. The right image was important to them this year in particular, following the cultural vanishing act performed by last year’s winner – urban act Speech Debelle – as soon as the twenty-grand prize cheque was cashed.

The XX have had a year to establish themselves on the festival circuit, and have tickled the underbelly of the charts if not exactly set them alight. So the Marketing Director at Barclaycard can sleep relatively soundly, safe in the knowledge that their sponsorship investment should continue to pay off for at least a few more months.

I bet last year Barclaycard were left thinking they could have just spent twenty-grand down the pub for all the good Speech What’s-Her-Face did for them.

So, by that token, surely Paul Weller or Mumford & Sons should have won. Barclaycard can, quite literally, take them to the bank, can’t they?

Well, perhaps not. A completely safe-as-houses bet such as  represented by those acts would have highlighted last year’s fuck-up instead of quietly sweeping it under the carpet. Media pundits and bloggers would have leapt all over it, claiming that it was a cynical attempt to associate the Mercurys with a successful act for purely business purposes.

I didn’t catch the whole awards show broadcast on the TV last night, but – like the witness to a crime – I saw enough. The live performances largely illustrated what a poor shortlist had been compiled.

The Mumfords delivered a sample of their well drilled live-set which was more than adequate to steal the show from the sample I saw. I’m sure you can catch carbon-copies of Villagers in the back room of pubs at open-mic nights up and down the country. The lad simply doesn’t have a ring of quality about him, and looks like he’s being pimped about by handlers trading on his doe-eyed shyness and funny haircut. I Am Kloot were clearly very competent songwriters and soulful performers, but somehow put me in mind of Chris De Burgh.

Corinne Bailey Rae and her band just embarrassing. She started off by showing us some hesitantly picked arpeggios she learned in her first guitar lesson that morning  (she’s not there yet but she’ll probably get the hang of it in time); before her backing band came struck up. Well, I don’t know which phone-in competition they’d each individually won to get the chance to play on stage at the Mercurys, but you’d think someone would have given them the chance to practice together first.

After that we watched as the token jazz trio from the shortlist warmed up by playing three different songs at once. It was certainly intriguing, but it would have been nice to see their actual performance. At least their sense of rhythm was better than Corinne Bailey Rae’s band. (Having said that though, Matthew’s sense of rhythm is better than Corinne Bailey Rae’s band.)

So for another year we’re left with the bitter aftertaste of music being misappropriated for the sake of corporate media-grabbing, and the unpleasant sticky residue reaches even the fringes of the music scene as the Mercury Awards flaunt their ill-deserved “edgy and independent” image in the music news headlines. How depressing.

Any predictions for the Mercury Awards 2011 then?

The Blue Aeroplanes – Mercury