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Posted in hiphop | music on September 8, 2009
Speech Debelle wins Mercury Prize! (coming for CMJ)
DOWNLOAD: Speech Debelle - Better Days (Revox) ft. Micachu and Wiley (MP3)
DOWNLOAD: Pete Lawrie - Black & Blue (featuring Speech Debelle) (MP3)
"Speech Debelle won this year's Barclays Mercury music prize last night, making her the first woman in seven years to scoop the coveted industry award.I just got excited when I found out Speech Debelle won this year's Mercury Prize. I wasn't necessarily rooting for her before.... Truth is I barely heard of her before, but after recently learning she was coming to NYC for CMJ this year, I started listening to the album over Labor Day Weekend, and I've been loving it.The Park Lane Grovesnor hotel, in central London, erupted into cheers as the 26-year old rapper from south London rose to accept the prize for her debut album Speech Therapy.
Speech Debelle, real name Corynne Elliot, appeared overwhelmed by the occasion and looked close to tears as she accepted the prize, despite displaying a cocksure attitude in the run-up to the event telling interviewers she fully expected to win.
"It means a lot to me because it's an award judges give solely on the strength of the album," she said.
"Before they said my name I had a moment of doubt, I thought 'what if I don't win? What about all the people who supported me?' and then they announced my name and I didn't have time to react, I was being mobbed." [Guardian]
Speech Debelle told her producer Wayne "Lotek Hifi" Bennett to make her sound like a "hip-hop Tracy Chapman". For better and worse he succeeded. The 26-year-old south Londoner's debut Speech Therapy is a rap album rooted in the genre's respectable, conscious traditions - the lineage typified in the 1990s by A Tribe Called Quest, Mos Def, Common and Arrested Development.Debelle beat Florence & The Machine, Kasabian, Bat for Lashes, Glasvegas, Friendly Fires, The Horors, and others for this year's Mercury prize.
[The Independent]
'Speech Therapy' (the album) was released here on August 18th by Big Dada and features a guest appearance by Micachu (bonus). A version of that song ("Better Days") is available for download above along with a song by Pete Lawrie that Debelle guests on. The video for "Better Days"), and some UK tour dates are below...
Speech Debelle - 2009 Tour Dates
Sep 10 - Street League Women's Match Day London, London and South East
Sep 13 - Bestival Festival-Red Bull Stage Isle of White
Sep 25 - Colston Hall - support for Roni Size Bristol
Sep 26 - Plug Sheffiled
Sep 27 - Night & Day Manchester
Sep 28 - Uni - Mine Leeds
Oct 1 - Glasgow Arches Glasgow
Oct 2 - Stiff Kitten Belfast
Oct 4 - Masque Liverpool
Oct 5 - Morcambe Library Liverpool
Oct 7 - Scala London
Oct 8 - Coalition Brighton
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Posted on September 8, 2009 9:18 PM
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Comments (10)
this is an excellent album and i'm happy that she won. looking forward to seeing her here in nyc
Posted by eric rex | September 8, 2009 9:51 PM
Sounds good. CMJ is shaping up be be better than usual this year.
Posted by Anonymous | September 8, 2009 9:52 PM
when/where cmj?
Posted by Anonymous | September 8, 2009 9:56 PM
Oct. 20-24, New York
Posted by Anonymous | September 8, 2009 11:31 PM
Terrible Choice, but it's still a better than average album.
The real prize of this year has been Florence & the Machine... Easily one of the best albums of the year with well layered depth and texture. Hell, Kasabian's, Led Bib's, White Lies', Friendly Fires', and the Horrors' albums were even better than this.
Posted by Anonymous | September 8, 2009 11:37 PM
Congrats to Speech. There were more then a couple of worthy winners but her albums pretty good.
Posted by Pepsi MaxCast | September 9, 2009 7:39 AM
GLASVEGAS WAS/WERE ROBBED!
Posted by Anonymous | September 9, 2009 11:41 AM
Glasvegas was not robbed. Glasvegas is all hype.
Posted by Anonymous | September 9, 2009 11:47 AM
This was the best album to come out of the UK in the past year? Pretty sad. A far cry from Elbow taking the prize.
Posted by Anonymous | September 9, 2009 5:00 PM
Glasvegas was not robbed. Glasvegas is all hype.
Posted by lv | October 17, 2009 12:22 PM