Last year’s Mercury Prize winners English Teacher returned to the event and reflected on the impact of the award, and gave us an update on new material
00:00Hello English teacher, welcome to the Mercury Prize. How are you doing?
00:03Good. How does it feel to be back after you won last year?
00:08Feels relaxed, doesn't it?
00:11Yeah.
00:12A lot more chill.
00:14It's quite nice. There's no chance we have to go.
00:18Insane and prepared speech.
00:20You can just have a nice night.
00:22What was the impact of you winning last year? How did that change things for the band?
00:27I think it kind of restarted, I guess, the album side.
00:31I felt like we were really busy and then like, post that we just, it kind of just continued until about now.
00:39I feel like I've been on, give or take, we've kind of been on tour since then.
00:44I mean, yeah, it's been a mental, yeah, it's making me reflect a lot on the last thought once really. It's been mad.
00:50Having that kind of concrete validation like that does give you a kind of sense of confidence, which does go the other way.
00:56Yeah.
00:57Does that kind of, when it comes to writing new music, does that kind of sit in the back of your mind that you have to kind of better the first album, that you have to kind of achieve more?
01:05Or is it something you don't think about?
01:07I think that would always be there, I think, regardless, you know, we want what we're writing to come out next to be better.
01:16But there's a history, isn't there, of like the Mercury curses.
01:20Yeah.
01:21I think he's got to come through, like, internally, hasn't he?
01:23He's really too much about all of this, this and that, and you'll dig yourself into a line.
01:28So he's just going through.
01:29But I'm telling myself all the time.
01:31Yeah.
01:32Last time you spoke to Enemy, you said you had been working on ideas for new music individually.
01:37How have you kind of progressed since then?
01:39Are you kind of working on things together now?
01:41What are things sounding like?
01:42Where are we at?
01:44We've thrown our ideas at each other.
01:47A bit.
01:48Nice.
01:49You just released the remix album of This Could Be Texas.
01:59What was it like hearing those songs reworked by your peers, some of your favourite artists?
02:04It's, again, just surreal for me.
02:07I really enjoyed a lot of the songs.
02:11I thought that what came back was really eclectic.
02:15Yeah.
02:16Nice to hear the songs that we wrote as, like, danceable tracks.
02:21It's kind of crazy hearing something that you've created.
02:24You've put through some of this head and a smile.
02:27A lot of them I didn't expect to sound like that.
02:30It was quite interesting just listening to them come in.
02:33Yeah.
02:34You were the first non-London actor to win the Mercury Prize since 2014.
02:38Obviously, this is the first time the Mercury has ever been held outside of London.
02:41Why is it important that the music industry kind of doesn't keep so centralised, so focused on London spreads out to further around the country?
02:48I've talked about this quite a bit before.
02:51I think, obviously, the music industry is important for many different reasons, but the thing is, if you don't have lots of different kinds of people making art, then it's all going to become monotonous.
03:09And then, if it's monotonous, then it's bullshit.
03:15Yeah, exactly.
03:16So I think, yeah, it's important.
03:17There's so many interesting perspectives outside of London.
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