What I like most about the Mercury Prize is that there’s something there for everyone. The 2005 nominees were Antony and the Johnsons, Bloc Party, Coldplay, The Go! Team, Hard-Fi, Kaiser Chiefs, KT Tunstall, The Magic Numbers, Maximo Park, MIA, Polar Bear and Seth Lakeman. If this was the beginning of somebody’s first ever record collection I’d say it was a pretty respectable beginning, though I’d have to take them aside at one point to explain to them — perhaps with diagrams — exactly why they should have stopped liking Coldplay after their second album.

We all know now that Antony and the Johnsons won the prize this year which pleases me a great deal; they’ve come out of nowhere, they’ve created a record that’s hauntingly beautiful and highly unusual, and they’ve been rewarded for it. Kaiser Chiefs were the favourite, and like Franz Ferdinand the year before would have been the easy choice to make. The fact that Antony and the Johnsons were even in the line-up was a good sign, but winning the award as well is great news.

If you haven’t heard anything by them yet, I suggest you pay a visit to their (incredibly boring but functional) website and download some MP3s. I’ve yet to hear of anybody not either loving them or hating them straight away.

As for the other nominees, there’s also a lot of good stuff there but I realise as I write this that what the line-up lacked was originality. The Magic Numbers? Excellent, but if you’ve heard anything by The Bees or The Shins or even The Polyphonic Spree then there will be few surprises here. Maximo Park suffer from ‘Identical Northern Band Syndrome’, as isolated they sound great — but if you’ve heard the Kaiser Chiefs and The Futureheads then you’ve already really heard Maximo Park.

That’s not to say I don’t like those bands — I do, very much so, and I also love The Go! Team and Bloc Party and I hope all of them are around for a long time, but now I look back at the line-up I can see how Antony and the Johnsons become quite an obvious winner simply by virtue of sounding unlike anyone else, and I’m glad that they were picked out of the crowd. Talented though the nominees were, it’s still good to see that being popular or well-known isn’t always what it takes to receive recognition.