Mercury Prize increase of their album "The Seldom Seen Kid" after winning the Prize in 2008. In their winner's speech, Elbow's frontman Guy Garvey said that winning the Mercury Prize was 'Quite literally the best thing that has ever happened to us'. Similarly, sales of The xx's winning album rose by 450% the day after they won the 2010 Mercury Prize and 2013 winner James Blake saw a 2,500% sales increase on Amazon after he was announced as the winner of the 2013 Mercury Prize. 2011 winner PJ Harvey's album "Let England Shake" jumped from number 181 to 24 in the UK
Tbilisi Rock Festival (1980) Araks and Aleksey Romanov’s Voskresenie were not invited to take part in the competition. The first prize was awarded to two acts: Gunnar Graps's Magnetic Band and Mashina Vremeni. Magnetic Band from Tallinn, Estonia performed a mixture of jazz-rock, blues and funk and was noted for their instrumental mastership. Mashina Vremeni is a rock band from Moscow and led by Andrei Makarevich, which fascinated the public with their poetic lyrics and, through this success, firmly established themselves on the Soviet rock scene. The second prize was won by Alexander Sitkovetsky’s art rock group Autograph hailing from Moscow, Gunesh from Ashkhabad,