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
2008 Turner Prize of inscrutable junk." In the "Financial Times", Jackie Wullschlager wrote, "Don’t go. Don’t even think about going. This year’s Turner Prize exhibition is without competition the worst in the history of the award... a killer mix of self-indulgence and academicism." Laura Cumming in "The Observer" agreed, "If ever you were thinking of giving the Turner Prize a miss then 2008 is the ideal year." saying that "[i]t is not that the art is wilfully bad ... it is just that it is almost entirely inactive." In contrast, Adrian Searle wrote in "The Guardian": "[T]here's a depth and complexity [in the