This willingness to confront popular taste reached it's apex in 2005, when little known transgender chanteuse Anthony Hegarty shocked the assembled glitterati by triumphing with his album I Am a Bird Now. Recently the victors have been from more mainstream indiedom - Arctic Monkeys, Klaxons - and now the wise money is on the judge’s taste this year boomeranging back out into the eclectic hinterland of razor-thin niches and word-of-mouth credibility.
Sensing a story with all the clumsy inarticulateness of a sleepy noon-day dog, it was one of Britain's pointless tabloid newspapers which triggered the sequence of events that led ultimately to that MySpace update. Declaring pompously that it was campaigning to prevent the ruination of the ceremony itself - in recent years all twelve nominees have been required to perform - The Sun then set about sticking the twenty first century equivalent of a wanted poster out, designed to unmask the recalcitrant artist and save the organisers’ threatened honour. The scenario itself was of course absurd - in reality, what better publicity for the show than a will him/her won’t him/her air of intrigue around one of the most enigmatic performers?
Faced with little choice; the figure behind the mask somewhat reluctantly revealed himself to be Will Bevan, the accompanying photo revealing an unassuming looking young man from the capital whom you might easily have sat next to on a Circle line train. That the moment proved to be anticlimactic had a degree of inevitability; after all mysterious figures operate more on the periphery of our own romanticism, our imagination lionising them into vague notions of superhero Dom. To add to the sense of farce, lovers of irony pointed to the fact that higher-brow daily the Independent had run a story positively linking Bevan to Burial some six months before.
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