Critic's notebook

Alexis Petridis on heavy metal and the Mercury prize

So the Mercury prize ignores heavy metal? That's just how things should be
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The 2011 Mayhem Festival, St. Louis, Missouri, America - 19 Jul 2011
Great pedigree ... Machine Head. Photograph: Startraks Photo / Rex Features

I love protests at music industry awards ceremony, usually because they're the single most interesting thing that happens at an otherwise dreary event. A few years ago, I particularly enjoyed the Mobos, largely because a group called the Black Music Council turned up to protest that reggae artists had been excluded from the nominations because of their homophobic lyrics. Intriguingly, some of them chose to express their anger via the vigorous playing of bongos.

Then a group of gay rights activists turned up to protest about the Black Music Council's protest. Some other people were angry about the number of US artists nominated; more still were angry about the number of white artists; and another group seemed cross about hip-hop promoting black-on-black violence. Outside, everyone was shouting at everyone else to a thunderous bongo accompaniment. Inside, they were giving an award for best ringtone to Mario Winans. It was no contest as to where the fun was.

And yet I confess to being slightly puzzled by events at the recent announcement of nominees for the Mercury prize, which goes to the year's best album. Heavy metal fans turned up to protest that the Sheffield band Bring Me the Horizon had been overlooked. Their album, as you are probably aware, is called There Is a Hell, Believe Me, I've Seen It, There Is a Heaven, Let's Keep It a Secret.

You have to say, regardless of the merits or otherwise of Bring Me the Horizon, the protesters have a point. The only hard rock artists to be nominated for the Mercury since 1992 are Biffy Clyro and the Darkness. The message seems to be that in 19 years, nothing else from the entire genre has come close to attaining the vertiginous heights of musical achievement scaled by albums that did get nominated, among them Simply Red's Stars, Sting's Ten Summoner's Tales, Richard Ashcroft's awful solo debut Alone With Everybody, and X&Y, a Coldplay album that even Coldplay seemed to think was a bit beige for its own good. You don't have to love metal – in fact you don't even have to like it at all – to concede that this probably isn't the case.

No expert, I did what I always do when a question about metal hoves into view: I rang my friend Dom Lawson, music journalist and devoted metalhead. Dom confirmed that, yes, over the last two decades, the genre had produced some albums he felt were perhaps a little better and more groundbreaking than Ten Summoner's Tales. There were albums by Akercocke, Iron Monkey and Sikth. There was The Codex Necro by Anaal Nathrakh, a record I fervently wish had been nominated for the Mercury, purely because I'd like to hear Jools Holland say "Anaal Nathrakh" on BBC4. This year, Dom suggested, TesseracT, Skindred, Your Demise, Talanas and Anathema had all been overlooked. The likelihood is that none of them even bothered stumping up the Mercury's entry fee.

The reason why metal bands never get nominated for the Mercury is the same reason why metal bands never appear on Later With Jools Holland. It's the same reason why the BBC devotes hours of coverage to Glastonbury and T in the Park, but nothing to Sonisphere, a festival at which the cumulative album sales of the headlining acts touches something like 200m. And it's the same reason why the chief rock critic of a national newspaper had to ring his mate up to find out what the most boundary-pushing British metal albums of the last 20 years were.

It's because the British mainstream media is institutionally biased against heavy metal. For some reason, it's populated by people who neither like metal nor understand it, and who believe that the general public follow suit. Under the circumstances, you can't blame its fans for getting their placards out and having a bit of a shout.

But I'm not sure this state of affairs isn't to metal's benefit. At least part of metal's appeal is its outsider status, something it has managed to retain – incredibly –for over 40 years. It's music that has consistently resisted incorporation into the homogenous mass of mainstream good taste, despite selling hundreds of millions of records, precisely because no one in the mainstream media really likes or understands it.

On the one hand, that means it doesn't get on the radio or telly much. On the other, it means metal fans develop a sense of loyalty and a feeling of us-against-the-world community. It means artists aren't subjected to the level of destructive hype that has bedevilled, say, indie music since Britpop. The phenomenon of the "firework band" – makers of one wildly overheated debut album who find themselves immediately laden with unreasonable expectations, and fizzle out – doesn't really exist here. Metal artists are allowed to develop at their own pace, away from the glare of the mainstream spotlight and the vagaries of fashion. This November, Machine Head will headline Wembley for the first time, 17 years after their debut album came out, a state of affairs that's impossible to imagine happening in almost any other genre.

Consequently, it seems that the worst thing that could happen would be for the Mercury to acquiesce to the protesters' demands and introduce a token metal nomination to go alongside the token jazz and folk ones. With the greatest of respect to Bring Me the Horizon's fans, things seem fine as they are. Your favourite band might not get nominated for the Mercury, or get airplay on Radio 1, but you can console yourself with the fact that, unlike a lot of bands that do, they'll probably still have a fanbase in two years' time.

Should the Mercury prize include metal? Vote here.

My cultural life

On my bedside table: Simon Reynolds's Retromania. A book for anyone who's ever wondered: "Am I suffering from sharity-blog induced franticity?"

On my iPod: Cliff Richard's The Day I Met Marie. Seriously. If Scott Walker had recorded this, people would call it a classic.

On my TV: BBC4's Britain Through A Lens: The Documentary Film Mob was fascinating. Its subjects really believed they could break down the class barriers of inter-war Britain.

In my diary: The Vorticists' show at Tate Britain.

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