Young Fathers win the 2023 SAY Award
Third time's a charm for Edinburgh outfit Young Fathers, announced as winners of the 2023 Scottish Album of the Year Award for their fourth studio album Heavy Heavy
It’s hard to believe, but The Scottish Album of the Year (SAY) Award has tonight announced its 12th winner of the annual award. After hours of deliberations, it was decided that despite having already won the award twice before, Young Fathers should be crowned SAY Award winners once again, with the Edinburgh trio winning the 2023 prize for their phenomenal fourth studio album Heavy Heavy. It’s the fifth time that Alloysious Massaquoi, Kayus Bankole and Graham 'G' Hastings have been up for the award and the third time they’ve been successful in bagging the £20,000 cash reward, with their Tape Two mixtape winning in 2014, and Cocoa Sugar in 2018.
As with every year, the process started with eligible album submissions before 100 impartial nominators helped get that down to 20 longlisted records. The longlist was then whittled down to a shortlist of ten with one picked by the general public and the other nine selected by a panel of judges. This year's 11 panelists were once again set to task on the day of the ceremony to agree on the winner, with Adem Holness (Head of Contemporary Music at the Southbank Centre), screenwriter Andrea Gibb, writer, editor and author Katie Goh and STV News' Laura Boyd among the esteemed panel, chaired this year by multi-hyphenate Arusa Qureshi. This year's ceremony took place at The Albert Halls in Stirling for the second time, following celebrations in previous years in Glasgow, Paisley and Edinburgh.
Heavy Heavy: a 'glorious mess' steeped in humanity
Young Fathers have been lighting up the Scottish music scene since the late noughties and only seem to keep going from strength to strength, with 2023 probably their strongest year yet, with non-stop touring, including a jaw-dropping televised performance at Glastonbury, leading many to declare them as the most exciting live band on the planet. And it’s true, few others can bring their music to life on the stage the way Young Fathers can; their frenetic, oftentimes highly volatile, raw energy unmatched. [Warning: the video below contains some flashing images.]
2023 also saw Young Fathers once again up for the Mercury Prize, nine years on from their Mercury win for 2014’s Dead. Heavy Heavy is a masterstroke of controlled chaos, bringing together a diverse grab bag of influences to form a record packed with quotable lines, singalong choruses, hip-shaking beats and moments so beautiful you could cry.
Earlier in the year, in celebration of Heavy Heavy's impending release, we were honoured to have Young Fathers take over the February issue of The Skinny. As part of that takeover, in a feature about the record, Massaquoi told us: “I think this record in particular, it's undeniably steeped in humanity. There's so many different conversations happening. And it's about how we can all be talking about something different, but we've all honed in on the feeling of the song. You've got three Beyoncés and that's probably what that is – we can all hold the fort individually and we can all support each other in that same process. What we do is like a glorious mess but it works and we made it work.”
No Windows win Sound of Young Scotland award
As well as the £20,000 cash prize for this year’s winners, the nine other artists making up this year’s shortlist – Andrew Wasylyk, Becky Sikasa, Bemz, Brìghde Chaimbeul, Brooke Combe, Cloth, Hamish Hawk, Joesef and Paolo Nutini – will all receive £1000, with all ten artists receiving beautiful low-carbon concrete trophies, handmade by Stirling-based makers Brutal Concrete Workshop.
On top of the main award, introduced in 2021 two other awards were given out at the ceremony. The Modern Scottish Classic Award and the Sound of Young Scotland, with the former going to Paolo Nutini for his debut, 2006’s These Streets, featuring hits like Jenny Don’t Be Hasty, Last Request and New Shoes, those tracks performed on the night by Brownbear and Becky Sikasa alongside The SAY House Band led by Joe Rattray. Meanwhile, the Sound of Young Scotland Award was presented to Edinburgh duo No Windows who told us in a recent Spotlight On feature on the ...Young Scotland nominees that if they won they’d “probably just get really pished,” admitting that “in the long run we'll make good use of the prize money. It will give us the opportunity to record new music, which we're really excited to do."
The SAY Award 2023 took place at The Albert Halls, Stirling, 26 Oct
sayaward.com