The 2015 GIT Award is now fast underway, gearing up to seek out the finest new music on Merseyside, and announcing the winners of its prize, alongside the One To Watch and Inspiration awards, on April 4 2015 at the Kazimier. Today, they’ve announced the judging panel. There are a host of returning faces, including the Quietus editor John Doran and contributor and inestimable journalist Simon Price, Liverpool Music Week’s Mike Deane, Xfm’s Mike Walsh, Liverpool club night EVOL founder Steve Miller, Yaw Owusu, curator of the Liverpool International Music Festival and the award’s founder, Peter Guy of the Getintothis blog. Meanwhile, new additions include no less than three excellent label bigwigs: Jeff Barrett of Heavenly Recordings, Simon Raymonde of Bella Union and Rich Walker of 4AD. They’re all joined by Jarri Van der Haugen of Disco Naïveté, Shell Zenner of North West Amazing Radio, Clash‘s Robin Murray and Chris Torpey, editor of Liverpool’s Bido Lito! and another fine tQ scribe.
In the text accompanying the announcement, Raymonde offers a lengthy reflection on his changing relationship with UK music, saying: "Since around 2008, something happened, maybe the end of Labour’s time in government coming up, the initial euphoria of Tony Blair as PM replaced by that jaw-dropping reality that he was just another false prophet, the widening economic disparity between North and South, all suggested a sea change in art and culture, in a way harking back to the late 70s where we just stopped and said, ‘Ok you know what? Fuck this, we are not standing for this shit any more’, and somehow all that energy and excitement that flows through the creative minds of today’s young musicians and artists I see as their way of combating the bleak prospects they see ahead of them in Cameron’s Big Fucking Society […] And my soul is enriched and my heart swollen from the incredible variety that is coming out of the UK. I now have around 15 UK-based artists on the label, and appropriately I am in the process of trying to sign a couple of bands from Liverpool as I write this […] I’ve been spending most weekends this past year on trains up from my coastal home town of Brighton to all the corners of our fair isle, and beyond, and it is no exaggeration to say, without wishing to put the curse of ‘scene’ upon it, the most consistently exciting bands right now ARE from Liverpool. That is an irrefutable fact." Artists and bands can enter by sending four tracks to gitaward@getintothis.co.uk.
