Can you remember who won the Mercury Music Prize last year? Us neither – and we wrote about it about a million times. Having looked it up, we realised it was Antony And The Johnsons, pretty much a miserable fat bloke in a dress.

Who’s going to win the Mercury Music Prize this year? Arsed if we know at the moment, but it probably won’t be the best British album of the last 12 months. It never is. But the shortlist for the 2006 Mercury Music Prize has been revealed, so Arctic Monkeys might win it, or Muse, or Thom Yorke, or even Scritti bleeding Politti. Or, if we’re lucky, Richard Hawley.