Indie rockers Blossoms and Panic Over among those benefitting from £1.6m fund
Indie rockers Blossoms and Panic Over will be among the music artists to benefit from a pot of £1.6 million.
The Music Export Growth Scheme (Megs), from the Department for Business and Trade (DBT) and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), allocated support to 58 UK acts.
The scheme, run in partnership between industry and the Government, supports small to medium-sized music companies looking to grow their artists' profiles internationally.
Over the last decade, the Megs has helped more than 450 artists, including rapper Dave, dance act Jungle, singer Rina Sawayama, hip-hop poet Kae Tempest and 2023 Mercury Prize winners Ezra Collective.
This year, companies representing Greater Manchester-formed Blossoms, Hertfordshire's electronic music act Maribou State, and Newcastle's singer-songwriter Andrew Cushin, have been awarded the money.
2017 Mercury Prize nominees Blossoms broke into the charts with their debut self-titled album in August 2016, which peaked at number one, and their catchy indie pop single Charlemagne.
The Stockport-based five-piece were listed on the BBC's Sound Of 2016 list, coming in fourth place.
Northern Ireland rockers Panic Over, from Bangor, are among those named along with The X Factor star Grace Davies, London Contemporary Orchestra, who performed a 24-hour concert live in 2022, London-based female rock duo Nova Twins, Cornwall's Wunderhorse, and Manchester's pop act The Lottery Winners and hip hop artist Antony Szmierek.
The Isle Of Wight's Coach Party, Glasgow's Corto.alto, who were 2024's Mercury Prize nominees, London-based Electric Enemy and poet and actor Dan Whitlam, Nottingham band Divorce, three-piece Hastings rockers HotWax and Merseyside's Red Rum Club, were also on the list.
Gareth Thomas, minister for exports and small businesses, said: 'Often bands and their labels are smaller firms who don't have access to the funding needed to support their plans to go global and this scheme can provide that crucial shot in the arm to help those acts on their way to stardom.
'With past recipients including UK companies representing acts like Nova Twins, shortlisted for the Mercury Prize in 2022, and Ezra Collective who went on to win the prestigious prize in 2023, this scheme is a proven success with hundreds of artists now benefitting as a result.
'As a key growth sector, bringing almost £125 billion to the UK economy in 2023, the government will continue to support the Creative Industries through schemes like Megs to showcase British talent, build on the success of our industrial strategy and achieve our mission for faster growth.'
Since the government began providing support in 2014, around £7.9 million has been given out in grants.
Panic Over said: 'We are delighted to be able to use this amazing opportunity to play shows and gigs all across the Republic of Ireland over the rest of the year.
'This support means the world to us, and we can't thank everyone involved enough for believing in our music and the journey ahead.'
Alt-pop duo and recipient Dolores Forever called it a 'complete game changer for us', which will help them get out a second album, and reach 'audiences which we haven't had the resources to do so before'.
According to UK Music, British music exports revenue in 2023 was £4.6 billion, a 15% increase compared with 2022.
Last year, Northern Irish rap trio Kneecap won their discrimination court battle against UK leader of the Opposition and former business secretary Kemi Badenoch after the UK Government conceded it was 'unlawful' to refuse them a £14,250 Megs funding award.
Their Kneecap film was nominated for six Baftas and took home the award for outstanding debut by a British writer, director or producer at this year's ceremony.
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Her father kept a hammer at the side of the bed for his whole life in England. The young Bernardine developed a 'self-protective force field' that persists to this day, along with a determination to fight her corner – with words. After leaving home for drama school at 18, her 20s were spent in a blaze of cigarettes and love affairs – with women – hustling for jobs and moving between the various short-term housing available in the 80s. 'I really cherish that period,' she says. She has been straight for 35 years, and today lives with her husband in the outskirts of west London; she has swapped the Marlboro Reds and Drambuie for yoga and meditation. In her 30s, before the boom in creative writing courses, she signed up for a personal development course. 'My parents were not part of the elite,' she explains. 'So they weren't going to pass on to me strategies for how to succeed.' Evaristo was manifesting long before Instagram promised us we could live our best lives. The course made her realise 'you can change big and you can expect the best. So why not go for that?' she says. She wrote a note to herself that she would win the Booker prize one day. The next three decades were spent working really hard to make it happen. 'Nobody was waiting for me to publish books. Nobody was commissioning me,' she has said in a radio interview. 'I just wrote on spec and hoped that somebody would publish me.' Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you after newsletter promotion Her first poetry collection, Island of Abraham, was published in 1994. Lara, a verse-novel based on her parents' marriage, came out three years later. Then came The Emperor's Babe, another verse-novel and her first with Penguin, which imagines life for a Black girl in Roman London. Soul Tourists, a zany road trip packed with Black ghosts from white western history; Blonde Roots, a satire that reverses the power dynamics of the slave trade; and a novella called Hello Mum, about a 14-year-old boy growing up on a council estate, followed. All her novels deal with the African diaspora in some way, mixing history, stylistic experimentalism and humour. 'I'm always going for the difficult stories and to be subversive,' she says. 'I'm always looking to find original ways into what I'm writing about.' Mr Loverman 'felt like a taboo subject'. Much has been written about the Windrush generation, but no stories that she knew of told a love story between two elderly Caribbean men. When it was first published, she was told it was 'too niche' to be adapted for television, because its protagonist, Barrington Jedidiah Walker, 'was Black, old and gay'. While her reputation was steadily building, sales were not. She wouldn't even look at her royalty statements when they arrived each year. Then, finally, her much-manifested breakthrough came. With Girl, Woman, Other she set out 'to explore as many Black women in a single novel as possible', ranging in age from 19 to 93, all with different backgrounds, faiths, sexualities and classes. Amma, a lesbian playwright, is clearly a version of Evaristo's younger self. Once again, in a style she calls 'fusion fiction', she plays fast and loose with punctuation in favour of the rhythms of speech and thought. Here are the monologues of the silenced women Evaristo wrote for the theatre all those years ago. Her Booker win coincided with a long-overdue effort to make publishing more inclusive. 'George Floyd,' she says, when I ask what she thinks was the catalyst for this change. 'There was already an awareness of it, but definitely the George Floyd murder and Black Lives Matter was a turning point.' Where once she knew every writer of colour in publishing, and could count them on one hand, she says, today she can't keep up. 'Identity politics has always existed,' she says of today's culture wars. 'We just didn't name it that.' Last year, she wrote a piece in the Guardian refuting the 'false allegations' against the RSL and the rumours that she had swept in with 'radical' new measures for appointing fellows, sidelining older, more established names. 'It's a great honour and a privilege,' she says mischievously when I press her for more. 'There's always this argument that if things diversify, standards are dropped.' Evaristo even manages to bring positive thinking to our current global predicament. 'Every decade, we are evolving. From my childhood to today, we have evolved,' she says. 'We can't do anything about America, but we can put up a fight in this country.' Of all these achievements, what makes her most proud? 'I feel I can enjoy the successes I've had of late,' she replies without hesitation, 'because I know I haven't kept it to myself.' Bernardine Evaristo is the winner of the Women's prize outstanding contribution award.
