So, this year all the smart dollar was on Florence And The Machine to walk away with The Mercury Music Prize. Whatever. The really smart money was on unknown, Buckinghamshire three-piece, Sweet Billy Pilgrim. “An album recorded in a garden shed wins Mercury” would have been classic Mercury myth.

As it happened, however, the very smartest of coinage was on Speech Debelle, as “Ex-homeless bird wins prize” proved an even more irresistible hook for a panel that traditionally refuses to be second guessed. ltd caught up with SBP front man, Tim Elsenburg, to talk about his journey from a garden shed to The Grosvenor…

Yo! What’s up post-Merc?
Going well, thanks. Just trying to decompress after all the excitement, so as not to get the bends. The leap from last week back into our day jobs has been a bit tricky, so we’re taking things slowly and trying not to be too grumpy.

How did it feel to get nominated?
Magical. We’ve worked so hard on this record, both in recording it and then trying to find a way to do it live, that it’s just been lovely to see all that work vindicated in such a meaningful way. The Mercury seems to hover above all the cynicism and manoeuvrings of the music industry, so to be endorsed like this means everything to a band as pale and unsociable as us! The award was just about great records.

What did you think of the nominees? Did you think Speech Debelle deserved it?
Led Bib were amazing. We had to play after them at the award ceremony, and I could barely switch my guitar foot pedals for fear of tripping over my own jaw. Friendly Fires have been quite a recent discovery for me, so to see them was great. I think their record might just be the sound of joy. Without socks on. I’ve always liked Bat for Lashes, and my money would’ve been on her if I wasn’t so intimidated by betting shops. I think Lisa Hannigan’s performance was my favourite of the evening though. Just beautiful. And Kasabian were great - they made perfect sense to me when I saw them live. Speech deserved to win though I think. All that self-belief flies out into the ether and either makes you look daft (Liam Gallagher) or in Speech’s case really cool. I’m going to see if she’ll let me do a remix. Banjos and beats. I have to reclaim them both from The Rednex’s ‘Cotton Eyed Joe’.

We loved ‘Twice Born Men’…
Thanks. The album was made piecemeal over a three year period, when the kids were asleep, after work, or at the weekend. Usually the music comes first. That’ll be suggestive of a mood or an emotion and then while I’m working on a vocal melody, certain lyrical phrases will just start to grow out of the nonsense I’m singing. At the same time, a title might appear which will direct those phrases towards something a bit more concrete. There is lots of layering in the arrangements too, with traditional instruments often combined with ‘found’ sounds. Songs variously include bowed bin lids (rescued from a skip when I was stripping out an office building), a plucked dishwasher (a B flat, fact fans), and a recording of a steam engine in a museum. You can even hear my late rabbit scratching the patio with its claws in the background as the last song fades away.

We hear it was recorded in a shed? Whose shed?
It’s my shed, situated at the bottom of the garden as is traditional. It’s pretty draughty, and far too many insects call it home, but it’s somewhere I can go, away from distractions; almost like going to work. I think every man probably needs a shed eventually anyway. It’s part of our passage into slippers, pipe smoking and outraged letters to Radio 4 or The Times. But I get to to spend several hours obsessing over a sound without having to worry about a clock on a wall, or whether or not someone is slowly slipping into a coma next to me. Even with my limited means, I can spend a long time making something sound right, so with no practical boundaries I’d probably finish an album every 47 years. I have to leave the door ajar when I record (otherwise I’d suffocate), so when you listen to one of the audio tracks on its own, you can often hear birdsong or people walking along the footpath behind my house, or a lawnmower or car. Those sounds disappear when it’s all mixed together, but I do wonder if there’s some subliminal trace left behind that makes it all that little bit more human.

Will you be doing things differently from now on?  
Not really. Just better, I hope. I’d like the next record to be a bit more about the voice, but I’m loathe to plan too much. We’ll see.

Any major lyrical themes on the record?
Twice Born Men was an organisation set up by Vietnam veterans, drawing attention to the plight of ex-soldiers who were struggling to adjust to the demands of civilian life. I saw the germ of an idea in the fact that Vietnam had taken these men, with their lives and their dreams and changed them entirely, to the point that life after a war like that could be considered a rebirth. Nothing that had gone before could prepare you for - or help you cope with - how things would be afterwards. Coming home would be like starting again and probably not in a good way. It struck me that love could have similar - albeit less overtly traumatic - consequences. No one is the same after falling in love. If it lasts and blossoms, or if it burns out and turns to poison; you are sort-of born again as you adjust to a life with or without that someone else. I also like the idea that a seemingly trivial decision can completely change the course of things, not in a romantic or sentimental way necessarily, because it would be just as likely to make life worse, but - again - it comes back to this idea of certain points in our lives representing a sort of rebirth. The songs on the album are supposed to be a reflection of the various possibilities that grow from those points... the good, the bad and the just plain ugly.

Sweet Billy Pilgrim play Koko on 2 November