Way back in the 1980's, after much pleading, my sister and I were presented with a Yamaha keyboard by our parents. It was great. About four octaves wide, it feature an amusing playable demo, 16 built in rhythm tracks and 100 voices: 03: toy piano; 22: brass ensemble; 79: glass harmonica, 93: ghost, etc. None of them sounded much like the instrument that inspired them but some had their own certain digital charm - like 78: musical saw. I remember being rather perplexed, mind you, by 96: klaxon. The brusque honk it produced was satisfying enough - exhilarating in its way - but get this: whereas all the other voices repayed the adventurous keyboardist by producing notes of different pitch as his fingers wandered up and down (allowing him to construct a melody), klaxon produced an identical parp whichever key was pressed. It was, quite literally, one note.

I think the well-informed reader will see where this one is going. Yes, years later - last night in fact - a group named after the 96th voice of mine and my sister's keyboard won the Mercury Music Prize for their debut album Myths of the Near Future. Congratulations those men! I am, in spite of my sardonic tone, a fan of the nu-rave trio (left) and their colourful racket - as good a winner as you could hope for I suppose. As soon as Amy Winehouse was installed as favourite, it was clear her very deserving effort would not win - too obvious. It was probably also pretty clear that Bat For Lashes had appeared in one too many feature proclaiming her the best outside bet for her to stand much chance. The real outsiders, like Maps and Basquiat Strings, were never going to get a look in and the rest of the list looks pretty average - if that label is not an absurdly generous one to append to The View. So within the skewiff logic favoured by the panel (who have chucked the thing at M People before now), the Klaxons' win is no travesty... but I can't help feeling the judges have missed the point slightly.

If the Mercury is a prize rewarding the best constructed album, I'm not sure that the rather monotonous Myths of the Near Future doesn't share a few too many characteristics with the 96th voice of my old Yamaha truly to be regarded as a classic. Golden Skans is one of the great singles of the year and certainly the trio's general hyperactive battiness - they intend to use their £20,000 prize to fund research into telepathy, the space cadets! - is greatly to be welcolmed. But their charms are surely best serviced in single form and most particularly in the excellent spate of remixes they have spawned. This is not damning with faint praise - the remix, appended to some fashionable blog, is probably the form of our times, in much the way that the 7-inch single was in the 60s and the 12-inch LP was in the 70s. But if the judges are serious about the album as a format in itself (as the Booker Prize is interested in novels as opposed to short stories, epic poems or novellas) they ought to have thought of rewarding an album that plays to the strengths of the format - such as... the varied-but-unified, all-killer-no-filler, zeitgeist-snaffling... Back to Black. I can't help feeling the Mercury would be taken that mite more seriously if it stopped trying to be so cleverly counter-intuitive. It's a rare occurrence, true, but sometimes a song gets to number one simply because it's very good, and sometimes the favourites is the favourite simply because it's the best.