Gutter press: Voice of the street

Ralph McTell lives on. ‘Speech Debelle rises from streets of London to win Mercury Prize,’ read the folk-loving Independent. When London rapper Debelle won the Mercury Music Prize with songs inspired by her teenage years of homelessness, it provided the hacks with an instant angle and boosted Ralph McTell’s hits on YouTube.

‘Rapper Debelle thanks mother as she street talks he way to Mercury win,’ was the London Evening Standard’s take, while the Times opted for a more prosaic ‘London rapper Speech Debelle becomes Mercury queen with tales of homeless life’.

Clearly homelessness is where the art is. The Standard revealed that Debelle ‘took her inspiration from her troubled and lonely past when she slept on the streets and in hostels’. She was now reunited with her mother Marilyn, fittingly enough a housing benefits worker. It was left to the Sun to report Speech’s quip that ‘as she headed out to celebrate her £20,000 prize, she said: "I’m not going to know where I live later on".’