“The last eight winners of the Mercury Prize were from the capital,” English Teacher’s Lily Fontaine pointed out in 2023. She couldn’t have predicted that a year on she would be the one to break that very streak, as last week the Leeds-based band became the first non-London act to win the prestigious award in almost a decade.

Like most of the cultural sector in Britain, while London resides in the full beam of the music industry’s spotlight, the country’s other regions compete for brief specks of attention. It’s baffling, considering much of the musical talent that now defines Britain abroad has come from elsewhere – particularly northern England (look no further than the endless media coverage of Oasis’ reunion in recent weeks). Yet, it’s an issue that’s only getting worse as the country plunges into yet more austerity.

Elsewhere, vast swathes of the music industry continue to toy with ways to appease our algorithmic overloads over truly nurturing local scenes. In desperate bids to build momentary stars through 15-second clips, artists are faced with the pressures of becoming palpable and ever-present social media personalities in exchange for the privilege of releasing music.

Yet English Teacher’s rise tells a different tale. “This Must Be Texas” had no viral hit, and there’s no front-camera choreography associated with any of its 13 tracks. Instead, there’s is a story of community, arts funding and real opportunities to hone their craft.

Since their formation in 2020, English Teacher have been guided by the collaborative music scenes of Leeds. No longer content with depending on wavering attention from a London-centric industry, recent years have seen the city redefine itself on its own terms – strengthening its local networks and building a truly inspiring eco-system ready to foster new talent.

It’s why Leeds was a fertile environment for a band like English Teacher to emerge. Take Brudenell Social Club and Hyde Park Book Club (the former thanked in their impromptu winner's speech) – local venues that uplift local talent and allow new acts to develop and build dedicated audiences. Or there’s BBC Introducing West Yorkshire, who gave them their first radio play, and Come Play With Me and Music:Leeds – non-profit music development organisations that offered them funding and guidance from their earliest days.

This cataclysm of support and genuine passion from those in their community resulted in a debut album now forever etched into the canon of great British music. To press play is to be offered a truly unique glimpse of the region that spawned them, existing in equal parts as a love letter to its beauty and sorrow at its deep-rooted social issues, racism and economic divide.

Whimsical and comedic, but also severe and suffocating, the album journeys through the small northern towns where nothing seems to happen, all the way to the acres of gloomy, wild moorland that frame them. It’s an atmosphere they summarised aptly themselves, saying it feels like “you’ve gone to space and it turns out it’s almost identical to Doncaster”.

“This Must Be Texas” has, in turn, been met with critical acclaim and an avid fanbase now spilling into every corner of the globe – proving there’s an appetite for these stories, even long past our own rugged shorelines.

And it could be a romantic ending: the hometown underdog returning with a trophy. But look closer and there’s a bleaker reality. Already, a pot of funding English Teacher received to re-record single “R&B” for the album has become unavailable in Yorkshire – shrinking an already depleting pool of opportunities. Similarly, Youth Music, who provided grants to them in their earliest days told Dazed last year that demand for funding was “at an all-time high”, while they only have the budget to accept 17 per cent of applications.

Elsewhere, BBC Introducing - the radio network the band came up through – suffered cuts last year, with the 32 separate region al programmes shrinking to only 20. And, the grassroots music venues integral to their development as performing artists also face the same sombre fate – currently closing at a rate of two per week nationally. Music Venue Trust tell Dazed that in the past five years 26 have closed or ceased putting on live music in Yorkshire alone. This is in spite of findings that they contribute over £500million to the UK economy on an annual basis.

The saying goes that it takes a village to raise a child, but it often takes a city to forge a great band. It’s why when English Teacher raised the golden Mercury Award and breathlessly thanked the venues and organisations that guided them on their way, it felt like a win not only for them but for the entire scene they were nurtured by.

Speaking to the BBC shortly after their win, Fontaine, still in a state of disbelief, said: “Where we come from, it just doesn’t happen.” This time though, it did. But if our music scenes continue to be an afterthought, both by the government and the wider industry, we may be waiting longer than a decade for the next winner outside the M25.