Gomez and Badly Drawn Boy are past winners, and share a vaguely similar approach to songwriting, but in the past solo folk/indie songwriters haven't triumphed at the Mercuries.
The song is taken off 9 Classic Tracks, Chadwick's follow-up to her 2012 debut solo album Eating for Two.
Broadway star Idina Menzel and Will Young both beat off non-musical competition in their categories – best solo performance and best London newcomer respectively – as did jukebox musicals Taboo and American Idiot, voted off-West End and regional shows of the year.
Not far from the castle, Portuondo sits in a cafe, eating a croissant and reminiscing – about performing with Nat King Cole, and touring the world as a solo artist.
I don't know, it's an immediate song; I don't expect people to pick up on anything beyond the "oh oh oh!" Your solo stuff has a very European sound.
Maybe they thought that because you put out your first solo album in 2013.
Smyth, who may or may not have just abruptly quit Madness (of which more later), has just finished recording his debut solo album, A Comfortable Man, a forensic account of the death of his 28-year relationship with his wife.
At the age of 14, while still at Compton junior college in California, she started a singing career, performing hillbilly songs with her father on the radio, and solo with touring bands.
"It is a group effort, it is not a solo," he told the crowd in Jackson.
All this makes him quite the exception in Iganga, but across Uganda this young man is by no means a solo pioneer and his store is by no means unique.
The song had been planned as the first solo single for Boyzone's Stephen Gately.
