Lily Fontaine of Mercury Prize winners English Teacher opens up on her career sliding doors moment

Leeds quartet English Teacher have had an absolutely smashing 2024. The band released one of the debuts of the year in This Could Be Texas , which came out back in April, and this week its mix of atmospheric rock, rattling post-punk and soulful ballads was anointed winner of the 2024 Mercury Prize. But life could’ve been even better for the group’s singer and guitarist Lily Fontaine, because just before she threw herself into her band, she was on the cusp of becoming a music journalist, the profession that, deep down, every person on the earth secretly desires. Don’t lie, you do!

Speaking to this writer in an interview for The New Cue earlier this year, Fontaine said she found herself at a crossroads before choosing the lesser path of an award-winning, Top Ten-reaching musician.

“Talk about ultimatums, there was this point just before the pandemic where I was working for a really small publishers in my hometown, making the free magazine that you get in the hairdressers and stuff,” Fontaine recalled. “I was interning for free one day a week and loved it and she offered me to be the editor of one of their magazines, but I was also considering moving back to Leeds to work on the band. I was like, ‘What do I do? Do I go down the path of fully throwing myself into becoming a journalist or do the band?’. I chose the band. So I could have been on the other side of this!”

Fontaine had interviewed a variety of artists including Alt-J, Wolf Alice and Jungle before focussing on her band and she said her interviewing style was “heavy on the research.” “I liked to have more of a conversation rather than question, let them answer, question, let them answer,” she remember. “I was more feeding off what they were saying. But I didn’t train in journalism or anything so I don’t know if that was a particularly effective style but that’s just what I did. I really enjoyed it.”

She hasn’t completely left her old would-be career behind, though. Last year, she did a piece for DIY arguing the case for why there needed to be more work done on the pipeline for artists outside of London, highlighting the fact that the previous eight winners of the Mercury Prize were from London. A year later, that very prize is making its way to Fontaine’s own mantelpiece.