Elbow shoulders aside competition in Mercury prize

For an award that often divides opinion and prompts questions about the judging criteria, it was perhaps the most popular winner in the 16-year history of the Nationwide Mercury Prize.

After 18 years of releasing critically acclaimed albums that never quite broke through to the mainstream, and battling against indifferent radio stations and record labels, the Mancunian guitar band Elbow last night triumphed over Radiohead, The Last Shadow Puppets and the hotly tipped dubstep artist Burial.

"It just feels great, very unexpected," said the lead singer, Guy Garvey. "You could look at it in the same way as certain Bedouin tribes look at a bowl of milk. Something that doesn't occur very often, but tastes all the sweeter for that."

The usual muttering and backbiting was absent amid rousing cheers from the industry crowd as the band were named as winners of the annual prize, which comes with a £20,000 cheque and can boost album sales five-fold.

After they signed with a new label, their fourth album, The Seldom Seen Kid, has become a sleeper hit, and the rousing anthem One Day Like This has spent most of the summer backing montages of British sporting success at the Olympics.

Garvey dedicated the prize to Bryan Glancy, a close friend and pivotal figure in the Manchester music scene, who died two years ago.

"The album is dedicated to him, because you don't get more seldom seen than someone who's dead, and I think he'd appreciate the gallows humour in that," he said. "I miss him every day, he was a great man and he should be stood here in many ways. Some of his music will be coming out soon and everyone else will know how great he was as well."

Garvey said the prize would be given to Glancy's mother, Mandy, to put on her mantelpiece.

The band - Garvey, the guitarist Mark Potter, keyboard player Craig Potter, bassist Pete Turner and drummer Richard Jupp - have maintained a loyal fanbase since forming in 1990, but the Mercury win could finally propel them to mainstream success.

Traditionally, lesser-known winners have benefited hugely from the "Mercury effect", enjoying sales boosts of up to 500% in the wake of their victory. But for others, such as Ms Dynamite and Roni Size, mainstream success has failed to follow.

The Guardian critic Alexis Petridis said: "It's a really interesting mainstream rock record that absolutely deserves wider audience recognition - the songs are fantastic, the lyrics are beautifully turned, it works a lot of slightly abstruse and disparate influences into its sound and there's something incredibly charming and human and warm about it."

The judges, sometimes criticised for their leftfield choices, continued a recent trend for rewarding indie bands that were already fairly well known and on the cusp of the mainstream.

Three of the past four winners - Franz Ferdinand, Arctic Monkeys and The Klaxons - were relatively established indie artists who had already sold well.

In such a subjective field, the choice will often prove controversial; former winner Antony Hegarty, of Antony and the Johnsons, likened it to "a contest between an orange and a spaceship and a potted plant and a spoon".

The Arctic Monkeys frontman Alex Turner, nominated for his Scott Walker-influenced side project with the Rascals singer Miles Kane, The Last Shadow Puppets, was there for the third time in a row. The pair cheered Elbow's victory as it was announced.

Turner previously won the Mercury with the Arctic Monkeys for their debut, Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not and they were also nominated last year for the follow up, Favourite Worst Nightmare.

Elbow were previously nominated for the prize in 2001 for their debut album, Asleep in the Back, when they were one of the most hotly tipped new bands in Britain. Since then, they have endured a rollercoaster ride, but Garvey said they had been "very lucky". "I'm so proud to have worked with my best mates for so long."