Some time in the early 1990s, Stewart Henderson did what a lot of young men and women in Scotland do: he joined a band because his friends were in one and because they asked him if he fancied learning to play something.

What he didn't know is that the band would be christened The Delgados and go on to become one of the leading lights of Scotland's resurgent music scene. And what he couldn't know is that nearly 20 years later, aged 41, he would still be running Chemikal Underground, the label The Delgados founded to release their own music in 1994 and which has since nurtured the talents of bands such as Mogwai and Arab Strap. Henderson is, in many ways, the accidental label boss – which makes his continuing passion for and commitment to Scottish music all the more admirable.

Chemikal Underground is not the reason we're sitting today in the appropriately named Stereo bar, though it has a bearing on it. More relevant – and occupying considerably more of Henderson's time at the moment – is the Scottish Album of the Year (SAY) award. It launched last year and, at a ceremony at Film City Glasgow, the £20,000 winner's cheque was awarded to Bill Wells and Aidan Moffat for their 2011 album Everything's Getting Older. The nine runners-up took home £1000 each.

This year's ceremony takes place on June 20 and the new venue is the spiritual home of Scottish rock music, Glasgow's Barrowland Ballroom. Happily, the artists competing for the 2013 award are more than equal to the epic location. Among a bumper crop of eligible albums are Django Django's eponymous Mercury Prize-nominated debut; the third, chart-topping album from dance act Calvin Harris; and Emeli Sande's platinum-selling debut Our Version Of Events. It spent 66 weeks in the top 10, a feat not even The Beatles could match. And let's not forget Paul Buchanan, frontman of cult Glasgow band The Blue Nile, who broke an eight-year silence in 2012 with solo album Mid Air. In the end neither Harris nor Sande made the shortlist but, well, that's showbusiness.

"The SAY award was not created to be some sort of doppelganger for the Mercury Prize or some sort of Caledonian riposte to it," Henderson explains. "But there was certainly an acceptance that the volume of good music coming out of Scotland wasn't being afforded the platform it deserved given how important music is in Scotland ... It's such an important part of our psyche it seemed odd to me that we didn't have a prestigious, credible celebration of the music we make."

Now we do.

The idea for the award began to formulate in 2010 when Henderson joined Mogwai's Stuart Braithwaite on the board of the Scottish Music Industry Association (SMIA), the body tasked with promoting and strengthening the Scottish music industry.

Braithwaite has since left the board but Henderson is now its chair. With the idea planted in his head he spent months edging towards the correct format for the awards, knowing that it would be very easy to put on a bad ceremony that felt either too tokenistic or too exclusive. "The really important aspect was: if we're going to set it up and get some funding we have to get it right or at least get it close enough to being right, because we won't get another crack at it."

The Eureka! moment came at the goNORTH creative industries festival in Aberdeen when Henderson had the wit to convene a meeting of music bloggers and to ask their opinion on the subject. Out of that came the determination to choose 100 so-called "nominators" from across the Scottish cultural spectrum and to ask them to list their five top albums of the year from a list which would be as defnitive as the SMIA could make it. That would give a 20-strong longlist and from that, a nine-strong shortlist would be chosen by a panel of judges, with the 10th place on the list going to the winner of a public vote. The format isn't perfect, Henderson admits, "but it's far more transparent and egalitarian than anything I've seen going before it."

This year's public vote closed last Monday and the shortlist was announced on Thursday at an event at the CCA in Glasgow. From today, meanwhile, the SAY website is streaming the 10 final albums.

In many ways the SAY award is a blend of the Mercury, Booker and Turner prizes, though unusually for a music prize it has a sister award, the SAY Art Commission. Based on the idea that in Scotland generally and in Glasgow in particular there is a great deal of cross-pollination between the art and music scenes, it rewards one of eight shortlisted recent art school graduates with a first prize of £12,000 and (like it says on the tin) an art commission.

To Henderson's mind, then, the £93,500 funding he received from Creative Scotland last year to set up the awards is money well spent. "I'm aware it's a lot of money," he says. "But you also have to bear in mind that £49,000 of that was dispensed as prize money to 10 bands and eight artists. This is a music prize and an art commission, with two winners and 16 runners-up. A lot of the funds are going directly into the pockets of artists and musicians. That was important for me."

Funding for this year's award has been increased by contributions from drinks company Dewar's, music licensing organisation PPL and Clyde Gatweay.

An elder statesman of the Scottish music industry he may be, but another driver behind Henderson's ambition for the SAY awards is his own experience of playing, recording and touring, and of the hardships musicians have to endure to follow their calling. He's seen both the lows of the game and, in the critical acclaim lavished on The Delgados and Chemikal Underground, the highs. And he understands the importance of support mechanisms such as labels, venues, independent retailers and, yes, award ceremonies.

Born in Motherwell, he studied accounting at university because his older brother told him all the pretty girls were in the business school. "Total lie," he laughs. The music career came about by accident when his schoolfriends Alun Woodward and Paul Savage started a group and asked if he wanted to join.

"When The Delgados formed I remember Paul phoning me saying he was starting a band with Emma [Pollock, singer] and Alun but they didn't have a drummer or a bass player so he was going to play the drums and would I like to learn how to play the bass? I thought: 'How hard can it be?'"

The Delgados released five studio albums and their third, 2000's The Great Eastern, won them a Mercury Music Prize nomination. Cue a trip to London for a glitzy ceremony in the company of Coldplay, Leftfield and The Verve's Richard Ashcroft. How hard could that be? Read on.

"We realised almost immediately that there were stages set up and Coldplay were playing and Badly Drawn Boy was playing and we thought, 'Right, we've not won it then,'" Henderson recalls with just a hint of bitterness. "Seeing some of your shortlised peers playing and you never having been asked felt like there was an apartheid system at work that we weren't aware of."

As a result of their nomination, The Delgados did win what's known in the retail trade as a sales bounce, but all of the available prize money on the night went to the eventual winner, Badly Drawn Boy.

So while Henderson admits that the Mercury Music Prize has laid down a template for the SAY awards, it also functions as an example of how not to do things. Lesson one: do have performances, but make the slot a prestigious showcase for an up-and-coming band rather than the shortlisted acts, who are anyway there to enjoy themselves. Lesson two: make sure everyone gets a cut of the pie. The SAY award ticks both those boxes. "I think it's important to recognise the fact that prize fund is not a dirty word," he says. "We shouldn't treat the idea of bands or artists being paid money through prizes as being in any way distasteful."

And regrets? He has a few. For a start, there's the absence of any classical music records on this year's SAY longlist. There's also the ongoing problem of how to maximise the retail potential of the awards. These and other circles he will continue to try to square as the awards progress and become a fixture of the Scottish cultural calendar.

By his own admission, Henderson was "never a muso" so when The Delgados eventually disbanded in 2005, he hung up his bass for good. Well, almost: he was later coaxed back on stage to help fill a support slot for cult US band Slint in Glasgow. "I was terrified," he laughs. "I was absolutely crippled with nerves and I came off stage and said, 'Never again.' I gave my bass guitar to Gerry [Hart] from The Phantom Band. It's still doing a tour of duty – just not being played in the ham-fisted way it used to by me."

Now even Chemikal Underground is seeing less of him as the SAY awards require him to take what he terms "a four or five-month leave of absence" from the label's HQ in Glasgow's East End. Is it worth it? It will be if he's right in his estimation of what music means to Scotland and to the Scots. "It characterises who we are," he says simply. It's a big claim, but for many young Scots it's true.

www.sayaward.com

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