WHEN Edinburgh trio Young Fathers became the first Scottish act in a decade to win the prestigious £20,000 Mercury Prize on Wednesday night, they did so despite received critical opinion, metropolitan bias and against the expectations of the country's bookmakers, who had singer FKA Twigs as odds-on favourite and the Scots as 12-1 outsiders with some firms and 25-1 with others.
But where Young Fathers are concerned, expectations, odds and bias are all there to be challenged.
Singer Alloysious Massaquoi said bandmate Kayus Bankole, for one, had always been confident of the outcome.
"Kayus said, 'We're going to win', just before it was announced. He said he had a feeling. Then I looked over and it looked like (presenter) Nick Grimshaw was putting his lips together to say Young Fathers, so I just got up. Then I just remember someone saying, 'Make sure you go up the middle steps'."
He added: "It feels deserved. But I think we had already won, to be honest. We have created something that is original."
He had some bullish words, too, for those metropolitan commentators already complaining about the band's relative obscurity and lack of album sales. Their prize-winning debut album Dead has sold just in excess of 2300 copies, the least of any to be nominated, let alone win.
"Whether we have sold only one copy or not, it does not matter," he said. "The music stands on its own. There is nothing like it."
Mr Massaquoi was born in war-torn Liberia and came to Edinburgh as a four-year-old refugee. Mr Bankole was born in the capital but spent part of his childhood in Nigeria and in Maryland, America.
Young Fathers formed in 2008 out of a friendship cemented six years earlier when the two school friends met third member Graham Hastings at a hip-hop night in the capital's Bongo Club.
Dead was recorded in a Leith basement, and followed two EPs, the second of which -Tape Two - beat Biffy Clyro, Edwyn Collins and Mogwai to win the award for 2014 Scottish Album Of The Year.
To most British critics, they are a rap act. For their British label Big Dada - which also has fellow Mercury nominee Kate Tempest among its artists - they are simply "original and magnificent".
Whatever the tag, Young Fathers have spent this year blowing apart any preconceptions about what Scottish hip-hop might sound like and how it might perform on the international stage.
"People are always going to say, 'Oh you're from Scotland' and they're surprised the music we do comes from that part of the world," said Mr Massaquoi. "But we don't worry about it. We concentrate on what we do. The music speaks for itself. It's worldwide."
And right now, that music and the band that created it are Germany-bound to record an album.
Mr Massaquoi said: "I think it is going to put us in a different situation. We are used to working in a basement so we think it will help push us, make us feel a bit uncomfortable. We like to feel a bit uncomfortable."
They will be back in time for Christmas, however - they have just been announced as one of the headline acts for Edinburgh's Hogmanay Street Party.
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