It’s now time to look back at the shrug of an evening that was this year’s Barclaycard Mercury Prize. You’d imagine that 26-year-old Speech Debelle has had the time of her life, speaking to GMTV reporters and plotting how to spend her £20,000 prize money.

If you’ve got any interest in joy, you should be happy for her. Watching her shriek with delight upon hearing the shock announcement that she’d won was the most sincere display of human emotion I can remember witnessing during pop’s most prosaic awards ceremony's 18-year history. You wouldn’t have got that from La Roux.

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Yet whether you do or don’t approve of the Mercury – and my personal view is that the idea of a room of ‘experts’ debating the pros and cons of a particular record has about as much to do with the experience of enjoying music as beetroot has to the Middle East peace process – it’s always struck me as strange that the people who actually sit in the room and do the debating, don’t do more to make themselves visible in the wake of the evening’s result.

Sure, if you’re at the awards ceremony itself, then at the end, Jools Holland will read out a fairly impenetrable list of names that make up the judges – but there’s no mention of what qualifies any of the names on the list to pass comment on a record’s worth, or even what the process is that precedes the point where Holland says “and the winner is...”. If you consider the lengths that award ceremonies of a similar stature go to in shouting about the luminaries on their panel – the Turner Prize for example – then I can’t work out why the Mercury doesn’t do the same.

As things stand, I don’t know why I’m supposed to care. I wasn’t at the awards this year because there was a documentary about fishermen on BBC1 I didn’t want to miss - so I don’t know who was judging because I didn’t hear Jools say. As far as I’m to know though, the judging panel consisted of six monkeys on drugs (although – boom tish - I’m presuming it didn’t, given that Kasabian didn’t win).

Likewise, without knowing the criteria that they judged the records on, I might as well presume they all got in a room, played Hungry Hippos and ordered pizza. Is the winner of the Mercury Prize supposed to be the UK’s best record (I’d have plumped for Biffy Clyro’s ‘Puzzle’ in that case)? The record that sums up the current UK music scene the most (because you’d really have to make a claim for N-Dubz’s ‘Uncle B’ if it was)? Or the UK record that I’ve most enjoyed listening to while dancing around my kitchen making mashed potato while drunk (take a bow Lily Allen and ‘It’s Not Me, It’s You’). I’m confused. And it appears I’m not the only one...

“It’s so complicated,” Lauren Laverne, former judge and current presenter of the BBC’s Mercury coverage told Musoguide's Catherine Wilson on the night. “(The criteria) depends, really, from year to year. They always say you can’t judge it on 'what is the best album?' as that’s subjective, so they’re normally looking for something that sums up the year. I sort of know who’s on the panel, and having done it for a few years I can hear their arguments - but even then I don’t know which way it’s gonna go.

"It’s sort of like ‘Twelve Angry Men’ but with vol-au-vents! Lots of people with beads of sweat glistening on foreheads. They’ll still be doing it now, downstairs in a room. You get brought up to watch the performances and then you get taken back down, and you get your dinner, and depending how difficult the decision is, you either eat it or not!”

OK, so I don’t know who the ‘they’ are that Laverne speaks of – Barclaycard? Freddie Mercury? The person who owns Hungry Hippos? – but I reckon it’s award chairman Simon Frith, the sometime rock critic and pop sociologist who penned the ‘seminal’ 1978 tome ‘The Sociology Of Rock’, a book that makes some interesting arguments about pop's relationship between listeners and the industry that produces it.

"The industry may or may not keep control of rock's use, but it will not be able to determine all its meanings,” says Frith. “The problems of capitalist community and leisure are not so easily resolved." Which, I think you’ll agree, is a valid point.

Less impressive is Frith’s 2004 thesis on ‘Bad Music: The Music We Love To Hate’, which snootily proclaims that "'bad music' is a necessary concept for musical pleasure”. He goes on to segregate ‘bad music’ into two camps - "tracks which are clearly incompetent musically; made by singers who can't sing, players who can't play, producers who can't produce" (which means, as a fan of Beat Happening, the Ramones, Huggy Bear, Shonen Knife, blah blah, that in Frith’s eyes I’m mostly a fan of ‘bad music’) and "tracks involving genre confusion. The most common examples are actors or TV stars recording in the latest style". Aw, I think Simon protests too much - like the rest of us, I bet he listens to Martine McCutcheon’s ‘Perfect Moment’ when no-one else is listening.

Anyway, I digress...

It seems like Frith is failing in delivering a coherent brief to his panel in selecting a prize winner – one Mercury judge, who didn’t want to be named, told me the panel are normally instructed to either select “the record that works best as a complete album”, or one that reflects “current trends that are going on in music”. This year’s panel decided that - from La Roux to Florence to Bat For Lashes - a “current trend” this year was the prominence of solo female musicians. It was our source's view that Speech Debelle was the best of that bunch. Fair enough, but surely that’s just a subjective decision? How do you even begin to decide who’s better? And we’re back to Hungry Hippos I suppose.

At least with music magazines – and I refer to NME in particular – we provide bylines with album and live reviews; that way you can get some grasp of the personality of the writer, gauge their tastes and agendas, and, if you’re a keen reader, you can work up a relationship with a particular writer, know their form and previous before you choose whether you want to value that persons opinions. Because at the end of the day, regardless of what a room of bickering ‘experts’ want you to believe, there is no good and bad music, there is just what you like, there is just opinion.

For your reference, here is the list of this year's judges for the 2009 Barclaycard Mercury Prize.

Janice Long
Former BBC Radio 1 DJ, now of Radio 2.

Charles Hazlewood
Noted British classical music conductor.

Jude Rogers
Guardian music columnist and current NME writer.

Arwa Haider
Metro newspaper music critic.

George Ergatoudis
Head Of Music, BBC Radio 1.

Conor McNicholas
Former editor of NME. Now editor of Top Gear magazine.

Mike Flynn
Jazz editor, Time Out magazine.

John Kennedy
DJ and presenter of X-Posure new music show on XFM.

Mark Findlay
Head Of Music, Global Radio.

Dean Jackson
DJ BBC Radio Nottingham.