‘You can expect all the usual excitement,” offered host Lauren Laverne at the start of this year’s Mercury prize ceremony. It’s the kind of thing people hosting awards shows are duty-bound to say, but the use of the word “usual” suggested she was diplomatically overlooking last year’s event, which – through no fault of the album that won, English Teacher’s This Could Be Texas – had all the excitement of a wake.

The Mercury had lost its corporate sponsorship, necessitating what host Annie Mac called “an intimate celebration of this year’s shortlist”, in the same way that an estate agent might call a flat with the shower next to the cooker “cosy”.

Visibly scaled-down and stripped of its live performances, it was oddly depressing to watch, but there was always the famous post-Mercury boost to the winning album’s sales to look forward to. Having dropped out of the Top 40 months before, This Could Be Texas duly rocketed back up to Number 40, comfortably outsold by a reissue of an old album by Ultravox. It wasn’t even the one with Vienna on it.

You didn’t have to be a natural pessimist to assume the Mercury’s days were numbered, but a year on, it’s still here, and looking relatively revitalised, local government in Newcastle having stepped in alongside a “music development agency” called Generator. The ceremony was relocated to the city’s Utilita Arena, accompanied by a plethora of “fringe events”: everything from gigs to songwriting workshops to something described as a Mercury prize fanzone “created in collaboration with Greggs”.

The smartest move of all might have been making the ceremony a ticketed event, open to the public, which gave things a certain sparkle lacking even in its heyday, when it was attended exclusively by the great and good of the music business, eager for the opportunity to talk all the way through every performance by artists they didn’t have a vested interest in.

The bookies’ favourite was either CMAT’s Euro-Country or Fontaines DC’s Romance, while anyone keen to back an outside contender might have alighted on singer-songwriter Jacob Alon’s fragile In Limerence – the latter’s live performance at the ceremony was greeted with rapt pin-drop silence. But in the end, the most commercially successful of the nominees won out.

Until Taylor Swift outsold the entire Top 100, Sam Fender’s People Watching had enjoyed the UK’s largest first-week sales of the year: at the huge gigs that accompanied its release, he played to nearly a quarter of a million people in four days. Its success is entirely deserved: you’d have to look back to the late-90s Manic Street Preachers to find another British artist so adept at marrying politics with the kind of music that fills stadiums.

It may have soaring, euphoric and indeed stadium-worthy choruses, but People Watching also deals in the harsh realities of Northern working-class life. Wild Long Lie is a song about cocaine, not as a rock star’s indulgence but as a post-pub mainstay; the title track details an elderly woman’s death in a chaotic care home (namely actor and friend Annie Orwin, namechecked in Fender’s winner’s speech); Chin Up and Crumbling Empire offer stark and self-baiting descriptions of the contrast between Fender’s success and the lot of his parents and friends back in North Shields.

There are certainly precedents for that particular cocktail of words and music – the most obvious comparison is Bruce Springsteen – but not many of them, because it’s a tricky thing to pull off. Like his previous album, Seventeen Going Under, People Watching does it with aplomb.

It also broadens out his roaring sound. It’s produced by the War On Drugs’ frontman Adam Granduciel, who brings some of his own band’s hazy psychedelic textures and sense of space to its songs, but it’s also noticeably folkier than Fender’s previous releases, and more audibly rooted in the north-east: its brass arrangements come courtesy of County Durham’s Easington Colliery Band.

Of course, giving the Mercury to an album that’s already a big seller lays the award open to accusations. People Watching patently doesn’t need whatever uptick in profile and sales the Mercury might offer, and it would have been interesting to see if a less successful album got more than the feeble boost afforded by the prize in recent years, given that the ceremony itself was vastly improved.

It’s been a long time since the Mercury really seemed to capture the public’s imagination. Whether said vast improvement will do the trick – and whether Newcastle continues to host the award – remains to be seen.