They had a couple minor crossover hits around the turn of the decade, which followed the same banjo-heavy, heart-rending confessional formula, featuring similar gradual swells in volume and drama. The group's individual members are not particularly famous for anything minus the guy whose last name is actually "Mumford" , and the band is not part of any particularly pop-notable scene, either musically or geographically.
That's a lot of albums by any standard, but it's absolutely unthinkable by standards. It's over , copies more than any other album has sold in its first week this year, including major releases by Justin Bieber, Madonna, Nicki Minaj and other pop megastars with about times the Q rating of Mumford and Sons. It's about 12 times more than Our Girl Carly Rae Jepsen sold with the biggest pop hit of the decade on her side.
By contrast, Babel lead single "I Will Wait" has peaked at 23, supported almost entirely by sales, with very little pop airplay. All that said, it's not a completely unexpected number. Mumford proved to be surprisingly commercially viable with their debut album Sigh No More , which sold significantly less than Babel in its first week, but proved a stealth sales juggernaut, lingering on the charts for years thanks to a couple well-timed award show performances and eventually peaking at 2, selling nearly 2.
Sigh was one of the five best-selling albums of , despite actually being released back in , giving you a pretty good idea of the album's impressive staying power. Still, given the fact that the group hasn't done much to raise their profile or change up their sound in the years since Sigh No More 's release, you'd think the chances would be pretty good that Sigh would represent the peak of the group's performance, and that it would be diminishing returns from there.
But it appears instead that Mumford and Sons are just entering their pop peak, and that Babel might end up cementing the group as one of the country's biggest, with a surge of Grammy nominations and general acclaim seemingly inevitable to follow. How is this happening? How did a folk quartet with seemingly no relation to the rest of popular music become the year's best-selling act?
Well, you could have asked the same questions last year about Adele, whose 21 ended up far outselling the likes of Lady Gaga, Lil Wayne and Rihanna despite falling into few if any of the modern trends in pop music.
The same could have been said about such other surprise blockbuster acts over the course of the 21st century as Norah Jones, Susan Boyle, even the O Brother Where Art Thou?
But he points to the example of legendary British guitarist Peter Green. Nothing fucking authentic about that, right? But actually there is. He loves it. It's what he's good at. It's not like he's saying he's from the Delta.
It's not like we're saying anything like that. He changed his name. And modelled himself on Woody Guthrie. And lied to everyone about who he was. Mumford is outfitted today like his hero, the worn dark suit ideally Dylan, so too the black hat deep-positioned on his head. Backstage at the Hollywood Bowl this hat will get a compliment from a bystander and Mumford will explain that its appearance is the result of many weeks campaigning. His wife, the actor Carey Mulligan , took some persuading on it Mumford and Mulligan married in April, and she is here at the venue today, merrily flitting about the wings, wearing a jumper with a large letter M on it.
Mumford is wary about his private life, and prefers not to speak on the record about Mulligan. I relate the following story as to how the couple got together from other reports. They knew each other as kids and were briefly pen pals before falling out of touch.
Then in the actor Jake Gyllenhaal , a mutual friend, reintroduced them and within a year they were engaged. At their wedding in the spring Mumford's father, a vicar, conducted the service. Marshall and Dwane tell me they were approached by a fan, not so long ago, who wanted to know if this was how they defined themselves.
We, er, we have a full spectrum of beliefs. He appends another story about a different encounter, six months ago, when he was asked by a fan if they could pray together. Marshall recalls his awkward refusal: "Erm.
Sorry dude. They're one of those bands who pinch bits out of books to texture their songs — from the Bible and from elsewhere, their first album launching with a quote from Much Ado About Nothing, for example, and the newer record featuring a borrowed line from Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall. They're charged with posh-lad pretentiousness as a result, though I don't know it's all that uncommon for bands to plunder snatches of lyrics from wider culture.
Before meeting the band I asked Mantel about the steal from Wolf Hall Mumford having admitted to it in a BBC radio interview and the novelist told me: "Of course they're welcome. I have millions of lines. As for the biblical stuff: "I don't know many artists who've managed to go a career without bringing these things up," says Dwane. Or that the band's ploy might be to "get a following and then reveal the great truth later" the Daily Mirror, If the band are working to a secret evangelical agenda then Marshall, at least, has got his doctrines confused.
Today he hands me a leaflet he has picked up that advertises access to "the wisdom of the universe". Interview bands who have made it big and you get to sense which are only good at containing monstrous self-love, or appalling self-doubt, or a fizzing mixture of the two, for the exact duration of a promotional commitment and sometimes a shorter period than that.
You also get an idea as to which have kept their humour and some hold on normality. The irreverent Marshall is described by Lovett, accurately, as "always looking like he's won a competition to stand next to the band". Mumford tells a story about someone squealing in recognition, not long ago, while he was waiting in line at a cash machine. His hand automatically went for the autograph pen … In fact he was being told he looked exactly like Alec Baldwin.
There is a striking resemblance. They're funny with me and generous with their time and, who knows, it might be because way back it was a press interview that accidentally got Mumford's songwriting career underway. He was about 20 at the time and a dropout from Edinburgh University "not very popular" there when he got session work as a drummer with Laura Marling.
She was then a little known singer-songwriter whose career was about to take off, and in a small London studio Mumford recorded the drum track for Marling's breakthrough album, Alas I Cannot Swim. When Marling was called away to do interviews that day, Mumford was left in a studio booth for an hour and a half, where he sat and wrote White Blank Page , later a central track on Sigh No More and a real heart-wringer, all about romantic frustration.
Throughout our conversation, Mumford talks of Marling only as an admired fellow musician — but anyone who follows these sorts of artists knows that Mumford and Marling became a couple for a time, from some point after Alas I Cannot Swim was finished until about He speaks fondly of their shared musical beginnings.
Have you seen Force 10 From Navarone? I was like the bomb expert, Miller, had my little box of tricks — [drum]sticks, a mandolin. We used an accordion case as a kick-drum, made snares out of paper stuck on tables. Laura would never say anything on stage so I'd do all the chatting.
That got my stage banter sharpened. Mumford approached Marling's manager, Adam Tudhope, with White Blank Page and a few other tracks he had written, and Tudhope took him on. The band gathered around Mumford from there. Lovett was an old friend from King's College school in Wimbledon, Marshall he had first met as a teenager then reencountered in Edinburgh; Dwane they all knew through crossover work with Marling.
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