Gentlemen Of The Road

It’s almost like a fairy tale. A bright, chubby-cheeked young boy from Wimbledon finds kindred spirits in a folk club under a Cornish Pasty shop, and, together with his waistcoast-wearing pals, becomes the biggest thing in music… apart from, perhaps, Niall Horan’s hair.

In a year, our plucky hero charges through more dream-like feats of superstardom than most musicians manage in a lifetime; whether performing with an icon (actually, he ticks three off the list – Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen and Neil Young) accepting the Prime Minister’s invitation to entertain the President at the White House (naturally, also in a waistcoat) or marrying a movie star (the lovely Carey Mulligan of Shame, Drive and The Great Gatsby fame), he pulls it off with old fashioned politeness and gentle British humour, if not bare-faced gallantry.
Granted, it’s a little light on the gender stereotyping and convenient spell-casting, but in a world where the release of the iPhone 5 is considered the height of excitement, it sure feels like the real thing..

Having travelled further up the pop ladder than even the most optimistic work of fiction could predict, Marcus Mumford and company are back with a new album, based on a very different kind of story. The follow-up to the million-selling Sigh No More takes its name from The Tower Of Babel, a mercenary tale from the first book of the Old Testament.
In a nutshell, it follows a human race united in language and colour who build a great tower to preserve their way of life, only to have God scatter them to the four corners of the earth and rob them of their universal tongue. It’s one of a handful of bible yarns that paints the Almighty as, if you’ll excuse my French, a total bastard.
“I think it’s a really versatile story,” Mumford explains. “It can make you think about communication or community or breakdown in community. It can also make you think about hubris and arrogance and things being torn down in your life. ‘Babel’ was a really versatile word that means a lot of things to a lot of different people and, in fact, to each of us in the band, it means something slightly different.”
Biblical allusions are nothing new for this well-read Londoner, whose erudite lyrics could probably make it into a Sunday sermon without the parishioners kicking up too much of a fuss. But even if Mumford’s rhymes do carry a religious flow (choice line: “Crawl on my belly until the sun goes down, I’ll never wear your broken crown”), the 25-year-old is quick to point out that Babel was created like any other record.
“It was all about the songs,” he says. “The only concept really for the album was the concept that it’s gotta be the best songs that we have.”
While Mumford And Son’s frantic folk rock sound remains intact, Babel covers a lot more emotional ground, flickering from joyful banjo stompers to piano-led torch songs. Acoustic heart-breaker ‘Reminder’ finds Mumford in a particularly lonesome mood, pining after a love left behind. “I’ve been traveling oh so long,” he yearns. “It’s all that I’m asking for/ Without her I’m lost/ Oh, my love don’t fade away.” Now that he’s prime tabloid gossip column fodder, surely writing lyrics like that is a risky business.
“It’s weird isn’t it?” he muses. “Songs are such private things, really. You write them in your most intimately private moments and then you broadcast them to the world and publish them and want people to listen to them, so you’re doing the most public thing you could do with a private moment. So yeah, there’s definitely a bit of vulnerability in there and you don’t want to give too much more of yourself away than you already have in your songs. But then, we’ve always written like that, that’s the cost of what we do as a band. We just write quite honestly and we’re quite forthright in our lyrics because we write about things that we care about or we think about or we feel. It kind of has to be like that, but there’s certainly a cost to it.”
With a few days to go before Babel hits the shelves and our hero’s innermost thoughts become some music-lover’s driving song, I imagine tensions are running high in camp Mumford. “There’s a bit of nervous energy,” he acknowledges. “It’s quite a weird time, actually.”
Mumford, Lovett, Marshall and Dwane will soon have ample distraction in the form of an Australian tour, but not before a stop-off in Ireland for Arthur’s Day. The Brits have never been shy about their love for our fair country, even bringing their own traveling mini festival to Galway last June.
“It was really fun, really fun,” Mumford recalls. “It was hard because the Huddersfield and Galway stopovers were like our experiments. We hadn’t done it before, so there are definitely things that we would now go back and try and change.
‘We’d probably try not to make it on the day of a big football final!” he laughs, referring to an unfortunately-timed Connacht semi-final at Pearse Stadium, “but Galway was very kind to us and we’re really glad we went there for it. Ireland’s just really important to us. The Arthur’s Day thing fell at the right time for us, just as we release the record. We liked the idea of going to Ireland and having a day there and spending some time there, because we really do love it.”
The intimate pub show we’ve been promised on September 27 is completely at odds with the scenes in the video for new single ‘I Will Wait’, which was filmed at a show in Red Rocks Amphitheatre, a ginormous rock venue (both in the geological and