Take It Or Lovett

Ben Lovett is a coy one. He’s tired but content, and friendly, when we speak the day before he heads to America. Band holed up in the studio, he’s got his own commitments, and seems to be performing quite the juggling act. Mumford and the other sons will evidently have to wait while Ben brings his Communion project to the West Coast.

We’ll get to that venture in a tick, but first of all, how goes progress on the follow-up to Sigh No More?
“Well yeah, work continues on the new record,” proffers Ben, almost apologetically. “It’s going really well, actually, but we’re not sure where it will all go. We can’t make any plans until the record is finished, we’re working as hard as we can. You’ll know all about it when we know!”
A February release date is expected. It doesn’t get much more insightful than that. So it’s lockdown at Camp Mumford (though, whisper it, we suspect they might be working on an easy-on-the-ears brand of MOR trad-influenced rock).
Ben is endearingly softly-spoken. You imagine he didn’t make too much noise when Marcus Mumford revealed the catchy name for his new band, though we wish he had – Lovett & Co sounds just great. He does, however, come to life when he talks about Communion, a club night that began well before the Mumford explosion and has grown exponentially. In October, Communion arrived at the Academy 2, its new home in Dublin. Co-founded by Ben, musician Kevin Jones and producer Ian Grimble, it began several years ago, in a London basement. Lovett outlines its initial aims.
“It started from the disillusionment with how upside-down the whole music industry was. I was playing in a bunch of bands five years ago, one of which had myself on keys and this guy Kevin Jones playing bass. We were doing all of the standard gigs you have to do in London. You get told by the promoter that you’re going to get to play this ‘great gig’. So you turn up, having hassled all your family and friends to come – everyone from your aunt and your best friend’s dog sitter – and you’re there playing in this big room with no one watching. The promoter turns around and says, ‘you didn’t bring anyone down to the gig, we can’t pay you unless you have over 30 people through the door under your name.’”
Lovett lets out a sigh.
“It’s just become a horrible, all-too-common tale in the unsigned music industry. We were a bit pissed about that and decided that the role of a promoter had to be reinvigorated. So we started in London, having a monthly club night and we’d put on our favourite acts. Some of them were friends of ours, some were people that we’d seen around the circuit and really liked their music. We told them all that we were going to pay them a fee up front and not to worry about bringing anyone down, that was our job.”
It started, as most things do, in modest fashion. A hands-on approach was required, so Lovett dropped the keyboard and started dropping flyers. “We went out and bust a gut, hassling people on the Portobello Road. This was before Facebook but we were heavily on MySpace, doing all that online stuff. Hounding people. We successfully managed to get 220 odd people per club night to see a line-up that they’d probably never even heard of.”
The more exposure the night received, the more he had artists clamouring to get a spot.
“We find it easy to book the acts now. They are all coming out of the woodwork, like the wounded soldiers of the music industry.”
From there, it grew and grew, and today – you suspect in part due to the Mumford & Sons association – Communion runs “as far Southwest as Truro in Cornwall and stretches to Glasgow in the North. And now we have Dublin.”
Last year, Lovett & Co (see, it’s catchy) put on 150 nights, each with four or so acts on the bill. Calculators at the ready… “a shitload of bands basically!” Ben laughs.
Not just quantity, but quality. The names visiting each club night just seemed to get bigger and bigger. Anna Calvi (“the Queen of Rock and Roll in many ways,” he notes) and Example have both been through the doors.
“Elliott [Gleave, Example’s given name] really just came down to DJ and represent. But having him there as part of the fabric and the community was just as important. It’s become a magnetic community. People from all walks of life wanted to be involved and put the finger up to the man to a certain extent.”
The night, and its associated label, has kick-started careers too.
“There’s lots of unlikely success stories. Justin Young, the lead singer of The Vaccines, used to play for us as Jay Jay Pistolet. He was actually the resident DJ at the London night under the name DJ Pistolet. We were really big supporters of him, so when he found his feet with The Vaccines, it kinda felt like our victory as well – we’d backed his songwriting from early on.”
On Irish shores, it got up and running in Whelan’s before crossing the Liffey to The Grand Social. In 2011, however, the guys clearly mean business, looking to establish the night as an ongoing concern over here. New venue then?
“The Academy 2 is hopefully going to provide everything that we want to offer with Communion, a known location that people can trust. At the same time, when people walk through the doors, we’re going to be doing everything we can for it to not just feel like ‘another gig at The Academy 2’. I remember Mumford & Sons playing an early show there and it’s one of my favourite gigs that we’ve ever done. It’s a cool spot, if not a little bit mainstream. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t put our own stamp on it.”
Whilst apparently not garnering a crowd sufficiently underground enough to fully enjoy radio favorites such as ‘Little Lion Man’, it sounds close to perfect.
And so we jump across the Atlantic, to the Land Of The Free, and the enormodomes that Mumford & Sons now inhabit. Having hit the late night chat shows on network TV, they embarked on a North American tour and earned themselves Grammy nominations for Best New Artist and Best Rock Song by year’s end. It’s far from the Dublin and London basements on which they were reared.
“I am a big fan of America,” says Lovett. “It’s a fun place. It’s a big pit to dive into, without having to switch languages. Of course, you do end up flying too much and get the jet-lag thing but once you’re there you’re good to do some hard work. Once you’ve landed, it’s such a big, enormous space that you really can make quite a lot of headway simply through lots of driving, which is all good with me.”
It’s also the Land Of A Thousand Musical Idols. Mumford & Sons may not have capitalised on either of those Grammy nominations, but they did get to play onstage with the great Bob Dylan at the ceremony, lending him some backing on ‘Maggie’s Farm’. A big deal?
“Incredible,” says Lovett, with a smile sparked from the mere mention of the thing. “I never would have expected to be backing Bob Dylan in a million years. I don’t know how much of it he would remember but I remember ever single breath! He was a fascinating man, not in any way a disappointment. He’s everything you would want from someone who inspires so many.”
Lovett’s next plane leaves mere hours after this conversation ends, but he will be sans-Bob and bandmates on this occasion. Communion is coming to California.
“Yes! Communion in the Red Woods. It’s a three-day festival in the middle of this enormous national park. We’ve taken over a really old wooden cabin. Then on the Sunday we’ll have a big outdoor show with lots of collaborations and people camping. It’s going to be fresh.”
Quite. As the raindrops hurl themselves against the window panes, we guess sometimes it’s good to be a folkie. Autumn tanning aside, the trip also offers Lovett’s mind a little room to ruminate. The twin priorities of Mumford & Sons’ new album and establishing Communion overseas can occasionally weigh heavy, but on the whole, it’s a help rather than a hindrance to his creativity.
“Fortunately both interlock in some ways,” he concludes. “Just for me personally, if I wasn’t doing Communion, I’d be struggling to have the perspective to work on our own stuff. We’ve always been, as a band, very interested in our peers. We’ve all individually played as backing, session musicians for singer-songwriters coming through. It certainly helps to plug into where we came from in the first place, which is where Communion will always remain. So the record doesn’t get too heady, d’know what I mean? It means you’re focussing on something else in a good way – listening to a new artist’s lyrics or melodies and going, ‘wow, that’s really great, that challenges my own writing.’ It’s a positive relationship.”

The next Communion club night takes place in Dublin’s Academy 2 on November 26 featuring The Staves and Paul Thomas Saunders,