Mumford & Sons’ New Road
Mumford & Sons are stuck in Tennessee traffic on the way to Bonnaroo a day before their headlining set, their bus nosing past a series of Waffle Houses and Flying J truck stops. “Is it going to take us three hours to get to this fucking place?” banjo-guitarist Winston Marshall wonders to no one in particular. A messy-haired Marcus Mumford flips channels on the bus TV, failing to find the Wales-Belgium soccer game. Marshall sits on the couch, his newly grown-out hair spilling onto his unbuttoned white Renaissance-style shirt, blasting Kendrick Lamar from his iPad.
It’s the second week of their summer U.S. tour, and one of the most important shows of their career: the first major festival set since the release of their third album, Wilder Mind, and a return to Bonnaroo, a gig they had to cancel in 2013 after bassist Ted Dwane fell ill. “It feels really lucky to be back,” says Mumford. “It makes us want to smash it even more than we would’ve done two years ago.”
Bonnaroo holds a special place in their hearts: They were nervous before they first played here, in 2010, but their heroes Dave Rawlings, Gillian Welch and Old Crow Medicine Show all joined them during their side-stage afternoon slot for a version of “Wagon Wheel.” “British bands are quite gang-y at London festivals,” says Marshall. “Here, they welcomed us with open arms.”
Mumford moved up to the huge second stage in 2011, and they were booked to headline the main stage in 2013 after the enormous success of their second album, Babel. But two weeks before that set, Dwane started feeling sick onstage in Berkeley. He played a few more dates before doctors told him he needed emergency surgery; a blood clot was removed from the surface of his brain. “It was just pure relief, really, because I had been feeling so bad for a week,” says Dwane.
The band held a tense meeting in an Austin hotel room, where Dwane insisted he could play Bonnaroo against doctors’ orders, but his bandmates outvoted him. “He was really skinny and he’d been sick for, like, two weeks, just vomiting his guts out — great weight-loss program,” says Mumford. “He still had that blue marker on his head. He looked fucking awesome. He looked like something out of Schindler’s List.”
“That might be my next look, actually,” adds Marshall.
Despite today’s traffic, they are in good spirits, bantering about the escaped prisoners in New York state (“Fair play to them,” says keyboardist Ben Lovett). Marshall makes fun of Bonnaroo’s slogan (“Radiate positivity, guys!” he says mockingly as he flips through the schedule) and wonders whether the waitress was flirting with him at breakfast that morning. “It was totally unprofessional — she practically invited me up to her room,” he says, with more than a little pride.
“You were peacocking,” says Dwane. In contrast to the rest of the group — especially Mumford and Lovett, who are both married — the exuberant Marshall makes no secret of how much he’s enjoying the rock-star life on the road: “I’m a single man, so I’ve got not much to go home to,” he says. “And I haven’t got many friends, either. I’m losing them. Will you be my friend?” When the bus finally makes it to the festival’s back entrance, he looks out the window and sees a crowd of barely dressed women. “Titties!” he exclaims. “Time for babe-watch. I’ll be at the front of the bus.”
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