Mumford & Sons Unveil Boy Band Past on ‘Jimmy Kimmel Live!’
Mumford & Sons uncovered a forgotten era of their musical past on Jimmy Kimmel Live! Monday night, appearing in a fake documentary about their late-Nineties boy band — featuring Jimmy Kimmel — Mumtown.
As the hilarious faux documentary reveals, the neo-folk/rock outfit were once teen heartthrobs with frosted tips and a mall-ready hit in their hearts. Ben Lovett was Benjy; Ted Dwane was T.D.; Winston Marshall was, well, Winston; Marcus Mumford was Marcy Marcus; and Kimmel was “Mum.”
“We called him Mum because he wasn’t allowed to sing,” cracked Marcus.
“His singing was, um, what’s the word?” mulled Lovett: “Shit.”
Despite Kimmel’s insistence to the contrary, archival footage shows him during live performances with duct tape plastered over his mouth. As a result, Mum became Mumtown’s chief lyricist penning such turn-of-the-millennium appropriate hits like “Package 4-U” (“I wrote that song about my mother,” recalled Kimmel) and “O.M.G.U.H.O.T.”
The band, however, was less impressed with Kimmel’s lyricism. Eventually, tensions reached a breaking point while working on “I Am My Heart” when an argument boiled over the anatomical veracity of the line, “My heart, down on its knees.”
“Is it a metaphor?” asked Winston. “No, hearts have little legs,” insisted Kimmel. “They tuck them in, they tuck them under.” The rest of Mumtown, reasonably enough, determined Kimmel was delusional, and at that moment Mum decided to embark on a solo career.
The band “begged” him to stay, but it was too late. Despite the crippling loss, Mumtown immediately took their next step towards rock and roll stardom, and, amazingly, the documentary captures that exact moment: Winston drawing the group’s attention to a banjo on the floor, which they proceed to poke and prod with curious amusement.