Exclusive Photos: Mumford & Sons Take America
Within the past year, Mumford & Sons have become one of the biggest success stories in rock. On the strength of their two big singles – the joyous "The Cave" and "Little Lion Man," which features the irresistibly bleep-worthy refrain "I really fucked it up this time, didn’t I, my dear?" – their first album, Sigh No More, has sold more than 1.6 million copies, including a million this year alone. In the August 4, 2011 issue of Rolling Stone, on stands now, the year's biggest new band takes us along for the ride.
By Josh Eells
Mumford & Sons photographed by James Minchin III in Telluride, Colorado, June, 2011.
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The weekend before Telluride, they played a raucous set at Bonnaroo that was so popular it disrupted the festival’s gravitational balance, drawing more people to the second stage than many bands did to the main one. The weekend after, they’ll play Glastonbury, right before U2. They’ve made fans of everyone from Ray Davies to Taylor Swift, and even Wiz Khalifa has given them a shout-out.
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"It scares the shit out of me sometimes," says frontman Marcus Mumford, 24, of the band’s success. "I just feel like, not only do we not deserve to be here, but we’re not good enough to be here. I guess we had a dynamic, and it caught on."
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"It's really weird to me that people like our music," says Mumford. "It's pretty straightforward. There's no flash to it. And there are so many other bands doing it. People are like, 'Don't listen to Mumford & Sons – listen to this band.' And I'm like, 'I know!' We're just mediocre, slightly overweight English musicians. We're fat, sweaty, and we try hard."
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Marcus Mumford takes a ride on a quad ATV in Telluride, Colorado.
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Despite their seemingly overnight success, things at the beginning were a little rough. The first time Mumford read reviews of their record, they were so bad he cried. "They were spot-on," he says. "I agreed with them wholeheartedly – they nailed everything I was insecure about it. I was like, 'I don't need to read your shitty writing to know what's wrong with us!'"
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Winston 'Country' Marshall during rehearsals at the Sheridan Opera House in Telluride, Colorado.
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Keyboard and accordion player Ben Lovett met Marcus Mumford sometime around third grade at the King's College School, a private school in Wimbledon attended by the likes of John Barrymore and Charles Dickens Jr. Mumford was a quasi-jock who played rugby and soccer and acted in school musicals (he played the Artful Dodger in Oliver!, much to his current chagrin); Lovett was less involved but cooler, a classically trained pianist who also played in a couple of bands. Together they started a six-man free-jazz group called Détente – which is about as embarrassing to them as you might guess – but when a friend of Mumford's older brother made him a bluegrass mixtape near the end of high school, Mumford became obsessed and started writing those kinds of songs instead. "Marcus will tell you, they were pretty trite," Lovett says of their early efforts. Does he remember any titles? He laughs. "Um . . . 'On the Train'?"
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Before joining Mumford & Sons Ted Dwane had been playing bass in a punk band called Sex Face. When Mumford & Sons went into the studio to record their debut album – which they paid for themselves – Marshall strummed a rented banjo, and Dwane didn't even have a bass.
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Banjo Player Winston 'Country' Marshall is the son of an insanely successful British hedge-fund manager (his personal fortune is a reported £250 million plus). Marshall would often wear cowboy boots to his posh private school. ("I was completely deluded," he says. "They were probably made in China.") Marshall also played in Gobbler's Knob, a ZZ Top cover band whose members sported fake beards ("We sold more T-shirts than we did CDs," says Marshall); when they were about 16, he and Mumford met at summer camp, where both of them played in the band. "We did, like, two gigs a day, all worship songs," Marshall recalls. "I think we bonded over Office quotes."
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Listening to Mumford & Sons' songs, it's hard not to detect a vaguely spiritual undercurrent. The lyrics – in addition to high-literary allusions to Shakespeare and Steinbeck (Mumford, after all, is a guy who reads 16th-century English historical fiction for fun) – are also full of references to faith, sin and atonement, not to mention explicit exhortations to "serve God" and profound queries like "Can you kneel before the King and say, 'I'm clean, I'm clean'?" Coupled with the band's harmonies and a propulsive beat, they can almost sound more like Christian praise songs than modern-rock hits.
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Mumford & Sons perform at the Sheridan Opera House in Telluride, Colorado.
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As it turns out, there's a reason for this. Mumford's parents, John and Eleanor, are the national leaders of the U.K. arm of the Vineyard movement, an evangelical church from the 1970s that they have been involved with since before Marcus was born. (It's the same church that lead Dylan to Jesus around the time of Slow Train Coming.) According to Lovett, a committed nonbeliever, Mumford's religion made things tricky. "It was always a bit of a stumbling block for our friendship," he says. "I don't know if Marcus would see it like that – we were still great friends who played music together. But whenever that stuff would come up . . ."
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Ted Dwane of Mumford & Sons performing at the Telluride Bluegrass Festival in Telluride, Colorado.
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When it comes to talking about the church today, Mumford is circumspect. "I just feel like it's personal, you know? For who we are as people, it's almost everything. But I don't feel like it's super-relevant to what we do musically."
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Mumford and his new girlfriend, actress Carey Mulligan, met through church when they were 11. They became pen pals but eventually fell out of touch, then reconnected a few months ago and have been together ever since. Mumford calls her "a great sounding board" and says they're very happy together, but it also takes him only about a minute of this line of inquiry to shut it down – albeit in the most polite, English way possible.