This year the Glastonbury Festival was brought to a close by the indie folk band Mumford and Sons.
Earlier in 2013 they won the Grammy Award for Album of the Year with their second album, Babel, which was the fastest-selling album of 2012. Frontman Marcus Mumford must have been overjoyed, having told NME that he feared it would be a ‘disappointing second child’, living in the shadow of their first album, Sigh No More, which won the BRIT Award for British Album of the Year in 2011 and has gone four times platinum.
Old-fashioned fun
Mumford and Sons seemed to have gained their incredible worldwide success by old-fashioned means: they create exuberant, rowdy hoe-downs for their fans to enjoy. Energetic live performances are at the core of their appeal, so much so that fans had to wait two years for a second album while the band picked up their banjos and raucously stomped their feet throughout the festival scene.
Marcus recognises that ecstatic live performances are the key to building a community of followers who appreciate their upbeat, catchy melodies: ‘It’s a unique thing to stand in front of a crowd and sing your songs [...] With our music, I don’t think people are trying to look cool or get drugged up or drunk. They’re just having a nice time, dropping the pretence and having fun’. The band’s homely, rustic appeal is perfectly timed to chime with a generation drawn to all things vintage. They’ve even managed to make tweed waistcoats, plaid shirts and overgrown whiskers fashionable again. Well, almost.
If they appear marvellously well-mannered, it is matched by a forceful honesty in their lyrics. Band member Ben Lovett says: ‘We wanted to do something unashamed’, and this sense of conviction comes across in the poetry of both albums. Soundbites from their songs — such as, ‘where you invest your love, you invest your life’ (‘Awake My Soul’) — are becoming mantras for their hordes of 20-something followers. Their approach has even been compared to Bono of U2, who succeeded in translating for contemporary audiences the depths of his soul-searching. Yet Bono’s work has a religious edge, whereas Mumford’s position on faith is unclear.
Songs that ask questions
Marcus’s parents, John and Eleanor Mumford, are the national directors of the Vineyard movement, an evangelical Christian denomination. This has led many to assume that Mumford and Sons are to some extend a ‘Christian band’. Their lyrics certain riff on biblical phrases and ideas, with phrases like: ‘Lord forget all my sins’, ‘I believe in grace and choice’ and ‘I was told by Jesus / All was well / So all must be well’. But these are countered with lines like: ‘A brush with the devil can clear your mind’ (‘Whispers in the Dark’). So what are we to make of it all?
Marcus has been criticised for shirking the question and seeming unwilling to comment on his own beliefs. He is clear that neither of the band’s albums is a declaration of Christian faith. Speaking to Rolling Stone magazine, he claimed that, although he believes in God and recognises that the church has been an important part of his upbringing, ‘I wouldn’t call myself a Christian […] I’ve kind of separated myself from the culture of Christianity’. Beyond this, he only makes vague comments that his lyrics are social or philosophical rather than religious. Ben Lovett explains that the songs come from a place of uncertainty: ‘There’s a reason why people write songs sometimes, because they can’t talk about something’.
‘We’re just writing songs that ask questions’, insists Marcus. These questions concern faith, as well as romantic relationships and the state of modern society. How are we meant to live? Who were we created to be? What can love achieve? How do we find truth? They’re questions that many of us ask, but our relativistic culture makes truth seems hard to pin down or place into a hierarchy. ‘How can you say that your truth is better than ours?’ (‘I Gave You All’).
Soul-searchers
The singer is desperate to find someone who can give him the answers, promising: ‘Lead me to the truth and I will follow you with my whole life’ (‘White Blank Page’). There, then, is the challenge which Mumford and Sons sets the church they left behind: to find ways of leading a new generation of soul-searchers to the Truth, who can truly set them free if they give their lives to follow him.
An earlier version of this article appeared on the Church of England Newspaper website.
