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Delta Tour - EP Backstage at the Hollywood Bowl this hat will get a compliment from a bystander and Mumford will explain that its appearance is the result of many weeks campaigning. His wife, the actor Carey Mulligan , took some persuading on it Mumford and Mulligan married in April, and she is here at the venue today, merrily flitting about the wings, wearing a jumper with a large letter M on it.
Mumford is wary about his private life, and prefers not to speak on the record about Mulligan. I relate the following story as to how the couple got together from other reports.
They knew each other as kids and were briefly pen pals before falling out of touch. Then in the actor Jake Gyllenhaal , a mutual friend, reintroduced them and within a year they were engaged. At their wedding in the spring Mumford's father, a vicar, conducted the service. Marshall and Dwane tell me they were approached by a fan, not so long ago, who wanted to know if this was how they defined themselves.
We, er, we have a full spectrum of beliefs. He appends another story about a different encounter, six months ago, when he was asked by a fan if they could pray together. Marshall recalls his awkward refusal: "Erm.
Sorry dude. They're one of those bands who pinch bits out of books to texture their songs — from the Bible and from elsewhere, their first album launching with a quote from Much Ado About Nothing, for example, and the newer record featuring a borrowed line from Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall. They're charged with posh-lad pretentiousness as a result, though I don't know it's all that uncommon for bands to plunder snatches of lyrics from wider culture.
Before meeting the band I asked Mantel about the steal from Wolf Hall Mumford having admitted to it in a BBC radio interview and the novelist told me: "Of course they're welcome.
I have millions of lines. As for the biblical stuff: "I don't know many artists who've managed to go a career without bringing these things up," says Dwane.
Or that the band's ploy might be to "get a following and then reveal the great truth later" the Daily Mirror, If the band are working to a secret evangelical agenda then Marshall, at least, has got his doctrines confused. Today he hands me a leaflet he has picked up that advertises access to "the wisdom of the universe". Interview bands who have made it big and you get to sense which are only good at containing monstrous self-love, or appalling self-doubt, or a fizzing mixture of the two, for the exact duration of a promotional commitment and sometimes a shorter period than that.
You also get an idea as to which have kept their humour and some hold on normality. The irreverent Marshall is described by Lovett, accurately, as "always looking like he's won a competition to stand next to the band". Mumford tells a story about someone squealing in recognition, not long ago, while he was waiting in line at a cash machine. His hand automatically went for the autograph pen … In fact he was being told he looked exactly like Alec Baldwin.
There is a striking resemblance. They're funny with me and generous with their time and, who knows, it might be because way back it was a press interview that accidentally got Mumford's songwriting career underway. He was about 20 at the time and a dropout from Edinburgh University "not very popular" there when he got session work as a drummer with Laura Marling. She was then a little known singer-songwriter whose career was about to take off, and in a small London studio Mumford recorded the drum track for Marling's breakthrough album, Alas I Cannot Swim.
When Marling was called away to do interviews that day, Mumford was left in a studio booth for an hour and a half, where he sat and wrote White Blank Page , later a central track on Sigh No More and a real heart-wringer, all about romantic frustration. Throughout our conversation, Mumford talks of Marling only as an admired fellow musician — but anyone who follows these sorts of artists knows that Mumford and Marling became a couple for a time, from some point after Alas I Cannot Swim was finished until about He speaks fondly of their shared musical beginnings.
Have you seen Force 10 From Navarone? I was like the bomb expert, Miller, had my little box of tricks — [drum]sticks, a mandolin. We used an accordion case as a kick-drum, made snares out of paper stuck on tables. Laura would never say anything on stage so I'd do all the chatting. That got my stage banter sharpened.
Mumford approached Marling's manager, Adam Tudhope, with White Blank Page and a few other tracks he had written, and Tudhope took him on. The band gathered around Mumford from there. Lovett was an old friend from King's College school in Wimbledon, Marshall he had first met as a teenager then reencountered in Edinburgh; Dwane they all knew through crossover work with Marling.
But we were energetic, and ambitious, and gave everything we could, and that got us a long way. By Lovett's count they've done 10 separate tours of the US alone. Today at the Hollywood Bowl the news is still very fresh that Babel has repeated the feat: a million copies sold in America, only this time much quicker, about six weeks after release.
There are bands out there who would find this a reasonable excuse to open the champagne. To fill the nearest pool with it, for backflips. When I mention the new achievement to Dwane, he hasn't heard about it. A casual disinterest in sales figures — is this for real? But he says: "A lot of bad music sells a million copies, I don't think it's a good litmus test for whether things are going well. I don't think there's anything good that can come out of knowing.
In the same way that we don't pay any attention to any of the negative stuff that comes our way, it's just as important not to pat ourselves on the back when commercial success is being talked about.
The band, he tells me, wantto have the freedom to evolve as they make a third album, a fourth.
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