I’ll be honest, I wasn’t a massive Mumfords fan, I knew a few songs but I mainly went because my best friend from Spain was here and I thought it sounded like good fun, I love myself a live gig. After the concert however, they have won me over and I can now say I’m a Mumford & Sons fan and will be listening exclusively to their music for a solid few months.
At the end of their 15 month world tour they came home to London and played their 50th show in their home town and made it an amazing one. Not only did they play headliners on Friday at the Barclays presents British Summertime Festival in Hyde Park, but they got to hand pick every single band that played there during the day, on every stage, and made it, as Mumford himself said “a day we would enjoy ourselves.”
They had a two hour set and we were there for the eight hours of the day-festival having a few drinks and a little bit of very expensive food before heading over to sit in the area closest to the stage to make sure we had a good place for when they came on at 8.20pm. I did however run away for half an hour to go see the Mystery Jets on the Barclays Stage.
When they came on all the fans went crazy and they kicked off with ‘Snake Eyes’ and then played one of their hits ‘Little Lion Man’. Like I mentioned, I wasn’t a very big Mumford fan so I’d only listened to the most popular songs on Spotify so even though I was enjoying discovering a lot of new songs I was very happy when they played ‘Believe’ in the middle of their main set and I went crazy haha! Two songs after that mega hype they played a song called ‘Ghost That We Knew’ and that almost made me cry because the lyrics are so darn beautiful and hit me right in my soft spot…
For some songs they got artists from the band Baaba Maal up on stage with them to play since they went over to South Africa to record a mini-album with them and the songs are quite famous. One girl right next to us seemed to be from South Africa because every time they’d come on stage she’d get on her boyfriend’s shoulders with a South African flag hanging down and seemed to be very proud of herself!
All 65,000 of us got very surprised when during ‘Ditmas’ Mumford ran down and around half of the crowd then straight through to the middle of the crowd and then decided to crowd-roll (he was rolling over us like a ball instead of like a surfboard) over the rest of us to the front of the stage, madness! But he is a brilliant entertainer and people obviously loved it, myself included!
There were two encores, and the first one was so damn beautiful it brought my little musical heart to the brink of tears. All four of them went to what is called B-Stage and sang two songs, acoustically with just one guitar to one mic. I’ve never seen 65,000 people sing more quietly and it was just magical and beautiful and at that point I was 100% sold.
The second encore was back on the main stage and they played four songs, one of which was ‘There Will Be Time’, and that meant the whole of Baaba Maal had to come back on stage. And after that, the ever so awaited ‘I Will Wait’, where the crowd just went completely crazy, myself included, and it was a great almost-end-of-the-concert-song as they then went on to then end it with ‘The Wolf’.
All in all the concert was amazing, and they’re great entertainers and performers. I am 100% sold on their music now that I’ve seen them live. I do however feel like I might be a bit too late as they did mention that this was the last live performance they were doing for a while as they’ve just ended their tour, so I’ll just have to wait a while to see them again.
Originally published here.
