Mumford & Sons @ The Excel
Wednesday September 4th was a sold out show at Xcel. They opened with “Lover’s Eyes” the perfect opener, audio mix was still being tweaked. “Broken Crown” was the sixth song in & by then it was sounding pure & clean, the horns really do make this band fun to hear. Very few people were sitting down by middle of the 1st set. There is something about their banjo, fiddle & hard strumming guitar that takes me away from the good old US of A.
Sandy & I have been big fans for years, hearing “Little Iron Man” live was a treat. The working class neighborhoods of west London produce some unusual music & musicians, so different from the messages we are used to hearing over here. There is an underlying anger in a few of their songs, Marcus is a great story teller. Hard to believe the Sons might be more popular in UK, Australia & Ireland then here but tonight everyone loved these guys. Difficult to say exactly what kind of music I was hearing, the early material was considered “folk”. some of those early videos & lyrics had a weird John Steinbeck thing that didn’t make sense to me.
This tour was promoting Babel. Marcus Mumford did a few songs up on the full drum set and that was a highlight for me. The band reminded us that night that they played the 400 Bar in 2008- damn, I missed that & would have driven through snow, sleet or a summer rain storm to see that show. I’ll call them Celtic thunder accompanied by strings & horns. End of the show they appeared center of the arena & did an acoustic version of Springsteen’s “I’m on fire”.
