That Marcus Mumford wants people to pay attention to what he is singing is made clear by the two Mumford & Sons songs he chooses to open his show: Awake My Soul and The Cave. It is just him and an acoustic guitar for that pair, so the lyrics can be heard. “And now my heart stumbles on things I don’t know / My weakness I feel I must finally show,” he sings in the former; “I’ll find strength in pain / And I will change my ways,” he sings in the latter, which also offers the description of someone as “you cannibal”.
That’s surely no accident, given it is followed immediately by Cannibal, beginning a complete runthrough of his extraordinary solo album, Self-Titled. Those two Mumford & Sons songs foreshadow what it is to come – songs about confronting pain and the past, in this case the legacy of childhood sexual abuse. Not that everyone seems to have got the memo: partway through Cannibal, there’s a peal of raucous laughter from the back of the room, even as Mumford is singing of still being able to taste his abuser. The shushing that follows almost drowns out the sound from the stage.
