We owe Mumford & Sons an apology – they are not a nostalgia act

I hadn’t listened to Mumford & Sons properly in years.

Not because I’d fallen out with them exactly, but because, like a lot of people, I’d quietly filed them away alongside peasant dresses, lace-up combat boots, Instagram’s Valencia filter, and every other relic of the early 2010s.

So when my sister and I headed to BST Hyde Park – the same sister who used to drive us to school in 2011 in her battered blue Chrysler with permanently broken windscreen wipers while Sigh No More played on repeat – we’d already started making fun of ourselves.

We joked about dressing for the occasion in stomp-and-holler cosplay. We half expected the evening to be a pleasant nostalgia trip before heading home thinking: ‘Well… that was nice.’

Neither of us expected to leave wondering why on earth this genre ever fell out of fashion.

Before the show even began, we asked the two men standing in front of us if they’d mind taking a photo for our mum.

They turned out to be brothers from Sheffield who have seen Mumford & Sons live five times. So convinced were they that this band is at its very best on stage that, after seeing them previously, they’d bought BST tickets while drunk in the pub before they’d even sobered up enough to regret it.

By the end of the night, I understood exactly why.

The thing that struck me most wasn’t actually the songs, although Little Lion Man, The Cave, and I Will Wait have lost none of their ability to send thousands of people into a joyful frenzy.

It was Marcus Mumford’s voice. Live, it has an extraordinary richness that somehow sounds even better than it does on record.

It reminded me why this band became one of the biggest in the world almost overnight and why, for a few years, every other artist seemed desperate to buy a waistcoat and a banjo.

Watching the full band — including a brilliant brass section –I found myself thinking that maybe we all got stomp-and-holler music wrong. We tend to talk about it as if it were a quirky trend that briefly took over before disappearing again, but seeing it live makes you realize how uniquely satisfying it is.

Because there’s something irresistible about thousands of strangers all shouting harmonies together while a banjo threatens to outrun the drummer. It’s communal in a way that even the biggest DJs or stadium rock bands rarely manage.

What also surprised me was how much fun Mumford & Sons themselves seemed to be having.

Plenty of bands revisit their biggest albums because audiences demand it. This didn’t feel like that. Marcus spent much of the evening grinning at his bandmates, bouncing around the stage and looking genuinely thrilled to still be standing in front of a packed Hyde Park more than fifteen years after they first exploded.

Rather than feeling like a nostalgia act cashing in on old hits, they felt like a band still enjoying the absolute peak of their career.

The guest appearances only added to that feeling. Hozier joining the band felt less like a celebrity cameo and more like discovering two voices that should probably have been singing together all along.

Their duet on Awake My Soul was breathtaking, the kind of performance that makes you wish someone had thought of the collaboration years ago.

Then came perhaps the biggest surprise of the evening. Fresh from supporting Harry Styles at Wembley Stadium just hours earlier, Shania Twain walked onto the Hyde Park stage to perform Here before launching into Man! I Feel Like A Woman.

Watching Marcus Mumford transform into an excited fan, bouncing up and down while repeatedly telling the crowd she was his hero, was almost as enjoyable as watching Shania herself. Hearing that song performed live is one of those genuine bucket-list moments I certainly didn’t expect to tick off at a Mumford and Sons concert.

My sister and I walked into Hyde Park expecting a lovely nostalgia trip. We left wondering if we’d just seen one of the best live bands currently touring. If you think the time to see Mumford & Sons live was 2012, you’re fourteen years too early.

The best time to see them is 2026.