Mumford & Sons at Hyde Park: The Gateway to Folk

Reach the front barrier of a festival pit an hour early and you pay for it in sweat. I paid gladly. July was still hammering the Great Oak Stage when I got there, sixty-five thousand people fanning themselves with anything to hand, the Hyde Park grass already trodden to dust. Then, at dusk, a boxing-ring announcer and a clang of a bell — the instrumental intro of The Wild — before the whole thing kicked straight into Begin Again and pyrotechnics went up into the low sun. Mumford & Sons were home, a full decade since they last stood on this stage. Marcus opened the set in sunglasses, the sun still in his eyes: a man back in his own city and not pretending he was used to it.

Full disclosure, because it is the reason I am writing this and not simply filing a review: I am no Mumford & Sons devotee. I am a folk collector — the real thing, the kind that lives in grooves and cracked voices. And yet, standing at that barrier while a whole park sang every word back, I understood something worth telling a Groov-illa reader. For a great many people, this band is the door. It is the first place a banjo and a three-part harmony ever walk into a life. And every door, if you know to look through it, opens onto a bigger room.

Hyde Park is not just another stage for them. The band has called it part of their story, a place of memories, and coming back after ten years — two new records in hand, 2025's chart-topping Rushmere and February's Prizefighter — carried the weight of something closing and reopening at once. You could hear it in Marcus's voice, and in a setlist built to cross the whole catalogue: the early triumphs, the rock years, the new songs, and two guests nobody at the barrier saw coming.

From the barrier: two hours, nineteen songs, two ambushes

I Will Wait lands almost at once, second song in, and the park becomes a single thing: it is their perfect sing-along machine, and hearing it sung by sixty-five thousand throats tells you exactly why they are up here. Then White Blank Page, all slow build and detonation, then Lover of the Light and Hopeless Wanderer. Stella Lefty, one of the day's names, joins for Badlands. This is plainly not going to be an anniversary victory lap.

The first ambush comes mid-set. Marcus introduces the guest as "the kindest man in music," and out walks Hozier for Rubber Band Man, their collaboration from this year — a track with a warm country pull — before staying on for a spine-tingling Awake My Soul, the two voices trading the refrain as the park sings it home. Just before, a shout-out to Pride, and rainbow flags rise across the fading light. Then back to the band's own weather: Truth, from the rockier new phase, the backdrop literally going up in flames; Ditmas, with Marcus throwing himself bodily into the crowd; and Little Lion Man, met like an old friend. This is where the pit stops being an audience and becomes one jumping organism.

The second ambush is the kind you tell people about for years. After Believe, a shortened Delta and The Wolf, the encore opens with Rushmere, and Marcus teases "another surprise" — a surprise, he says, "for us too." On walks Shania Twain, in a black bodysuit and knee-high boots, straight off the Wembley Stadium stage where she had just opened for Harry Styles that same night, having raced across London to be here. First Here, Mumford's most country song, written with Chris Stapleton; then, when she asks the park if we fancy "something sassy," the opening chords of Man! I Feel Like a Woman! and outright pandemonium. Sixty-five thousand people losing it together. This is what festivals exist for.

And then, almost without warning, it ends. The Banjo Song, The Cave, fireworks — and the house lights up. I admit I stood at the barrier for a beat, wondering if that was really all: no long farewell, no ritual walk-off and return, just the fireworks and then the void. Anyone who comes from club shows knows that small vertigo of anticlimax. It took me a moment to understand it was not coldness. It was Hyde Park.

Marcus, the way in

There is a lazy way to describe Mumford & Sons, and it starts with "banjo, waistcoats, stadium stomp." There is a more useful one, and it asks where they draw from. The band formed in west London in the late 2000s, inside the small folk scene that also produced Laura Marling, Johnny Flynn and Noah and the Whale — kids rediscovering an England of wood and strings while the world danced to something else. Marcus played drums for Marling before he ever fronted anything. The folk revival, for him, is no cover-shoot pose: it is the ground he started on.

Then came all the rest — Sigh No More, Babel, the American stadiums, the Grammy — and with it the maximalist, upward, floodlit version of folk: hymn-like builds, four-on-the-floor kick, the throat thrown open. In 2021 Winston Marshall left, and the banjo went with him, the signature instrument of that first sound; they are a trio now, and the course has drifted toward a more confessional Americana. Fittingly, Prizefighter was cut with Aaron Dessner — the man who redrew indie folk this past decade — with guests like Hozier, Gracie Abrams and Chris Stapleton. Mumford & Sons, then, are the widest door the mainstream has onto the word "folk." The question, for us, is what stands on the other side.

From the stage to the groove

Because if the banjo and the harmonies got you in Hyde Park, that sound comes from somewhere — and the better part is upstream, in shadow, more intimate. That is where the folk that does not stomp but whispers lives: the kind that fills not a park but a room and an evening. Want the map before the names? Start here: what folk actually is, where it comes from, and why it keeps returning.

Then the three that matter. Nick Drake: three records, a short life, English melancholy turned to guitar — the exact opposite of the stadium hymn, and for that the deepest root of all. Karen Dalton, the cracked voice even Dylan looked up to, banjo and grief on In My Own Time. And Van Morrison's Astral Weeks: folk turned to stream, Celtic soul and jazz, the record a whole idea of "a song that breathes" never recovered from. Three back doors, all opening exactly where Hyde Park pointed without saying so.

From the arena to the groove

When it was over, as the park emptied and voices spilled out into the London streets still singing, I thought it had been a generous night: two hours, two front-page guests, a homecoming done right. Mumford & Sons know exactly what they have become — the band that opens, to millions, the door to a word, folk, that many would never otherwise have spoken. That is a credit, not a charge.

But the thing I take home is not a chorus sung by sixty-five thousand. It is a suspicion that built, quietly, somewhere between Awake My Soul and the closing fireworks: that all that euphoria was an invitation. Real folk does not shout. It waits. It sits in a room, on a turntable, low, in a voice that trembles. If Hyde Park got you, the road does not end at the park gates. It starts there — in the groove.

Mumford & Sons are not the destination. They are the door. And a door is for one thing only: walking through. — Groov-illa · Cover Story, 2026