Whine merchants

Some albums you love instantaneously, others you have to work at. And, just occasionally, an album comes along that you know that you will love if only you can hear it enough times. Except that you won’t. You will keep on playing it, and still you won’t really like it, and still you will keep on playing it. Mine at the moment is the one by Mumford & Sons, the amusingly posh raggle-taggle folk group (all called Oli and Ben), who enjoyed a wondrous 2010, selling loads of records and wowing festival audiences (all called Oli and Ben). If only they could write a decent tune, they might be quite good.

Last week I was perilously close to throwing in the towel, and putting on an old Steely Dan record instead, when it suddenly occurred to me: it’s the voice. Detailed perusal of sleeve notes then revealed that the lead singer is called Marcus. How had I not noticed this before? An old friend of mine, who likes to put people in their place, once said that anyone called Marcus was either black or a public schoolboy, and sure enough Marcus Mumford went to King’s College School in Wimbledon. (Some of his bandmates were at St Paul’s.) But it’s the voice. We are not talking about a thing of beauty here. It whines, it grates, it has the unmistakeable stench of authenticity (which means it is probably put on), and it sounds uncannily like someone else’s voice. But whose? Where did he get it from?

I worked it out in the end. It took me about a day and a half of blood vessel-bursting concentration. Marcus Mumford is vocally a dead ringer for a man called Simon Aldred, who fronts a band called Cherry Ghost.