Picture the scene; you’ve just moved in to halls with all your worldly possessions, a Sainsbury’s Basics white plastic kettle, and enough nervous energy to run a marathon. Your family insisted you that they take you out for food before they left you to attempt awkward introductions with your new flatmates and, by the time you’re back, you find that they’ve all buggered off somewhere too. You make yourself useful and (because it’s 2012, and we didn’t have WiFi) set up your internet. You plug in your ethernet cable, and the iTunes Store (because, again, it’s 2012) beeps to let you know the album you pre-ordered is downloading.
Later, your flatmates will return, and you’ll tell each other everything. You’ll go the Freshers fair, and to SUSU, and out on the town. You’ll have a whole, wondrous uni experience stretching out in front of you. In the way that they do, there will be countless bands and songs and albums that will come to define parts of those years and keep them feeling real and tangible in your memory. It’s all still to come. But, for now, you’re sorting out a bedroom all your own, tacking up posters and folding away clothes, and listening to one of your favourite bands.
On the very first day of Southampton’s Freshers Week 2012, Mumford & Sons first crooned that they were hopeless wanderers, who’d ‘learn to love the skies they’re under’.
Mumford & Son’s Babel was released 21st September, 2012 via Island Records.
