The day before I spoke to Marcus Mumford in early September, he had met the Pope. Along with a selection of artists including the British actor David Oyelowo and the American film director Darius Marder, the songwriter had been invited to “sit and talk about art” and “beauty” in the Vatican.
Mumford, who grew up in an evangelical Christian family, isn’t “wildly keen” on defining himself as religious now. “I love Jesus, I thought he was dope, so that’s sort of the central part of my faith, and all the trappings and the baggage, I’m not so interested in,” he told me when we met in a west London recording studio in early September. But Pope Francis made an impression on him. “We had a little face-to-face moment. He said: ‘Will you pray for me?’ I went: ‘Yeah! Like, right now.’ So I prayed for him, which was really wicked. I think he’s a good man. I mean – the bar’s pretty low for popes, right? But it strikes me that he’s a dude with integrity.”
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