Gig review: Mumford and Sons, Caird Hall, Dundee

“A SUNDAY night in Dundee is like a Friday night anywhere in England,” announced Marcus Mumford, to huge applause.

Making an appearance in the city as part of the national mini-tour, which immediately precedes their much larger set of arena dates next month, there was much evidence here to suggest why this still-young group from London now find themselves among the A-list on both sides of the Atlantic.

Were you to boil their live appeal down to one single defining element, it would be the kick drum placed at Mumford’s foot which set most of the songs here to a throbbing heartbeat pulse and ensured the capacity crowd met the music with a wave of bouncing energy, yelled lyrics and applauding hands in the air.

With the four members of the band arranged in a row along the front of the stage and joined on occasion by a horn trio, a fiddler and ultimately support band Dawes to create a communal, Last Waltz-style love-in, that drum underpinned simple folk-rock epics like I Will Wait, Below My Feet and Little Lion Man.

The tone of the show ebbed and flowed through the subtle, whisper-soft four-part harmonies of Timshel, the understated drama of White Blank Page – played under a canopy of lightbulbs and a wall of arcing spotlights – and the effortless pop allure of Lover of the Light, but it was the sheer joyous energy which impressed. As a ferocious encore of Roll Away Your Stone and The Cave gave way to a covered communal finale of With a Little Help From My Friends (after the Joe Cocker version) it was impossible not to feel overwhelmed by the Damascene moment.

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