By After multiple hours braving the horrendous rain and wind, the wave of fans eventually flooded into what could possibly be one of the best concerts you could ever attend.
BRITs Critic’s Choice Award 2016 winner, Jack Garratt, kicked off the night and to be quite honest I was slightly disappointed. Let me explain – the majestically bearded Jack Garratt wasn’t really the disappointment, although he did only play songs you could’ve already listened to from his EPs (‘Synesthesiac’ and ‘Remnants’) and Soundcloud account but this is understandable as his debut album is released early 2016 so he needs to keep some stuff hidden. The disappointment to the night was the audience; the majority of the standing didn’t even arrive until after Jack Garratt’s heavy bass-filled set which in my opinion is disrespectful and just downright stupid in all honesty. On the other hand, the audience who were there didn’t move…at all! Even though there were a couple of technical difficulties and awkward moments Jack Garratt did pretty well as an opening act.
Around 30 minutes after Garratt finished his moment, the infamous Mumford began performing and all I can say is wow!
Mumford & Sons opened their 22 track long with the hit ‘Snake Eyes’ from their most recent album, ‘Wilder Mind’, still the crowd was motionless – this is understandable however as ‘Wilder Mind’ wasn’t liked by as many fans as it should have been due to its rockiness. The once stationary audience was fired into a roar of energy when the second and third track of the night were Mumford classics ‘Babel’ and ‘Little Lion Man’ – the mass of fans seemed to heavily appreciate this.
When I first sat down and viewed the staging I was disheartened as it didn’t seem like there was much to it; I was quickly disproven. The staging consisted of a ton of strobe lights, lasers and fireworks. During the second song, the 4 metal rigging beams extruding from the roof of the stage displayed around 16 Mumford & Sons themed flags that hung from it. There was also, what appeared to be, a collection individual light bulbs that were lowered from each beam for many of the songs to create different sequences and patterns to perfectly match the music – these shown in various different colours. The staging as a whole had a very festivalesque vibe to it.
The band performed a range of tracks from all albums, including; ‘Just Smoke’, ‘The Cave’, ‘Ghosts That We Knew’ and ‘Ditmas’. They also performed ‘Whispers in the Dark’ for the first time since 2013.
After performing 17 tracks, bearing in mind that towards the end of this section Marcus Mumford (lead vocals, drums and lead guitar) joined everyone in standing whilst singing and appeared to be exhausted, the band took to the B-stage for an intimately captivating section of the night.
The B-stage consisted of the 4 of them all stood around one mic on a small and low, square, platform with just a couple of guitars – here they performed ‘Timshel’ and ‘Cold Arms’. 
To round off the night, the men of Mumford & Sons took to the main stage one final time for an encore of: ‘Hot gates’, a satisfyingly surprising cover of Bruce Springsteen’s ‘I’m on Fire’ and ‘The Wolf’. One thing that bewildered me is the fact that throughout the gig they didn’t perform the title track of the album that the tour is named after (‘Wilder Mind’), however, Marcus did spare a good 5 minutes to talk about football.
Overall, I’d recommend anyone to go see them if they have the chance, it will be an utterly mind-blowing moment of a lifetime that you would never regret.
