If you took away the backdrop — the grandiose packed-to-the-gills Greek Theatre on a lusciously warm Friday evening, the ecstatic audience bobbing to the pulsing strobe of crimson light, the shrieks of teenage girls and 40-year-old men — and put Mumford & Sons on a random street corner in downtown Berkeley, most passersby probably wouldn’t even blink an eye.
Clad in hipster-hobo garb, sporting scraggly beards and untamed hair, the exuberant four-piece folk-rockers outfit fit the wet-behind-the-ears street busker image to a tee.
But since their humble Bay Area debut a mere five years ago, when they opened for the openers at San Francisco’s tiny Cafe Du Nord, the scrappy collection of young Londoners — whose three shows at the Greek last week sold out in minutes — have experienced what can only be described as a meteoric rise to fame.
Mumford & Sons have only two albums under their belt. Never mind that the first went multi-platinum and the second got a Grammy in 2012 for Album of the Year — the fact of the matter is that the group still doesn’t have a ton of numbers to its name. It’s a fact that all but guaranteed in the course of a 1 hour 45 minute set, they’d perform just about every song in their arsenal.
Unpredictable, it was not. But to Friday’s doting crowd who came to soak up every last harmony, banjo roll, kick drum beat, and world-weary romantic declaration that define the band’s anthemic ballads, the finite playlist — under 20 songs in all — seemed just about perfect. The show was full of greatest hits from a band that only has greatest hits.
