Who would have thought that donning a tweed waistcoat and strumming a few banjos would be the secret to success? For rather astonishingly, country bumpkins Mumford and Sons can now claim to be one of the world’s biggest bands with the news that they are heading for rock music’s highestt first week sales on the Billboard chart in four years.
The nu-folk quartet are on course to sell a staggering 600,000 copies of their second album, ‘Babel,’ in just seven days. That’s almost twice as many as Justin Bieber’s ‘Believe’ shifted earlier this year. Whilst the only rock group to surpass that number in recent years was AC/DC with ‘Black Ice’ back in 2008.
The follow-up to ‘Sigh No More’ will also top the UK charts on Sunday after it sold over 90,000 copies on just Monday alone. To put that into context, last week’s chart-topper, The Killers’ ‘Battle Born,’ only sold 4,000 more across the whole week.
Multi-instrumentalist Ted Dwane recently told the NME that he never expected the band to achieve such colossal success:
“Number Two was the best we got with ‘Sigh No More’ so it would be amazing. Obviously no-one’s going to wish against a Number One record but I know Green Day and Muse have albums out and they’re pretty big hitters.
“If you told me in the ’90s that I’d be in a chart battle with Green Day, I probably would have just laughed at you.”
You and everyone else, Ted!
