Cancelled on social media, Mumford & Sons’ Winston Marshall decided to fight back
He sent a tweet and his world exploded. Rather than give in to cancel culture, Mumford & Sons’ Winston Marshall took a stand.
What would induce a man to give up his life as a rock star with one of the world’s biggest bands to become a blogger with a podcast? To answer this intriguing question I’m meeting Winston Marshall, the banjo player from Mumford & Sons. Marshall has a painful story to tell, so he insists on buying a huge bag of biscotti and coffees to keep us going. Once he has finished nattering with the cafe owner and greeting familiar faces from the north London neighbourhood with a “God bless”, he is ready to put his story in print for the first time. “Community is really important to me,” Marshall says in his best trendy vicar voice. “The pandemic forced me to chill and engage with the people around me.”
His new-found chill vibes might also have something to do with the fact he has a lot more time on his hands since leaving Mumford & Sons last year. The phrase “getting cancelled” is thrown around rather loosely, sometimes just meaning blowback for a misguided remark, but the abrupt demise of Marshall’s sparkling career is the real deal. It’s a strange, troubling story that speaks volumes about our culture and the state of free speech in the arts.
Until March 6 last year, Marshall appeared to have it all. At 33, the man behind Mumford & Sons’ distinctive banjo twang had made a fortune, dated A-listers, won Grammys and toured the world with one of the most successful bands of the 2010s, electrifying crowds from Hyde Park to Coachella with hits such as Little Lion Man and I Will Wait. Then he sent a tweet and his world collapsed.
It was a lazy mid-pandemic Saturday afternoon at home and Marshall had just finished reading a book called Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy by Vietnamese American journalist Andy Ngo. Marshall decided to tweet his approval of the book. “Congratulations, @MrAndyNgo. Finally had the time to read your important book. You’re a brave man,” he told his few thousand followers.
As the tweet began to circulate, Marshall faced a groundswell of rage and a bitter tirade of insults. Celebrities and artists joined in too. The electronic punk duo Sleaford Mods called him a “c...” who supported fascism. The comedian Nish Kumar called him a “Nazi”. “Fire the fascist” became a rallying cry for outraged fans flooding the band’s Instagram page. By that Tuesday Marshall had issued a grovelling apology, claiming that he had “come to better understand the pain caused by the book I endorsed” and was planning to take some time away from the band to examine his “blind spots”.
What even was this landmine that had detonated Marshall’s career? Ngo is a niche but controversial figure in American media. The journalist has spent the past few years documenting the activities of Antifa, a nebulous collection of hard-left activists, mostly in the city of Portland, Oregon, where he lives. Antifa have become a hot-button issue in American politics, regularly amplified and attacked by Donald Trump and his conservative allies. To American liberals Ngo is a despised troll who has been filmed hanging out with far-right groups and seeks to undermine the struggle against rising fascism by deliberately antagonising left-wing activists. The Los Angeles Times called sections of his book “truly despicable” for attempting to “downplay” racist murders by white nationalists. To conservatives he’s a brave soul willing to put himself on the line to expose violence and nastiness on the radical left. Antifa, after all, have been accused of laying siege to the courthouse in Portland and causing widespread destruction during the unrest that followed the killing of George Floyd, and Ngo has been kicked, punched and put in hospital for his endeavours. None of this has much at all to do with a banjo player from London, but by praising Ngo’s book Marshall released the online furies.
Despite (or perhaps because of) their immense success, Mumford & Sons have never exactly been cool, long suspected by the cultural left of being privileged wallies who cannibalised folk music for their own enrichment. By outing himself on the “wrong” side of the culture wars, Marshall – alumnus of prestigious London private school St Paul’s, son of Brexit-supporting hedge funder Paul Marshall – appeared to have confirmed the worst of these suspicions. And thanks to the dynamics of a Twitter outrage cycle, the fury of a few thousand keyboard warriors fed into the online media: the band faced a withering assault and management became anxious. It’s not as though questions were being asked in parliament about Marshall’s tweet, but in the close-knit world of transatlantic pop music the band came under intense pressure.
Marshall was dazed by the uproar. “Your initial reaction is, ‘I’m so sorry I’ve offended you’,” he says. “I apologised because I felt like maybe I don’t understand this topic fully, and I need to understand it.” Marshall’s bandmates, including the lead singer Marcus Mumford, who is married to actress Carey Mulligan, were far from thrilled with the political firestorm that threatened to engulf their careers. “They were getting dragged under the bus with me, that was a horrible experience for them,” recalls Marshall, who says his initial instinct was to protect his friends.
In the following weeks, however, he questioned his decision to apologise. “As I continued to research I felt more and more that I’d participated in a lie,” he says. “That really affected my conscience.” Marshall had recently returned to practising Christianity after a long hiatus and he began to worry about the wellbeing of his soul. He returned again and again to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s essay Live Not by Lies, in which the Soviet dissident enjoins his readers into “accepting a life outside the mainstream, courageously defending the truth, and being willing to endure the consequences”.
Marshall struggled to sleep and lost weight as he wrestled with his decision. “Those few months between apologising and quitting were psychologically very traumatising,” he says. The more he thought about it, the more he felt that his initial tweet had been correct: he believed that Ngo was indeed a courageous journalist seeking to expose violence on the far left. Subsequent videos that have appeared of Ngo being attacked in Portland by Antifa members during a counterprotest against the far-right group Proud Boys served to confirm to Marshall that his view was valid.
By June he realised he would have to choose between the band he loved and his own freedom of expression. Fortified by his resurgent Christian faith, he resigned from the band with an impassioned blog post that quickly went viral. “I could remain and continue to self-censor,” he wrote, “but it will erode my sense of integrity.”
So did he jump or was he pushed? The Andy Ngo brouhaha had a curious precursor in 2018 when Marshall and his bandmates Ted Dwane and Ben Lovett posed for a photograph with the conservative academic and pop philosopher Jordan Peterson, known for his controversial views on gender identity and the patriarchy. A furore ensued and Marshall was forced to explain that having a photo taken with someone doesn’t mean “you agree with everything they say”. The incident was eventually smoothed over, but Marshall’s drift to the political right was clearly becoming an issue for the band, which operates in the overwhelmingly left-liberal music world.
At the time of his departure in 2021 the tabloid press reported that Marshall had been “kicked out” of Mumford & Sons by bandmates who were fed up with his politics and the problems it was causing. Marshall disputes that. “I stepped out,” he says. “It was incredibly difficult.”
Whatever your feelings about Mumford & Sons as musicians (they’ve always been a guilty pleasure for me), there’s something profoundly depressing about his departure. Rock’n’roll bands are supposed to break up due to creative differences, drug addiction or illicit affairs, not Twitter storms over obscure American non-fiction. One doesn’t have to be a fan of Ngo or Peterson, nor find their ideological posturing remotely appealing, to be concerned about a culture that ostracises someone who does. “I really didn’t think Antifa would end up being the hill I died on,” Marshall says. “It’s not even a topic I actually care that much about.”
As teenagers it was Marshall who gave Marcus Mumford a helping hand, inviting him to play with his “sleaze country rap” band, Captain Kick and the Cowboy Ramblers. Mumford & Sons formed in London in 2007 and played Glastonbury the following year: they were posh, talented, gently bohemian and cruised the wave of lumberjack hipsterism that washed over Britain from across the Atlantic. Things went interstellar with the album Sigh No More in 2009, which sold in the millions.
Critics, however, were never convinced by these faux-hillbilly private schoolboys, particularly the self-proclaimed “shitkicker” Marshall and his occasionally prattish antics on the banjo. Even he seemed ambivalent at times. “F..k the banjo,” an inebriated Marshall told a reporter in 2014.
In 2012, Babel became the fastest-selling album of the year and Mumford & Sons toured incessantly off the back of it. Marshall, known as “Win” or “Winny” to his mates, appeared to enjoy the lifestyle. “I definitely had a rock’n’roll period,” he reflects. “I love the band, I love the music. Some of those songs I love dearly and part of me is sad that I won’t be playing them again.”
Marshall was rumoured to have dated pop star Katy Perry in 2015; the following year he married Glee actress Dianna Agron in a lavish three-day affair in Morocco. On paper it all sounds fun, but looking back Marshall says something wasn’t right. “I don’t miss fame, I don’t think it was real,” he says. “I was seduced by it. I got pulled into it. Particularly through this recent experience I’ve realised that a lot of my friends in that world weren’t my real friends.” His sobriety became an issue too, as life on the road began to wear. He says he ended up “self-medicating” and regularly taking a “party mix” of hard drugs. “It was all a bit of a blur, really.”
He is now three years clean from booze and drugs and “hasn’t looked back”. Sobriety gives him “clarity and energy”. He endured a painful separation from Agron in 2019 and the pair divorced the following year. Around that time Marshall “came to Christ again”. As the rock star came to more closely resemble a country parson, it is perhaps not surprising that some starchier political views began to emerge. He has railed against cancel culture and liberal bias in corporate media, attacked progressive artists for behaving like a censorious mob and defended both the author JK Rowling and the US podcaster Joe Rogan, who have caused controversy with their views on transgenderism.
Marshall’s more serious side has always been there. His mother, Sabina, is descended from a genteel European Jewish family that was ravaged by the Holocaust. His father, Paul, co-founded the hedge fund Marshall Wace and is worth an estimated $1.1 billion; he’s also a political junkie and was once a staunch Liberal Democrat. Much as his son parted ways with Mumford & Sons over political differences, Marshall senior split with his beloved Lib Dems over Europe and moved right, becoming a committed Brexiteer and donating heavily to the Leave campaign and the Tories.
“I wasn’t that engaged in political and cultural debate growing up,” says Marshall, who skipped university to tour with the band. “But it was in the family nature to discuss all this stuff.” Over time he began to read more. After the Manchester Arena bombing in 2017, Marshall says he “got really deep into Islam” and befriended former Islamist extremist Maajid Nawaz, who he says was one of the few public figures to defend him publicly during the Ngo furore. “Because [the bomb attack] was in the music industry, and it happened in the Manchester Arena where I’d played a few times, it really hit home for me,” Marshall says. “I really wanted to understand why these people became radicalised. Through that I found a higher appreciation for my own cultural background, for the Judeo-Christian tradition and belief system.”
Marshall insists he isn’t a conservative and abhors the far right. These protestations didn’t wash with his critics, though, and his political identity became incompatible with his life as a music star.
Now that the storm has passed, Win 2.0 has emerged. He has founded Hong Kong Link Up, a volunteer organisation that helps to settle political migrants from Hong Kong in Britain. He has also started Marshall Matters, a podcast for The Spectator in which he interviews artists about culture, politics and everything in between. Guests have included conductor Ignat Solzhenitsyn (son of Aleksandr), comedian David Baddiel and American Pie songwriter Don McLean. He has also written articles for The Spectator, lamenting the way artists and creatives seek to silence voices that buck the progressive consensus. In short he has become a culture warrior. “Having made all this huge sacrifice so that I can speak my mind, I might as well f..king do it then,” he says. “It would seem stupid not to.”
Of course Marshall feels the odd pang for his old lifestyle, but insists he doesn’t regret leaving Mumford & Sons. “I got my soul back. I felt I could sleep again, it’s amazing the effect that had on me. It has been completely liberating. I feel like it was the right decision.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, censorship has become his focus. “Obviously artists have a right to boycott. The difference now is that it’s ‘silence him or I’m out’,” he says. “This feels so bizarre and I don’t think it ends well. Musicians’ careers are all about self-expression, so how can they think that’s going to work if they’re not up for people expressing themselves?”
During the Twitter storm Marshall received plenty of private support, including from some world-famous artists, but he noticed almost no one went in to bat for him in public. Meanwhile, many colleagues were quick to stick the knife in. “I was surprised at how other artists condemned me,” he says. “I lost a lot of friends.” Marshall’s hope is that by hosting conversations that demonstrate cordial disagreement and heterodox viewpoints he might help to move the needle towards a more generous public sphere. “If there are more examples of people agreeably disagreeing within the creative industry, things might just chill a bit,” he says.
And what of music? Marshall is writing songs again and working with a “well-known” pop singer on new material. He is relieved to find he hasn’t been “cut off entirely” from the music world. And the band? Mumford & Sons haven’t released anything since his departure. Is Marshall still friends with the boys he spent nearly 15 years with, touring the world? His answer is so boilerplate it must have been agreed by a divorce lawyer: “I really wish them the best, I really want them to succeed and have a great career. I have nothing but good wishes for them personally and in business.” Right then.
Clearly Marshall carries some deep scars. He has built a stimulating new life, suited to someone who doesn’t have to worry much about paying the bills. He’s lively, challenging company, but after 90 minutes I’m left with a lingering sadness. Ultimately Marshall’s career is a casualty of our age of stupidity: of destructive culture warfare, Twitter idiocy and ideological intolerance. “I imagined being in my sixties and still playing with the band,” he says. “That’s one reason it was so hard to leave. I thought we’d always be together.”