The singer’s unflinchingly honest debut solo album, Self-Titled, addresses the sexual abuse he experienced as a child. He talks about shame, addiction and redemption – and meeting the pope
Marcus Mumford says he doesn’t actually remember writing Cannibal, the extraordinary song that opens his debut solo album, Self-Titled. But he’s very clear about the circumstances leading up to writing it. They began with a collapse into alcohol addiction and binge-eating towards the end of the last Mumford & Sons tour in 2019. “When you’re travelling all the time, you’re able to convince yourself of anything, to make excuses not to take responsibility,” he says. “Oh, I’m on my own, so I can have a few drinks in my room,” or “I can have a few pints of ice-cream in my room because I’m medicating loneliness, or shame, or whatever it is.”
Then there was a period where “people around me said: ‘You’ve got to figure this out, mate,’ but they didn’t know what the problem was, and neither did I”. It was followed by a time when Mumford went into trauma therapy and a period when he didn’t want to write songs at all: he was “in denial about being an artist, when I’d only hang around with, like, farmers or estate agents”.
