30 • The Sunday Times Magazine
hat 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,
whom you might know as the banjo player
from Mumford & Sons, for coffee in
Islington, north London.
Marshall has a painful story to tell, so
he insists on buying a huge bag of biscotti
and coffees to keep us going. “Have you
tried Nascondini,” he inquires. I have not.
“They’re delicious,” he says, correctly.
Once he has finished nattering with the
café owner and greeting familiar faces from
the 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 community vibes
might also have something to do with the
fact he has a lot more time on his hands since
leaving Mumford & Sons last summer. 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 and 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 the 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
supports 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 causedby 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 ownWinston Marshall, 34, toured the world as a founding member of the
hugely successful folk rock band Mumford & SonsThe tweet that lit the fuse,
praising Andy Ngo, a US
journalist critical of the
Antifa movement