Marcus Mumford has a back up career plan lined up.
The British musician heads up band Mumford & Sons, whose albums have topped charts around the world.
Despite the band’s success, including two Grammy Awards, Marcus may be heading to the classroom at some stage. Or maybe you’ll see him tending to the land in the not too distant future.
‘Yes, I’m still surprised. I’m still not convinced this is my job. I’ve still got contingency plans at the back of my head, before every tour, about becoming a teacher or a farmer," he admitted to British magazine The Big Issue.
"I definitely have some sort of arrested development in terms of my psychology in terms of my career, where I still sort of feel like this is going to stop tomorrow.’
Luckily Mumford & Sons are still drawing in the crowds and their third album Wilder Mind, released in May, hit the number one spot in the UK, America, Australia and Canada, among other countries.
While their records continue to fly off shelves, one thing you’ll never catch the band doing is lending their tracks to adverts – even if that means turning down eye watering sums of money.
‘If there’s no work involved, we’re not up for it. We want to earn it,’ bassist Ted Dwane outlined. ‘So we’re not up for taking a song we’ve written and giving it to Nokia and getting a million quid. That doesn’t feel good… There’s too much reward for really no effort.’
Winston Marshall and Ben Lovett make up the quartet, and the four men are all on the same wave length when it comes to how they work.
‘We call bulls**t on each other whenever there’s a sniff of it. So if one of us writes something musically that we know is not quite honest, or if someone is interested in doing something for the wrong reasons, like…’ Ben trailed off.
‘Well, it’s money, basically, isn’t it? Sometimes people do things for money," Ted interjected.