Winston Aubrey Aladar Marshall (born 20 December 1987) is an English podcaster, political commentator, and musician. He is the former banjoist and lead guitarist of the folk rock band Mumford & Sons. Prior to this he was in the bluegrass sleaze rap group Captain Kick and the Cowboy Ramblers. With Mumford & Sons, Marshall won multiple awards, including two Grammys and two Brit Awards.
After leaving Mumford & Sons in 2021, Marshall has become a vocal political commentator. He hosted an interview podcast titled Marshall Matters on The Spectator from 2021 to 2023. In 2024, he launched his own politics and culture podcast, The Winston Marshall Show.
Early life and education Winston Aubrey Aladar Marshall was born in Wandsworth, London, on 20 December 1987. He has a sister Giovanna who is a singer and songwriter. His father is Paul Marshall, a British hedge fund manager who co-founded the Marshall Wace hedge fund and is the co-owner of GB News. His mother, Sabina de Balkany, is French and comes from a genteel European Jewish family.
His maternal grandmother was novelist and property developer , who was one of the first female property developers in France, and his maternal great-uncle was the collector . Molly and Robert's family relocated to France after World War II, where they added the nobiliary particle "de" to their name despite that they had not been ennobled. Marshall has said that 13 members of his family "were murdered in [...] the Holocaust" of which his maternal grandmother was a survivor.
Marshall was educated at St Paul's School, an independent school in London. He began playing guitar aged 13, and started a ZZ Top cover group called Gobbler's Knob. He was inspired to play banjo after seeing O Brother, Where Art Thou?, switching to folk music and wearing his hair in dreadlocks. Marshall did not attend university, opting instead to pursue music.
Marshall and future bandmate Marcus Mumford met as teenagers at church, playing worship music at a church group together and in a worship band, with Mumford saying Marshall is "magnetic to be around". Marshall, a multi-instrumentalist, has said that he chose to focus on banjo over guitar because there were fewer banjoists and so it was easier for him to get session jobs.
Musical career Early music In the early 2000s, Marshall was in a bluegrass sleaze rap band called Captain Kick and the Cowboy Ramblers, who had songs such as "Jesse the Gay" and "Country London". Marshall was credited as "Country Winston Driftwood" and played the banjo, guitar, dobro, mandolin, and harmonica. With Captain Kick and the Cowboy Ramblers, Marshall ran a jam night "for teenagers who wanted to drink and play music" at Bosun's Locker, a tiny music club beneath a pasty shop on the King's Road in Fulham. The jam nights attracted a number of musicians who had an affinity for earthy acoustic music, including Noah and the Whale and Laura Marling.
Mumford & Sons
The group Mumford & Sons came together in December 2007 after its four members had already been performing together in various configurations. Co-founder Mumford started songwriting after seeing Marshall's band Captain Kick, and other similar artists, perform while Mumford was at university in Edinburgh; Mumford was struggling at the time and found Marshall's music "a glimpse of salvation", especially as Marshall encouraged him to join them on-stage. The first Mumford & Sons performances took place in 2005 at Marshall's Bosun's Locker jam nights as informal performances of the musicians "like a hoedown". Mumford began performing here, and was joined by Marshall as well as other musician friends with whom he had previously performed, including Ben Lovett and Ted Dwane. As well as together, Dwane, Marshall, and Mumford all performed with Marling's band during the jam sessions. Mumford said that "eventually, Ted [Dwane], Ben [Lovett], and Winston [Marshall] stuck. It wasn't until [they] started writing songs together that [they] realized this was an actual band and not just a singer/songwriter with a couple of mates." Marshall played the banjo, guitars, dobro, and provided backing vocals, for the group, and was often identified as the comic relief of the line-up.
The band performed at Glastonbury Festival in 2008 and released their debut EP later the same year. Marshall and Mumford took jobs in the antique shop run by Marshall's mother in order to save money to produce and record music with Mumford & Sons. They toured with Marling and Johnny Flynn from 2008 to 2009; Marshall was nervous to perform in the United States, knowing that banjo is more common there than in the United Kingdom and their audience would know if he was good or not. In 2009, they cut their tour songs as their first album. The album, Sigh No More, on which Marshall is credited as "Country Winston", was released that year along with the single "Little Lion Man"; written by Mumford, the song was nominated at the 2011 Grammy Awards as Best Rock Song. The band was nominated for the Grammy for Best New Artist, and performed at the ceremony with Bob Dylan and the Avett Brothers. Sigh No More won the Brit Award for British Album of the Year in 2011.
The album was influenced by the music of Fleet Foxes, the Avett Brothers, Kings of Leon and Gomez; for Pitchfork, Stephen Deusner wrote that the band made this clear by pushing their musical references "with a salesman's insistence." It was released to minimal attention but steadily garnered more positive reviews, and while Deusner criticized the album as derivative, he was impressed that "there are some unexpected textures, mostly courtesy of some guy calling himself Country Winston playing banjo and dobro." The success of the bluegrass banjo-led album placed Mumford & Sons as the breakout of nu-folk music. They followed the album with near-constant touring, cementing their presence, though concert reviews were also mixed, criticizing the repetitiveness of the samey setlist while acknowledging the crowd's enjoyment. Chris Richards of The Washington Post added that the musicians' stage presence, particularly Marshall "thrusting his pelvis like a bluegrass Rick James", was irritating.
In 2010, Mumford & Sons were the band and back-up for Marling's album I Speak Because I Can and released a joint EP with Marling and Indian group Dharohar Project. Self-titled with all three acts' names, it saw generally warm reviews that praised Marshall's dueling-banjo additions to songs. The group continued to tour extensively, and released their second album, Babel, which had a more rock sound, in 2012 to mixed reviews. Marshall provided lead vocals for the song "For Those Below". In the same year, Mumford & Sons contributed songs to two films: "The Enemy" for Wuthering Heights and "Learn Me Right" with Birdy for the soundtrack of the Pixar film Brave.
Babel became the quickest-selling album of the year, and the growing success of Mumford & Sons led to more detraction, with the band, and its banjo specifically, often criticized as inauthentic; Marshall told The Guardian that he disagreed, saying they are authentic because they play music that they enjoy and at which they are good. The band embraced other criticisms, creating a tongue-in-cheek music video for single "Hopeless Wanderer", parodying their own image. In it, Marshall was portrayed by Jason Bateman. With Babel, Marshall shed his "Country Winston" name, saying he had outgrown it (as a holdover from Captain Kick) and had become disillusioned towards country music; when he began playing the genre he associated it with bluegrass music, and then found that he did not like the country music he heard in the United States. At the same time, he expressed distaste towards the banjo and said that he does not really know how to play it and had been told by his hero Jerry Douglas to not learn, quoting Douglas saying: "The reason that it's interesting what you do is that you have no f***ing idea what you're doing!" Babel won the Grammy for Album of the Year in 2013, with the band being awarded the Brit Award for British Group the same year. They were also honored with the Ivor Novello Award for International Achievement in 2014.
The band went on hiatus in 2013, but contributed to a compilation album by Idris Elba released in 2014, re-recording their song "Home" with Thandiswa Mazwai. They returned in 2015 with the album Wilder Mind, on which Marshall was credited as "WN5TN". There is no banjo on Wilder Mind, an electronic rock album that was influenced by the National; Aaron Dessner was a producer. Though his bandmates disagreed, Marshall said that they changed the sound because they did not enjoy touring so much with a limited repertoire. However, he also said that he had warmed to the banjo again after time away from having to play it, and used it on the band's 2015 tour. The album received mediocre reviews, with critics in disagreement on whether losing the banjos improved the band or not; The Guardian wrote that it "was far less polarising" than their first two albums, due to being "numbingly boring" and lacking the band's USP. The next year they released an EP, Johannesburg, with African artists Baaba Maal, Beatenberg and the Very Best; they had been approached to do the project after Marshall worked with Maal on other music. The EP does not use the banjo. Marshall sang lead vocals on the song "Fool You've Landed".
Mumford & Sons then worked on their fourth album, Delta, which was released in 2018. The album uses banjo again, but in non-folk ways. Marshall said that Delta: "does sound to me like the culmination of 10 years' work. I'm proud of it for that". The music draws more on their adult life experiences than their previous work, with the Evening Standard noting that during its creation Marshall got married but also experienced depression. Marshall said that since the album was not their first and would not be their last, they felt freedom to branch out in sound. He started writing some of the songs on Delta in Nashville, where Agron was filming a movie and they became engaged. Lovett said Marshall "was throwing these pretty left-field sounds out of these writing sessions in Nashville"; Marshall was encouraged by sound engineer Garrett Miller to try more synthesized music, resulting in "Picture You", and composed the first verse and the falsetto hook of "Woman" there. He also wrote "Wild Heart", which was recorded so quickly he did not actually perform on the track on the album. Spin noted the three songs were the more powerful of the album's stripped-back songs.
Marshall took the early components of "Woman" to his bandmates in Brooklyn, and Lovett said of the moment: "[it] just felt like something that was very, very different, but also felt really good. Maybe that was a moment that we felt unshackled by anything that we had done previously." Marshall said that despite the song title, "Woman" is about the love shared by the couple. It is an R&B indie song, with Mumford saying they were influenced by Jai Paul; Marshall used a five-string cello banjo on it, disguising the banjo sound, with three banjo tracks layered. Rolling Stone felt that "Picture You" and "Woman" sounded like Khalid songs; The Observer compared them to Coldplay songs. The album received sub-par reviews.
With Mumford & Sons, Marshall won multiple awards, including two Grammys and two Brit Awards.