Twenty years ago, The Maccabees sprang from the chaotic 00s. When digital downloads were just beginning, and naivety ran rampant throughout the music biz, the new generation of UK indie rockers careened their way up and down motorways on package tours, clad in tight jeans, striped shirts and fringes. Relishing in the endless youthful fervour, it was an all-or-nothing time in which the South London quintet thrived.
Over 10 years and four albums – including a Number One – and countless tours, they established themselves in the hearts of indie lovers across the country. But as with all good things, there came an eventual waving-off at Alexandra Palace in 2017, which marked the end of The Maccabees. As they left the stage for the last time, parting ways after wanting to go out on the highest highs – which included a headline set at 2016’s Latitude festival – in this moment’s wake, the five-piece left an ambitious project that defined them for over a decade.
That was, until last year, when rumours of their reunion surfaced. In an interview in 2024, they revealed that at guitarist Hugo White’s wedding, the band had briefly got back together (with a little help from fellow 00s scenesters Florence Welch and Adele). But it wasn’t until the offer came through to raise those high-highs to a headlining day at London festival All Points East that the group felt the time was right to embark on a new chapter. With additional warm-up dates also announced – as well as tenth-anniversary celebrations for their last album, ‘Marks To Prove It’ – 2025 finds The Maccabees in a renewed state. Albeit, one focused on getting to grips with the past.
“Recently, Instagram has been showing me various people bringing out little zines or collections of photographs from our early era of indie-rock and the club nights,” vocalist Orlando Weeks starts. He’s chatting to Dork from a nondescript room at a friend’s house in the UK, although he currently lives in Lisbon with his family. “I remember thinking at the time how this isn’t as photogenic as all the old punk books or all the new wave. And now, seeing them this far detached, they look great; they photographed well. But at the time, it didn’t feel like it would. Maybe you need enough separation for it to build a bit of potency of some reflection. This kind of survival in anything is impressive, isn’t it?”
This line of thinking has been key to The Maccabees getting the band back together. It’s a fruitful time for celebration, and with each member having undertaken various projects – Orlando’s various art and musical outfits, as well as his books; guitarist and vocalist Felix White’s cricket podcasts, his outing with Maccabees co-founder and brother Hugo in 86TVs, his book and founding record label Yala! Records; drummer Sam Doyle embarking on a career as a filmmaker; bassist Rupert Jarvis’ stint touring with The Vaccines while focusing on family life; Hugo working alongside Felix in 86TVs and also turning his hand to production on projects with the likes of Jessie Ware, Jamie T, and Matt Maltese – it’s safe to say this reunion is not exactly set to fill a gaping hole in their lives. This is an enterprise of love. “I really want to do some gigs on this scale and with the headspace I have now,” Orlando says. “Just to see what that’s like. I think it might be a great pleasure.”
When it came to picking up the Maccabees’ mantle again, for Felix, it was natural. “It’s almost like we’ve done it so much it’s printed in your body, and inside your muscle memory, inside your system, forever. When you play with people for a long time, you have a language between you that only you use. There’s an understanding about music, especially because none of us have got technical musical training or anything like that.
“All the stuff that we learned from our teens to our mid-30s, all the phrases we used to how to make music and how things should sound and how you do it, we’d invented between all of us,” he explains. “So there’s a lot of tension and release dynamics in Maccabees, like high energy verses, atmospherics, etc., which we’d written the code ourselves. There’s a certain way that you communicate with each other that is understood, but it’s impossible to do with anyone else because they’ve grown up with music in a different way. So there is something quite grounding about reconnecting with that and being like, Oh, this is the most natural way to play music for me is inside this situation.”
After his period in a more focused and lighter sonic soundscape, re-entering The Maccabees fray offered a rejuvenation for Orlando. “To come back in and hear early songs played really, really fast, really loud, being in that particular kind of rehearsal environment in terms of sheer volume and speed and all of that kind of stuff is really exciting,” he says.
“I was nervous about playing those songs the first time, and it not feeling good or being weird, but I think it was completely natural,” Felix admits. “It was almost spooky how quickly it all felt tight,” Orlando confirms.
“The end of Macs didn’t mean that I didn’t still love making stuff and writing songs”
Reflecting on the band’s end now, beaming in from his home rehearsal room, surrounded by guitars and artwork, among other memorabilia, Felix ponders the mythos of the Maccabees’ story. “It’s so strange because as soon as The Maccabees ended, it’s almost like it became something else in people’s minds and in my head. It was so weird.” Even in his undertaking at Yala!, when people asked for his advice or how his experience in a band could help burgeoning young acts, Felix came up blank. “I couldn’t even remember,” he chuckles. “It was almost like you became a different person for a second. I was completely detached from who that was or what that was. You start thinking about it like you think about The Smiths or whatever, even though it’s your band.”
For Orlando, he’s wearing rose-tinted specs for the early days, back when they were a scrappy outfit creating gig posters and leaving them in every pub they could find to get legs through the doors. Not to mention calling in favours with their art school pals to help make their early music videos. “All that optimism and the entrepreneurial mishmash of it, I really loved,” Orlando recalls. “And I didn’t have any benchmarks to hold it to. I wasn’t savvy enough to have comparative anxiety; it was just, we’re doing this thing, and that’s it. That was great.”
Felix has particularly fond memories of hitting the road. “Everyone’s on a roll, everything’s clicking, and you’ve been on tour for months. You’re going from one gig to another, and everyone’s drunk. Someone’s getting crowd surfed from one side of the bus to the other, or tying all the bunk beds up like The Crystal Maze, with wire and stuff, and having to go through them like obstacle courses while you’re driving in the night going through Germany. That’s the sort of stuff I remember and think, ‘Wow, that was so chaotic and so fun’.”
The Maccabees’ output has come to embody their growth. Establishing their inherent musical language was just as key as getting to grips with life as young lads barreling around in vans and buses chasing their hard-worn ambitions to seasoned musos. So when it all disappeared, they were surprised by who they became.
There was once a time in interviews they’d ruminate on the possibility of what would happen if the band no longer existed. Felix thought, “If I weren’t in the Maccabees, I’d just be in another band, because blah, blah, blah, that’s what I do,” he says, with an air of embarrassment. But after leaving the Ally Pally stage, he found himself undertaking everything but another band. “I was freaked out when the Maccabees ended,” he admits. “Being in another band, I’d just be trying to be in The Maccabees again, so I didn’t have any idea what that band would sound like or what it would be. So I ended up doing 100 different things that were not being in a band to sort of go around that. It’s like I didn’t know what I’d be trying to achieve with any other people. It took a long time to work that out inside my head.”
Orlando is the one who dove headfirst into exploring his individual artistic musical output. “I think that is partly to do with realising that there are so many aspects of this that I would never want to walk away from and that the end of Macs didn’t mean that I didn’t still love making stuff and writing songs.” What Orlando needed to do at this time was to keep things measured. That decade of cavalier youth took its toll on him. So, his first project had to be limited to a time and place. In this case, a Christmas book with an accompanying soundtrack. Obviously.
“‘The Gritterman’ was a good attempt to do something that didn’t have to be toured, because I didn’t want to do that,” he admits. “And I thought, well, Christmas comes, but once a year, so I can’t do that all year, right?” It wasn’t long before he fell back into old ways, mostly. With the imminent birth of his son, he wanted to scrapbook the event in the best way he knew how with 2020’s debut solo outing, ‘A Quickening’.
While these old habits may have reared up for Weeks, they weren’t a part of his decision-making in reuniting the band. “It felt like a good time. The way that we, particularly Fee and Hugo and me, and Sam and Ru as well, just the easiness of our being in each other’s company, had reached a point where it felt like this could work.”
Felix would bounce the idea off other people, concerned if it was a good idea or if the past should stay in the past. “Most people said, ‘Well, you know, it’s family. It’s your family, isn’t it?’ And that to a degree, is true,” he says. The Maccabees is an intrinsic part of their lives and individual stories. “It’s always going to be inseparable to us as people what we did in that period. So to be able to reconcile and make it a positive thing and see if it’s something we can wear now feels really exciting to me.”
The Maccabees’ way of charming their way into the hearts of generations of UK indie lovers can’t be understated. Throughout their time, they established a run of four albums, each with an individual approach. After their franticly twee debut ‘Colour It In’ in 2007 and the intrinsically darker-edged 2009 follow-up ‘Wall Of Arms’, the following two albums – 2012’s ‘Given To The Wild’ and 2015’s ‘Marks To Prove It’ – established a more studious band who left the fray of those early days behind in the quest for something bigger and better.
Expanding from a rag-tag outfit to a studiously fleshed-out group, while often bands will strike gold on their debut and then continue to mine this one idea for the foreseeable, The Maccabees, as Felix puts it, “It’s almost like I can see us going up a ladder as we go through each record, which I think is something unique about the Maccabees’ work.”
“The third and fourth Maccabees records have really lasted. I think they’re unique in that most things I like about music, especially guitar music, are in those third and fourth records. I would happily play them to anyone and be like, ‘That’s my band’,” Felix beams.
“Every single album had a very specific, detailed aesthetic, whether it was accidental or otherwise,” Felix reckons. “And I think that was the really cool thing about when I look back on the Maccabees, every single moment had encapsulated a period. You can tell what age we are and what we’re thinking about. You can see what we’re absorbing, culturally or otherwise. It’s really clear, and I think those bumps were mirrored with the people listening to it.”
Orlando has an affinity for the time around the band’s third album, ‘Given To The Wild’. It was a time when he felt like he’d figured out what he wanted to do as a singer. “The songs we’d written felt markedly more ambitious and mature,” he says. “And where I was trying to push myself, and us, was landing with everyone else, and our skill set and understanding of production… I was impressed by us and by everyone that was doing it.
“There’s a thing that happens if you’re making something if you can hear it and not hear yourself in it; that’s so exciting because you’re not picking it apart,” Orlando continues. “You’re not in a state of anxious introspection; you’re just hearing it. And there were a few moments that I had that.”
As for how this catalogue suits them now, it would seem the passage of time has gifted the Maccabees lads a bright outlook. “It’s all lasted amazingly well,” Felix says. “But the early music, it’s interesting seeing ‘Land being an older person, singing the music that he wrote when he was 19 or whatever because they have a lot of pathos. They’re really beautiful words, but to hear him… It’s almost like they were waiting for him to be older to be sung, not properly, but it’s like they’ve been in a holding pen to be sung properly by an older man, if that makes any sense, because they’re just beautiful.”
They’re still reckoning with how they’re wearing this iteration of The Maccabees. “I think that’s a really good way of putting it because I think that’s what we’re sort of working out, like, how does it fit us now?” Felix ponders. “Because we’re not those people anymore. Well, I certainly fucking hope I’m not gonna be crowd surfing on a moving bus at 40 years old!”
The day the Maccabees left the stage for the last time, they expunged all the stickiness and heft that had caused the group to no longer feel as necessary and urgent as it once did. A part of this was Orlando’s anxiety towards the end. “The last few years of Macs gigs I was really struggling with stage fright,” Orlando reveals. “I was not enjoying it very much, and I wasn’t enjoying touring, and I felt pretty knackered.”
Looking back now, Felix had an inkling but not to the degree that has since come to light. With his friend going through his own ordeal, Felix found himself retreating into his own way of combatting it, attempting to balance out the band’s energy. “We got a bit almost caricatured each way, a tiny bit. I do look back on that and think I could have stopped. It’s that avoiding an anxious thing you often hear about in relationships, when one person goes that way, the other person goes further to sort of compensate. So, when I think about that, I think, yeah, I could have been a bit more aware or open, but you just aren’t at 20 or whatever. You just don’t do those things.” Felix says.
For Orlando, lessons learned may be hard worn, but he sees that as an essential part of the Maccabees’ journey. Harking back to those days when things were unstoppably and addictively chaotic in the name of being a band, “A big part of what made Macs what it was was the all or nothingness of it, and the big part of what was claustrophobic was the all or nothingness. So if I told my younger self that there is a world beyond Maccabees, then that would deflate what made Maccabees interesting and the entire density and of all of that was a big part of why things worked. The friction was a major – and I don’t mean negatively – it’s just the necessity of the butting of heads to make the songs and the music and the dynamic and everything, that was that’s why I think it worked. So you couldn’t take that out of it,” he muses.
The future is currently a full-stop after their All Points East show. Retreading their footsteps is an attractive prospect, but the world has since moved on, things have changed. Being a band 20 or even 10 years ago held different challenges to what they’d face now if they were to commit to a Maccabees future with new material. “It was such another world that when our last album came out, we genuinely had discussions for like a week about whether we should post that the album was out on our Instagram page,” Felix laughs. “Or is that a bit uncool?”
But this freeform return of theirs, one not bound by any routines or cycles, is fun for that very reason. Exploring outside of this full-stop is not out of the conversation, but at the same time, things are different. “There’s a bit of a beginning, middle and end to this; we have those shows, and then that’s it,” Orlando muses, “and we’ll see. Maybe that’s not the end, but there’s not the never-ending, vanishing horizon of being in a band that’s in the various cycles. So there is less of that potential claustrophobia.”
While those early years were breakneck, filled with youthful vigour, now, The Maccabees are the elder statesmen relishing in the pressure-free environment they now find themselves in. “To try and recreate that kind of time would sully it,” Orlando ends. “It’s an important part of the weave that is our relationship, but we’re not all desperate to get hammered on a bus again.”
Taken from the June 2025 issue of Dork. The Maccabees play All Points East on 24th August, with Bombay Bicycle Club (Special Guests), Dry Cleaning, The Cribs, Nilüfer Yanya, The Murder Capital, Divorce, Prima Queen and more.
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