The Maccabees

‘Did Maxim used to have a bit in the back where you could buy fake IDs?’ lead singer Orlando asks me, as he tells me about the band’s teenage boozing. A lot of his mates – including Maccabees bassist, Rupert  – apparently secured their passport to oblivion via the back pages of our esteemed mag, and the band giddily spent their childhood buying beers down the off licence and guzzling them on Clapham Common.

We’re not on the Common today, but instead tucked away in a London Bridge pub, inhabited by a few Guinness-slurping men and a randomly placed model skeleton. The pub – the Britannia – rather impressively hosts over 100 different whiskies, but after a hard day’s rehearsing in a nearby studio, the boys are only interested in Coronas, a purchase that has swiftly prompted this Prove-It-Card based exchange.

 ‘When the [off licence] man asked what you did’, Orlando continues fiddling with his baseball cap. ’You always said you were at university. But you’d never heard of any, so you just made one up. Wandsworth University, Clapham Common University – I was a student at all of them!’

Though The Maccabees (guitarist brothers Felix and Hugo and new drummer Sam complete the line-up) did eventually go to university – all of them to Brighton – only Orlando finished his course, and the others just used their student loans to rehearse until the band got signed. It is there that they’ve spent the last four years, releasing debut album Colour In It in 2007 and cultivating a huge fan base. As they release their anticipated follow-up Wall Of Arms, however, the band tell me they’re now ‘migrating back’ to London.

‘We’ve exhausted every place there is in Brighton,’ says Hugo. ‘I can’t stand going out anywhere now.’ I ask if this is because they constantly get hassled by female fans, but the entire band bursts into sheepish laughter. ‘We don’t get hassled by fans at all!’ explains Felix despite his Zach Braff charm. ‘We’re not really that kind of band.’

So what kind of band are they? They have the poshest sounding names in rock (unbelievably, their former drummer was called Robert Dylan Thomas), they don’t worry about how they look, and tell me they would never play a gig ‘out of their faces’ out of respect to their fans. The answer: a very committed one. Spending almost every day with each other, The Maccabees live and breathe music, listening to as many different artists as they can (The Animal Collective, Orange Juice and Public Enemy are current favourites), and going round each other’s houses, thrashing out new and bizarre tunes.

The new record is certainly testament to that intensity, though looking through the song titles (‘Wall of Arms’, ‘Bag of Bones’…) it looks suspiciously like the soundtrack to a Sam Raimi horror film. ‘Don’t worry, it’s not about a load of arms chopped up!’ Sam says of the title track. ‘No, it’s an embracing thing,’ Orlando adds. ‘A wall is something that prevents stuff or holds something up or holds something in. A wall of arms is like imagining you have lots of people supporting you.’

This kind of positivity permeates the entire album – even the wonderfully dark, ‘Kind Words’ – and there is real warmth from all of them that comes over both in person and when they perform. ‘Our shows are really spirited events,’ agrees Felix. ‘There’s a real affinity with us and the crowd.’ I remind him about the time I saw them play – when he was throwing up before going on stage at the Great Escape festival. ‘Oh yeah, I went through a faze of throwing up before and after gigs,’ he confirms. ‘A lot of that stuff tends to happen to me.’ Excitably, Rupert pipes up, ‘The biggest London gig we’ve ever headlined [at the Camden Roundhouse] Felix got an infected fingernail. And just before the gig he had to get a nurse with a needle to try and pop it out…’ ‘Yeah, I fainted,’ says Felix. ‘A proper Carry On-style faint, ten minutes before we were due on stage.’ ‘We were all in the dressing room trying to get ready,’ Hugo continues the story. ‘And he was lying on the floor with two paramedics with needles in his hands. We were like, ‘Are we still going on in five minutes?’ And our manager was like, ‘Yeah, you’re still going on!’ ‘I don’t know if I played very well,’ Felix concludes. ‘But the gig was brilliant.’

As they continue their Wall Of Arms promotional tour – infection free – they tell me they’ve spent a lot of their time offstage watching loads of different comedy, notably American Office, though Felix’s attempts to steer them towards Seinfield have fallen on deaf ears. ‘I can’t get these lot into it. If you watch enough of Seinfield you realise it’s the best thing ever. It’s a hundred times better than Curb Your Enthusiasm. The problem is that because they’re wearing these blue jeans, up to their waist, you look at it and think, “I shouldn’t be watching this.” But you should – it’s incredible.’

When I ask them if they’re into their football, they look sheepish once more. ‘It’s fair to say we don’t pride ourselves on our sporting prowess,’ band spokesman Felix chips in once more (Rupert played a bit of rugby, and Orlando’s cross country career was short-lived when he ran the wrong way round the course and ‘thought he’d won.’) So, we shouldn’t expect them to appear in an inter-band football tournament any time soon?

‘Actually,’ Rupert says proudly. ‘We did that in Brighton and won the inter-band football tournament!’ ‘Really? What other bands were playing?’ I ask. Felix: ‘There were no other bands.’ ‘It was a load of retired bouncers on sand,’ Orlando adds. ‘The next day for MTV’, continues Felix, ‘we played The Enemy in Beach Football Brighton and they beat us 4-0. If that wasn’t humiliating enough, they edited it so that it looked even worse. I did a free kick that went into the sea. And they paused it and drew a picture of the moon, and had the ball going over it.’ ‘You know it’s bad when they start adding animation’, says Orlando deadpan. ‘That’s the end,’  ‘Yeah, but where are The Enemy now eh?’ exclaims Felix jokingly. ‘Oh yeah, shit, way more successful than we are…’

This may currently be true commercially, but based on the strength of Wall Of Arms and the huge charisma of the band, that is massively set to change, and their indie counterparts will be left trailing in their 5-a-side football pitch dust.