Sharleen Spiteri speaks of delight after receiving honorary degree
Following the special commemoration day ceremony, which marked the foundation of the university, Spiteri, originally from Bellshill, North Lanarkshire, said it was 'emotional' to have received such recognition for her career in music, and said she and her sister wished their mother could have been there to witness the occasion.
She told the PA News Agency: 'When I got the call, the first thing I did was phone my sister, Corrine, up and said, 'you will never believe this' and both us us were wishing my mum could have been here to see it, which makes it really special.
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'In the moment, you're sitting in there and you're surrounded by the other honoraries and you listen to their stories.
'You're listening to what they've done and it gets really emotional because you're thinking about all the people that got you here.
She added: 'It takes a lot of people to allow you to support you and to be successful. You don't start successful, nobody does.'
The band's current line-up, consists of Spiteri, Johnny McElhone (bass, guitar, keyboards); Ally McErlaine (guitar); Eddie Campbell (keyboards); Tony McGovern (guitar, backing vocals); and Cat Myers (drums).
Next year, the band marks 40 years together, and Spiteri said she had no idea the group would have ever become as famous as they are now.
Sharleen Spiteri (Image: Sharleen Spiteri) She said: 'Honest to god, I thought if I could just write one hit record, I'd be happy.
'Johnny McElhone and I thought that as the two of us sat there in a spare room, literally recording on a four-track, writing I Don't Want A Lover and we thought, 'we can write one song'.
'He had already been in successful bands before, he'd already written a few hit records, so I feel that I probably had a better chance than a lot of people.'
Asked if the band has any plans to mark the 40th anniversary, Spiteri said: 'Well, if I tell you, then you know about it, don't you? It's what you don't know about you'll have to wait and see.
'We've got a big summer this year, we've got 30 festivals around the world. So we're doing that and I'm actually heading off now to literally get back on the tour bus.'
(left to right) Broadcaster Kirsty Young receives a Doctor of the University (DUniv), musician Sharleen Spiteri receives a Doctor of Music (DMus) and author and journalist Sally Magnusson receives a Doctor of the University (DUniv) from the University of Glasgow (Image: Jane Barlow/PA Wire) Asked what advice she would offer any young, aspiring musicians hoping to get into the industry, she joked: 'Don't listen to people like me.'
Also honoured, Kirsty Young spent 35 years working as a broadcaster across a number of TV and radio outlets, including the BBC, STV, Channel 5 and ITV.
She was made an Honorary Doctor for her services to her industry, and said it means a 'huge amount' to her.
She told the PA News Agency: 'The thing about this honorary degree is it genuinely, deeply feels like an honour.'
She added: 'My mother is a Glaswegian, my grandparents and great grandparents were Glaswegian, so to be in this great city and receive this award means a huge amount.'
Asked what advice she would offer those who want to work in broadcasting, she said: 'I think the best thing you can do if you're interested in breaking into broadcasting is become a kind of citizen journalist.
'You've got it all in your hands – when I started I was packing camera cases for camera men, there were no camera women in those days or female sound recorders.
'I was labelling tapes, it was a very big, cumbersome operation, but anybody who is at university now will know that it can just be them and their phone or a little camera and they can make news and they can upload it to YouTube and do their own thing.
'So, I would say, get experience by getting the on-air miles under your belt by doing that, and badger organisations that you want to work for. It's a really hard game and it's harder than ever now because people aren't used to paying for content.
'Stick at it, it's a hard game, but it will give you a fantastically interesting life, and you will have access to people and places that most people never get to see or speak to so it's really worth it.'
Professor Sir John Curtice, who was awarded an honorary doctorate of letters, said: 'It's a great delight to receive an honorary degree from the university. It is a rare accolade, and I appreciate the university for having awarded it to me.
'In a sense, it's a recognition or a celebration of the fact that I have been able to work with Glasgow University over a number of years. And the fact that, although I'm a member of a different, somewhat rival institution on the other side of the city, it's been perfectly willing to allow me to work, or to be involved in some of the work of this institution as well.'
Sally Magnusson, who was awarded a doctor of the university degree, added: 'I'm absolutely thrilled to have got this wonderful doctorate, from the University of Glasgow.
'It has been a real thrill for me to discover what the inside of this lovely university is like, and to be part of its history is tremendous. Centuries and centuries of history and beauty and learning – it's fantastic.'
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The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
US singer-songwriter Tyler Ballgame: ‘It shocked me out of depression. I had this spiritual awakening'
Four years ago, Tyler Perry's stepfather offered him a job in the office of his dog-training company in Portsmouth, Rhode Island. Perry had little else to fill his time: he was 29 and living in his mother's basement, uncertain what he should do with the rest of his life. In 2017, he had left Berklee College of Music, where he had ostensibly studied songwriting, but largely smoked weed and skipped class. The songs he wrote then were introspective and folk-driven, in the lineage of Nick Drake and Elliott Smith – artists he had been drawn to in his senior year of high school, who had spoken to him just as depression had first set in. 'I was depressed for, like, 10 years,' he says. In idle moments in the office, he would scour Craigslist, imagining a different life in New York or Nashville or LA. One day, on a whim, he applied for a recruitment job at a commercial real estate company in Los Angeles. He lied about his experience, and the fact he didn't have a degree. 'I just wrote a really good email,' he says. 'And 20 minutes later they called me. I went through two interviews in a day, and then they said: 'Can you be here in two weeks?'' Perry had never been to Los Angeles. That evening, he talked it over with his family and friends. 'And my mom said: 'What do you have to lose? A few thousand dollars? You can always come back.' So I moved to Venice Beach, California.' In a clip of Perry that began to circulate online last autumn, the singer was filmed at Eagle Rock bar The Fable performing Help Me Out – a song that longs for self-acceptance the way one might yearn for a lover. He moves around the stage with a sensuous majesty, a large man in triple denim, flicking his hair, courting the mic stand, his voice moving effortlessly from earth-deep to celestial. There is something of Elvis and Roy Orbison and Harry Nilsson; the kind of easy, confident performance that feels like alchemy. In person, Perry is a faintly beatific presence, sitting in a Brighton cafe in the gap between shows at the city's Great Escape festival. He speaks gently, his conversation ranging from the suburbs of Rhode Island to the free kombucha at WeWork via countercultural philosopher Alan Watts's thoughts on ego. What quickly becomes clear is the distance between the solid assurance of Perry's stage self and the more tentative man sitting across the table. Before all of this – before the dog-training office and the real estate application – Perry had begun working with a counsellor and dietician named Courtney Huard. For a couple of years the pair worked on improving Perry's sense of body positivity and mental health, and the impact was immense. 'She was an incredible person and I'm really lucky I came across her,' Perry says. Around the same time, he discovered the work of self-help teacher Eckhart Tolle and his book The Power of Now, and took an Enneagram personality test. 'I pinned my personality to a wall, and I got to see it for the first time,' he says. 'And it shocked me out of depression. I had this kind of spiritual awakening.' The problem was that this newly awakened Perry did not fit quite so well with his catalogue of melancholy folk songs. For years, when he played live, he had hidden behind his guitar, his voice flat and whispered. 'I was wanting to be 'cool' in that sense of 'mystical, can't grasp it …'' he says. 'But I don't think that's necessarily me.' In California, he lived out of a suitcase, worked for the property company in the day, and at night played open mics across the city. Mostly he would play a couple of his own folk songs, and then a cover of Roy Orbison's Crying. It was this last song that hit the sweet spot. 'People would freak out, and it would be like it was my birthday,' he says. 'Everybody in the place looking at me and clapping.' He realised that covering Orbison's song called on the skills he had first learned doing musical theatre in high school: a supported singing voice, a sense of generosity and occasion. Perry wondered if this might be a new direction for him – one that drew on all of his musical loves, from showtunes to Fleet Foxes, via Jonathan Richman and the Who's 1969 rock opera, Tommy. He dreamed up a character for himself, called it Tyler Ballgame – a nod to the nickname of legendary Boston Red Sox baseball player, Ted Williams, and a joking put-down to himself, a man who had spent years squandering his talent in his mother's basement, being the very opposite of a sporting legend. He set about working out how this Tyler Ballgame might write and perform. At Berklee, Perry had attended a performance studies class taught by Livingston Taylor (brother of singer-songwriter James Taylor). The classes were held in a theatre, and on the first day, Taylor invited each of his 40 students to stand on the stage. You had to go up and hold your palms out to the audience, and shift your weight from one foot to the other in time, and look everybody in the eye. It struck Perry as brilliant. In Los Angeles, Perry remembered the class, and it struck him as an act of radical presence; something Tyler Ballgame might do. He started to try it in his live shows. 'I'd reach out to the audience and look them in the eye. Like, we're both here to do something. I'm trying to connect, and we're going to live this experience together.' The songs came with an ease. Soulful, and sad sometimes, but also brimming with something hopeful and alive. They carried the richness and simplicity of the classics. Perry relocated to East Los Angeles, began collaborating with other neighbouring musicians, and playing live as much as he could. One day, the producer Jonathan Rado, famed for his work with Miley Cyrus and the Killers, happened to see an Instagram story of a Tyler Ballgame show and contacted him. The singer went over to Rado's studio shortly afterwards and over the next couple of weeks, the pair recorded more than an album's worth of material. Word of Tyler Ballgame soon spread, and by last autumn, record labels had begun making fevered bids to sign him. In the end, Perry went with the British independent Rough Trade, connecting with them over a shared love of Nick Drake and Arthur Russell. 'I had a lot of options and it was really flattering and really crazy,' he says, 'but I just kept coming back to Rough Trade, because of that kindred spirit of whatever music I make naturally, in my soul, they already love, because they've already put out all the music that I love.' Perry makes for easy company, and after an hour and a half of conversation I ask if there is anything else he might like to tell me. 'I don't know,' he says slowly, and hesitates. 'Maybe I'd like to mention my counsellor, Courtney, again,' he says. 'She had her life taken, really horrifically.' Huard was killed by her husband, who later killed himself. Perry learned of her death when a friend sent him a news article from his local newspaper back in Rhode Island. Perry saw the photograph and was stunned. At that precise moment he had been writing Help Me Out, a song largely inspired by Huard. 'She made me realise your value is not tied to the size of your body, or how people look at you – things which had kept me from even being on stage at all. 'There are so many people on the messageboards of her funeral posts and her obituary saying: 'She set me on the course of my life.' She was a really special person, and it just shows how precious life is. So I live for her.' It is a hot afternoon, but Perry takes to the stage at the UnBarred Brewery wearing a woollen jumper. He looks out to the crowd, gently spreads his palms, and begins to sing. It is a golden performance, the songs sounding almost as if they have always existed, and Perry entirely mesmerising. As he plays, I think of something he told me over lunch – about the freedom and fluidity of performance. 'I want to be totally in the flow state, like gone,' he said. 'Where nothing is canned or prepared or contrived.' Some shows, he told me, you get it, and the rest of the band get it, and the audience gets it, too. 'And then it's like real magic. It's a celebration of the joy of performance and the joy of music.' Today as Perry and the band play, the air is filled with a kind of joy – with something like real magic in the warmth of a Sussex afternoon. Tyler Ballgame's new single New Car is out now. He plays the End of the Road festival, nr Blandford Forum, 30 August, and The Lexington, London, 10 September.
The Guardian
3 hours ago
- The Guardian
The Guide #202: Awol headliners to rampaging deer: how festivals survive the worst-case scenarios
We're in the thick of festival season in the UK, where every weekend seems to host a dizzying array of musical mega-events. The likes of Glastonbury, Download, TRNSMT, Wireless and others may already be in the rear-view, but there are still plenty more to come across all manner of genres: Camp Bestival (happening this very weekend), Creamfields, Green Man, All Points East, Reading and Leeds, End of the Road and so many others, across farms, city parks, country estates and the odd mid-Wales mountain range. For the people who run these festivals, months or even a full years-worth of work will have gone into readying for a single, crucial long weekend. The stakes are high: whether things go off without a hitch or not will, in some cases, determine that festival's future. And boy, are there a lot of potential hitches: electricity, sanitation, ticketing, food and drink, security, and the fragile egos of famous musicians, to name but a few. 'The scary thing about festivals is, if you take away one small element, the whole thing collapses,' says promoter James Scarlett. James should know. He books and organises not one but two annual festivals: 2000Trees, a 15,000-capacity alternative, punk and indie festival in Cheltenham, which last month completed its 17th edition with headline appearances from emo veterans Alexisonfire and Taking Back Sunday, along with Keir Starmer faves Kneecap; and ArcTangent, which specialises in metal, math rock, prog, post-rock and general experimental music, and later this month (13-16 Aug) will lure 5,000 punters to a farm near Bristol to hear bands as varied as post-rock titans Godspeed You! Black Emperor, prog-metallers Tesseract, lugubrious indie dance veterans Arab Strap and a duo called Clown Core who play avant garde jazz fusion from a portable loo. In addition, James is also the co-host – along with Gavin McInally, who runs Manchester extreme metal festival Damnation – of 2 Promoters 1 Pod, a weekly, unvarnished, slightly sweary look at how a festival comes together from the booking of bands to the construction of the site. If you have even the most cursory interest in how festivals work, it's a fascinating listen. All of which makes James the person you'd call for in case of something going badly awry on site. So in this week's Guide we've decided to test his firefighting skills, by asking him to solve a series of festival disasters, including some ripped from recent headlines. Read on for his thoughts on awol headliners, heatwaves and herds of marauding deer. Festival disaster #1 | Your headlining band are playing a mind-blowing set but are overrunning. You've already reached the curfew time your festival has agreed with the local council and the band still haven't played their biggest song yet. What do you do? 'I have, occasionally in the past, let bands breach curfew. We got caught once doing it at ArcTangent. A council member was driving home from another event and just thought they'd stop outside the farm. He heard the music stop at 11pm … and then start again at three minutes past! We received a slap on the wrist that time, and have a good relationship with the council as our crowds are never any hassle – but you can lose your licence over breaking curfew, and then the whole festival is gone. So I think normally the answer is the curfew is the curfew. Still, If you've got a headliner who, say, have 45 minutes of technical difficulties, I think there might be an argument to let them break the licence just in order to keep the crowd happy, you don't want an angry 15,000 people who didn't get the headliner that they wanted. There's a health and safety argument for breaking your curfew if that happens.' Festival disaster #2 | A heatwave has descended on the festival site. You've not been told to shut it down, but temperatures are reaching the mid-to-high 30s. What do you do? 'This year we had 53 cases of heatstroke at 2000Trees on the Wednesday of the festival, when people had only just arrived. It's pretty impressive that people have come straight in and gone: bang, heatstroke! You have to have a really good first aid tent. We cleaned the local depot out of saline drips for ours, because so many people were coming in extremely dehydrated. In fact one drummer from a band, Future of the Left, had to go to the tent for severe dehydration and heatstroke. He's a very energetic drummer and in those tents the heat rises, you're higher than the crowd, and you're properly going for it – not really a working environment you want to be in! Still, we've clocked up mid-30s temperatures at 2000Trees at least twice and once at ArcTangent, and you can still run an event in that. It's about communication with your audience: drink water, wear a hat, wear sunscreen, try to find some shade.' Festival disaster #3 | An Icelandic volcanic ash cloud leaves the headliner you've booked stranded in mainland Europe with no way of making it to the festival in time. What do you do? 'If a headliner drops out, you're in trouble. You've just got to be honest with your audience that the band aren't gonna be there. And all you can really do is bump whoever was second from top up a slot, and everyone moves up. We go into each festival with a long backup list of bands that are either local or already on site as punters. So if we get a dropout, we can usually fill the gap at short notice. You can always guarantee that someone will miss a train, miss a flight, get stuck in traffic or just get confused about what day they're playing … which is quite frustrating if you spend all year booking a lineup!' Sign up to The Guide Get our weekly pop culture email, free in your inbox every Friday after newsletter promotion Festival disaster #4 | The prime minister has said it is not appropriate for a controversial act to headline your festival. What do you do? 'What the UK prime minister says about Kneecap is of little interest to me to be honest. I'm not being bullied. We were having ex-MPs and current MPs writing to 2000Trees, like they have a say in what we do. We're a business, it's not up to them. I think it was a help that a few other festivals have stuck to their guns on keeping Kneecap on the bill: Glastonbury and Green Man for example. It does give you a little bit of solidarity. If everyone had folded on it and we were the last ones, I guess I would have felt more pressure. I don't think we would have caved until such time as it was a risk to the business over it. And in the end there was no risk. Kneecap were good as gold at 2000Trees – they did a brilliant, amazing headline set, one of the best we've ever had at the festival.' Festival disaster #5 | A fire breaks out on site just days before the festival begins, destroying your main stage, Tomorrowland-style. What do you do? 'If you don't have the main stage for your festival you're probably going to have to cancel because there's not enough space for everyone across the other stages. So you'd be on the phone to every stage and marquee company across the country trying to find a replacement. The problem is, with the massive explosion in the festival industry in recent times, stages and marquees are very hard to come by. It's likely to be squeaky bum time. In the case of Tomorrowland, amazingly, they borrowed Metallica's stage. Bands like ACDC and Metallica tend to tour with two rigs, so they'll be playing one night on a stage with a lighting and sound rig. And ahead of them, in the next city, there'll be another team building their stage for the next show. When that show's finished, they tear that rig down and move on to the next place. Which is crackers really – it's hard to imagine the scale of that.' Festival disaster #6 | A herd of deer has descended on the festival, trampling over tents and chomping on the merch stall. What do you do? 'Well, we had pigs and swans invading our VIP campsite at 2000Trees this year! The pigs had broken out of a nearby farm. There's no gentle way of getting a pig out of a campsite, really, you have to manhandle them. Our production team were chasing them around – it was quite a comic scene. For the swans we rang up the RSPB – 999 for birds – and they advised us to not do anything, and eventually they'd take off, which they did. Deer would be more difficult. You can't go manhandling deer, particularly stags with their antlers. We have 140 pages of risk assessments, covering every risk you could ever imagine … but pigs in the camp was not on that list!' If you want to read the complete version of this newsletter please subscribe to receive The Guide in your inbox every Friday
The Independent
4 hours ago
- The Independent
The Maccabees on reuniting: ‘There were years when it was like a stranger messaging'
I n a dank rehearsal room in New Cross, bathed in an eerie green light that clings to the walls like moss, The Maccabees are easing back into each other's orbit. A headline appearance at All Points East is still months away. Nearest me is their guitarist Felix White, dressed all in black. 'Any requests?' he asks me. Soon the air is thick with nostalgia. Guitars twitch and flicker. Drums roar. Then in comes the choirboy vocal, clear yet quivering, as if frontman Orlando Weeks is on the verge of an apology: 'Mum said no/ To Disneyland,' he sings. 'And Dad loves the Church. Hallelujah.' It's the first time I've heard 'Lego', from their 2007 debut album, since the south London band bowed out eight years ago. But here are all the early Maccabees hallmarks: staccato riffs, adolescent romance, tenderness wrapped inside tension. Back then, in the harried sprawl of mid-Noughties UK indie – a scene of skinny jeans, dirty dance floors and MySpace pages – they briefly seemed to be just another charming, successful young band, writing cool, funny songs about wave machines and toothpaste. Yet they were always headed somewhere else, evolving, their sound increasingly adventurous on their way to a Mercury Prize nomination, an Ivor Novello award, a No 1 record and a headline performance at Latitude. Then it stopped. Seemingly out of nowhere, in August 2016, the group announced they were to be no more, save for a series of farewell celebration shows at Alexandra Palace the following year. 'We are very proud to be able to go out on our own terms, at our creative peak,' a statement read. 'There have been no fallings out.' Fans were bereft. In the years since, details of the split have remained hazy: by all accounts, it was not so much a blow-up as a simmering of fractures and differences. The pieces didn't fit together any more. While Weeks told The Independent in 2020 that the band 'just ran out of steam', blaming the creative frustrations of working as a group, it's clear a cooling-off period was needed. 'With Orlando,' says Hugo White, a guitarist in the band like his older brother Felix, 'there were a few years we didn't speak. You'd send one text maybe in six months.' They had been together their entire adult lives. 'I was 16 when I started the band,' Hugo notes. 'I was 30 when we split up.' Keeping five people together at that age 'locked into a diary that's scheduled for the next year, all intertwined in [each other's] lives', is difficult, he says. 'And I think that kind of broke in a way.' At that point, the five of them all agree, the idea of ever getting the band back together seemed inconceivable. 'It felt final,' says Weeks, who has now released three excellent solo records. 'Extremely final,' Felix jumps in, amid laughter. 'We needed it to be like that in order to move on,' says Hugo. 'It couldn't linger around.' Felix White during The Maccabees' set at the 2009 Isle of Wight Festival (Getty) We're 10 minutes in, and the group dynamic of The Maccabees is already unmistakable – a familial rhythm of in-jokes, unspoken cues and roles that feel shaped over years. If Weeks is the reluctant frontman, softly spoken and meditative, Felix is the band's ebullient cheerleader. Brooding opposite him is Hugo, with a jaw as sharp as his humour, cracking a number of close-to-the-bone barbs about the breakup. Drummer Sam Doyle and bassist Rupert Jarvis are here, too, quieter, more enigmatic. Though the mood is celebratory, there's no doubt the split was a difficult pill to swallow. 'It was so weird because you've made such a commitment to each other from a young age,' Hugo later tells me. 'So the idea that someone wants to make music outside of that group, with other people – it's almost like a betrayal... Even though it isn't.' For Felix, the way it ended, just as The Maccabees had finally earned their place at indie's top table, was, by his own past admission, 'heartbreaking'. 'We were mid-thirties and there was a real sense of saying goodbye to a part of your life,' he told us last year. The Maccabees wasn't the only breakup Felix was going through. At the same time as those bittersweet Alexandra Palace shows, he was also parting from his girlfriend Florence Welch, of Florence + the Machine. There was so much change in the air, Felix says, that it was difficult to navigate. 'Lots of endings happening in lots of different versions of life.' But then change has always been reflected in The Maccabees' music. Just as they became more expansive sonically, with gauzy guitar textures and swirling atmospherics reminiscent of Arcade Fire, so their lyrics matured. Gone were the chewed-up Lego pieces, replaced by introspection and songs concerned with the vicissitudes of ageing. Enjoy unlimited access to 100 million ad-free songs and podcasts with Amazon Music Sign up now for a 30-day free trial. Terms apply. Try for free ADVERTISEMENT. If you sign up to this service we will earn commission. This revenue helps to fund journalism across The Independent. Enjoy unlimited access to 100 million ad-free songs and podcasts with Amazon Music Sign up now for a 30-day free trial. Terms apply. Try for free ADVERTISEMENT. If you sign up to this service we will earn commission. This revenue helps to fund journalism across The Independent. Orlando Weeks performs during the band's 2013 Isle of Wight set (Getty) On a personal level, growing up with The Maccabees, all of us more or less the same age, I've always felt a strange sense of ownership over them, as if they are my band, a soundtrack to my coming of age. I was 20, still flinging myself across sticky, student dance floors in torn Levi's, when a mutual friend played them to me just before the release of debut album Colour It In. Then, two years later, nursing a broken heart, I found myself near Felix in the crowd as Blur played the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury. 'I fell in love to your first album,' I told him. There were other encounters, too, running the gamut from cringe to extremely cringe. Backstage at the Isle of Wight Festival in 2011, introduced to Hugo by a PR, I careened into fanboy overdrive, explaining more than once that 'your band changed my life'. Professionally speaking, I couldn't be trusted to be objective, either: I spent years wearing down a late, great music editor who refused to let me write about them. Eventually, she caved, and I reviewed them at Brixton Academy, not knowing it would be one of their last shows. (Headline: 'Is it time The Maccabees headlined Glastonbury?') Of course, they're not just my band. Recently, at a stag do in the Scottish Highlands, I derived immeasurable joy from watching the groom-to-be insist on playing four vintage Maccabees songs back-to-back at 3am, those time-capsule choruses still a bottomless font of bonhomie. To me, in an era of swaggering, hyper-macho indie landfill, with bands such as Razorlight and The Rifles, their music always stood apart, shimmering with warmth and depth. Evidently, Danny Boyle thinks so too. For a pivotal scene in his film Steve Jobs , he turned to the sweeping, crepuscular tones of 'Grew Up at Midnight', lifted from the band's critically acclaimed 2012 record Given to the Wild. 'We thought that was going to make us f***ing massive in America,' says Felix. 'They used the whole song at the end and we were like, 'Oh my God, we're going to America, people…'' He pauses… 'F***ing nothing. If anything, we were smaller after the film came out.' The Maccabees at the NME Awards in 2016, shortly before their split (AFP/Getty) Be that as it may, there's no downplaying the magnitude of those farewell shows, which felt part celebration, part elegy. I was there and can attest to just how emotional they were. 'There was a real sense when those last Maccabee shows happened that everyone had been, was a particular age, and it became sort of symbolic for saying goodbye to a certain part of your life – sort of early thirties,' says Felix. 'That idea of real adulthood was upon everyone, that you're definitively ending a stage of your life – and it felt like it was inside all of the rooms when we played those shows. It felt like everyone was pouring their own collective sense of goodbye into it, whatever that might be – relationships, being young, people that couldn't be there, all that kind of stuff. So it felt very heavy.' For a while, it seemed that Felix would not look back as he set off on new paths. He launched Yala! Records, wrote the cricket-themed memoir It's Always Summer Somewhere and started a cricketing podcast called Tailenders with radio host Greg James and England's all-time leading wicket-taker Jimmy Anderson. But as time passed, he realised, 'you do get to a point where you're like, actually, life doesn't last forever. If we want to do this, it could be a really beautiful thing.' There was a recognition that it would likely feel that way for their fans, too, who had felt the poignancy of their parting, and had since perhaps been doing a lot of the things that the band had been doing, like starting families and spending more time at home. 'As a Maccabee through the ages, I think you can really hear that in the music: you can hear that we're 19, you can hear that we're 24 and so on. And the gigs used to feel like that, like when we were first playing, and there used to be people hanging from the ceiling and shoes flying everywhere and all that kind of thing. And then, as we got older, it changed into something more introspective.' As we got older, it changed into something more introspective Felix White Cut to Glastonbury this year and there The Maccabees are, headlining the Park Stage, with a comeback set that weaves all those elements together. Yes, there's introspection, but also that frenetic energy; if there'd been a ceiling, you can be sure people would have hung from it – perhaps without their shoes. 'We never thought we'd be playing these songs again to anybody,' Felix said to the crowd. So how come they are, I ask? The catalyst, Hugo says, was his wedding to the author and poet Laura Dockhill in lockdown. After hiring out a pub in Battersea, he invited Weeks on the condition, he jokes, that he would sing. 'And just for the after party,' Felix chimes in, laughing. 'It's not an open invite!' And so, for the first time since Alexandra Palace, all five of them were in the same room. Their friends Jack Peñate, Jamie T, Florence Welch and Adele all performed that night. Crucially, so, too, did The Maccabees. Reuniting, says Weeks, 'didn't feel forced, because after the end of something like The Maccabees, to coordinate a meeting felt sort of contrived. Then, suddenly, there was this event that was a very obviously uncomplicated reason to all be together.' After Covid, he explains, there were tentative conversations about a reunion. Slowly, the pieces aligned. The White brothers' new band 86TVs were forced to pause their plans after Stereophonics called back their drummer, Jamie Morrison, for a tour. 'So, suddenly, there was this fallow year for them,' Weeks continues, 'and I had finished my stuff with [his 2024 album] Loja. So it was just a natural hiatus there. If there hadn't been an All Points East that felt so good, then it might easily have just drifted and not happened. But it just felt very uncomplicated again.' The boys are back in town: The Maccabees at Glastonbury 2025 (Jill Furmanovsky) Certainly, their Glastonbury set had a natural ease and coherence. 'The thing that I was really noticing was that me, Land [Orlando] and Hugo all used to do this thing where we'd all move at the same time, like unintentionally choreographed,' says Felix, when I meet him and his brother again a few weeks after the festival. 'You'd do two steps forward, stand still, three steps back, and you feel everyone do it at the same time. Like, weird, telepathic, synchronised. And here we were doing it again.' Falling unconsciously into step with one another without even speaking, he says, was 'so weird... even beyond the playing, like it was in your body somewhere'. Beforehand, though, 'I was f***ing nervous,' says Felix. 'And the TV thing really does heighten the whole experience.' 'You can't really get a more high-pressure scenario,' agrees Hugo. They'd been calm in the days leading up to it, but that changed on the day, explains his brother. 'Land had this thing in his head where he was saying randomly, sporadically, with no context, how nervous he was out of 10. So you'd be having a chat, and he'd suddenly go 'seven', and then half an hour later, it'd be 'six', and then 'nine'.' Nerves aside, the band were thrilled with how it went. 'I didn't come down from it for days,' says Felix. The set was capped by an appearance from Welch, now back with Felix, for a rendition of her galloping 2008 hit 'Dog Days Are Over'. 'It was a rehash of what we did together at the wedding,' says Hugo. 'As soon as she sings in a room, it changes. She has that thing where she changes the atmosphere in the inner space, and it's really rare.' The whole process was very different from the classic rock cliché of 'putting the band back together' – rebuilding relationships took time. 'We'd meet up with our kids on the South Bank,' says Hugo. 'Stuff that is so far from how we would have spent every day. After a year of not speaking or whatever, you know, you go for a coffee and walk for an hour. Hugo White: 'Florence has that thing where she changes the atmosphere in the inner space, and it's really rare' (Getty) 'Obviously, it's different now,' he adds, 'because Land lives in Lisbon, but things are just back to how they were. And there were years where it was like a stranger messaging you.' Of course, there have been seismic shifts in the musical landscape since The Maccabees formed in 2004 over a love of The Clash and the BBC series Old Grey Whistle Test, which featured punchy, angular performances by the likes of Dr Feelgood and XTC ('You can see why it looked fun to play fast,' says Felix). These days, the industry is 'less focused on bands', says Hugo. 'People are creating these things on computers. Because it's cheaper, it's easier. It doesn't require the same effort as five individuals that connect in a certain way to be able to create something.' Jarvis agrees. 'It's so much more expensive to just be a new band. Back when we first started, we'd chuck in a fiver each to go and spend four hours rehearsing, [but] that doesn't get you anywhere nowadays,' he says. 'I feel very sorry for the new bands because of that, and there's a lot less new bands. You really notice that – there are fewer venues, fewer nights out, fewer things going on for bands to form a scene.' As the fashions of the scene that spawned The Maccabees in the indie sleaze era made a comeback, Weeks saw his past life through a new lens. 'We must be far enough away from that moment to look back at those pictures with a kind of giddiness,' he says. 'The colours and the weird asymmetrical haircuts and plimsoles and acrylic Perspex dangly little earrings and all of those things that, at the time, didn't feel nearly as cool as looking back at photos of The Clash. But we're far enough away from it now that it owns its identity.' The tribalism of the era, when you could tell which aisle of HMV a person would head to just by their hairstyle, holds a romantic pull for the band. 'There was still so much DIY-ness about it all,' says Weeks. 'There was more of a look, a cohesiveness of aesthetic.' Felix recalls being at a metal bar in Camden recently, 'and they've all got a look. That made me feel really nostalgic and jealous thinking, oh, I can't remember being in a place where everyone's got this code that makes them all sort of connected.' Felix White (far left): 'We spent two and a half years in full-on mania making 'Marks to Prove It'' (Jill Furmanovsky) Though the average fan's taste may seem more diverse than ever, Hugo wonders if something was lost in the transition to pick-and-mix fandom in the streaming era. 'You used to buy one album and listen to that until you got another album. [Nowadays] you don't have to listen to one album.' He stops himself and laughs. 'Do they even listen to an album? You just dart between songs like social media, scrolling through things.' The Maccabees seem conflicted about social media generally – especially its demands for self-promotion. 'When Marks to Prove It came out in 2015,' Felix recalls, 'we had a long conversation about whether we should even put on the Instagram that the album's out. We spent two and a half years in full-on mania making this record and it was generally like, is it naff to say the album is out today?' 'When you think what kids like the young artists now are expected to do, it's just, like, mind-blowing in comparison to how things worked for us,' Hugo says. 'We were so fortunate to be able to make stuff as a group of people and not be in this constantly competitive environment.' 'Just being not part of promotion,' Weeks marvels. 'Yeah, it was always someone else in control,' says Doyle. 'Deliver the artwork and they would promote it by getting posters up or whatever it was,' adds Hugo. I'd love to have seen Nick Drake's Instagram. Imagine him asking people to swipe up and share Felix White The sort of 'savviness' that self-promotion requires was not what set them on their way, notes Weeks, picking out current bands he likes – Divorce, Caroline, and Black Country, New Road – who have 'accidental alchemy' but also manage to be engaging on Instagram, without having to lay bare their 'private, inner workings'. 'I'd love to have seen Nick Drake's Instagram,' says Felix, laughing. 'Imagine him asking people to swipe up and share.' It's clear that as they prepare to play All Points East, headlining a bill that includes Irish sensation CMAT and indie stalwarts Bombay Bicycle Club, laughter and good vibes have returned to The Maccabees. 'Everyone's in a good headspace and connecting with each other, and that's allowed it to be stronger,' notes Hugo. Which raises the question: will there be more music from The Maccabees in their forties? 'Do you think that means we would make better music or worse music?' asks Felix. It'll be a different stage of life, for better or worse, I reply. 'It'll be slower,' laughs Hugo. 'There's a good feeling about it,' Felix says, with a wry smile. 'It's tempting…' The Maccabees headline All Points East on 24 August in Victoria Park; last tickets are available here . Reissues of their albums 'Colour It In' and 'Given To The Wild' are released on limited edition vinyl on 22 August. You can pre-order here
