How The Maccabees reunited for the biggest show of their career

If you found yourself in east London’s Victoria Park earlier this summer for Outbreak Festival, there’s every chance you may have seen The Maccabees frontman Orlando Weeks going incognito as thousands of fans watched Turnstile headline the capital’s biggest-ever celebration of hardcore music. 

The two bands, it’s fair to say, are sonic poles apart. But that day provided Orlando with the chance to soak up a festival in Victoria Park, just two months before a newly reunited Maccabees head there over the August Bank Holiday to play their biggest-ever show at All Points East. The five-piece headlined Glastonbury’s Park Stage this year too (where they brought close friend Florence Welch onstage), but the point very much remains thus: all roads lead to Vicky Park. 

“It just made me think, ‘This is gonna be great,’” says Orlando, as we sit down at the south London rehearsal space the beloved indie outfit have used since they were teenagers, just days away from their first intimate comeback show in north London. 

“You know that feeling when you’re watching other people play football and you think, ‘God, I wanna do that’?” he explains of his Vicky Park reconnaissance trip. “I just felt really excited that we are going to be doing something similar.”  

Then there’s the small matter of the note-perfect alchemy that occurs when you place a beloved band in a massive outdoor space underneath a late August sunset too, of course. 

“It’s amazing when you’re playing at that time of night,” Orlando reflects. “You stick loads of lights into that Silk Cut Purple sky, and everyone is just so ready for it. There’s an anticipation built into everyone who is waiting at those gigs, but really, they’re the hardest slots to get.” 

When The Maccabees headlined Latitude Festival in 2016, there was a general feeling that even bigger dates would follow if they wanted them. But weeks after that massive show, they announced that a farewell tour would follow in 2017, including two final celebrations at Alexandra Palace. Here was a band seemingly quitting at the peak of their powers, in a move that firmly pulled the rug from under the feet of their fans. 

They had emerged in the mid-2000s as a key part of the era’s scene with the jaunty debut album Colour It In but had leaned into more muscular guitar-rock by the time they released their final album Marks to Prove It in 2015.  

Orlando has previously said that the group  “ran out of steam” after recording that last album, but now admits he was battling personal struggles during the band’s latter period. Their return, announced late last year, is an overdue chance to finally embrace the joy of being in The Maccabees. 

“The most important thing with these shows is obviously that they need to be really good,” Orlando explains. “And then the second most important thing for me is that I can figure out a way of enjoying it more than I was at the end. I was getting very anxious and nervous about playing and I found it really tricky. It was stage fright, essentially. So, I really want to enjoy it. It’s such a rare privilege that we get to play to people on a large scale with the level of preparation that we’re working towards.” 

Looking back on the memories of those daunting shows, Orlando adds: “I’m very bad at dealing with adrenaline. It would spike during shows, and it made it very hard to present. It made it hard to come off stage feeling anything other than a sort of relief. Which, obviously, isn’t what you want to feel, and it isn’t really helpful if everyone has had a really great show. It’s a real counterpoint to that.”  

His bandmate Hugo White admits that the split felt like a “bubble bursting”, while Felix White adds: “I feel like bands always build a tension and a mentality that will just keep fucking going until it explodes. It’s very hard to go out of it and realise that this might be over. It’s that onward tension that propels you forward and gives a sense of onward momentum. You just don’t have time to think about it.”  

It was a largely harmonious parting, the band say, but it felt permanent. Even when they reunited to play ‘Pelican’ at a south London pub for Hugo’s wedding reception in 2020 —with close friend Adele acting as their support act with a performance of ‘Rolling in the Deep’ — they didn’t consider it to be the start of a comeback. 

“The wedding performance for me was simply getting to do the thing that I’d enjoy most in an evening, but I think it was the touchstone of us rebuilding a bit,” says Hugo. 

“When the band ended, I think there was such confusion about where everyone was in their life, and that naturally led to a bit of a separation between us all. But the few times we’ve gone for a drink or met up with our kids, they’ve acted as building blocks towards getting the band back together, even if that wasn’t always the intention.” 

Before those building blocks began to emerge, each of the band had gone down creative avenues that felt entirely reflective of the different forces and restless creativity that allowed the Maccabees to become so beloved in the first place. Orlando has moved to Portugal with his young family, made three excellent solo albums and put his illustration degree to use in creating a children’s book called The Gritterman, proving he could well become the next Raymond Briggs if he so desires. 

Hugo and Felix have teamed up as one half of the guitar band 86TVs, while the latter’s entry into the world of sports broadcasting — including the hugely popular cricket podcast Tailenders — has been so successful that he’s cultivated a section of fans for whom the band is the second most interesting thing about him. 

And then there’s drummer Sam Doyle and bassist Rupert Jarvis. Sam has gone into filmmaking and scores, while Rupert — as an interview with the band last year noted — has gone into carpentry while occasionally pulling his bass out of retirement to record with the likes of Jamie T.

It was only when they met up for Christmas pints in 2023 that the idea of a Maccabees reunion in some uncertain form began to emerge. Timelines and plans remained vague and uncertain, before an offer from All Points East emerged in late 2024 and suddenly made things a lot more real. It spurred them into action. 

“I mean, it doesn’t come around very often where you’re given the chance to build a festival you want to see and you’re actually allowed to do it,” explains Felix. 

In this instance, it means creating a line-up that any indie-loving millennial such as myself, who saw them play at Vicky Park for the short-lived Underage Festival as a teenager, would go mad for. Scene contemporaries such as The Cribs and Bombay Bicycle Club will be joining them, but so too will indie/alt stars of today, including Irish supernova CMAT, alt-country risers Divorce and Black Country, New Road. 

“It’s like when you were young and used to imagine the idea of winning the lottery, buying a football team and thinking about the players you’d buy,” Felix jokes of the line-up. 

“There is an element of nostalgia and sentiment to it, but it’s nice to have a contextualised version of that with bands who continued on their path and then play with people like CMAT too. She’s since become, like, an international pop star, which is quite cool. She used to come and see us because she was in a Bombay Bicycle Club fan group, and now she’s a massive pop star. That’s mad.”  

For all of Orlando’s fears about being unable to enjoy the shows, the first date back at the Tufnell Park Dome in late June shows he’s got nothing to worry about. It’s one of the hottest days of the year, and the tiny room above a north London boozer is fast reaching the kind of temperatures where the predominant makeup of the room’s air supply is a heady mixture of booze and sweat. But from the moment they open with fan favourite ‘Latchmere’ — perhaps the best song ever written about a municipal leisure centre — they’re given a heroes’ welcome. Moshpits are ripped wide open, crowd-surfing fans are pulled over the barrier and the grins plastered across the band’s faces barely subside for the next 90 minutes. Old roles are assumed too. Orlando, as ever, is quietly understated, while it’s up to Felix to gee up the crowd and thank them for the warm welcome.  

It’s the perfect start to life for Maccabees 2.0 at the beginning of a summer which will no doubt see them receive similar reactions across the land. There’s every chance fans may clamour for the band’s full-time return, but this, they say, will be entirely dependent on the success of their performance at All Points East. Once more: all roads lead to Victoria Park. 

“If you’re honouring an obligation you made as a teenager to be in a band, there’s something really cool about that when you get older,” reckons Felix. “But you have to check you’re not doing it because it’s a habit. You always have to check how things fit you in life and how they serve you — if you’re doing it for an old version of yourself or the person you are now. We’ve got to make that decision once we do All Points East about whether we’re doing it for the people we are now. We’ll make that decision together, but ultimately it can only be answered by that one gig.”