The Maccabees talk reuniting for All Points East 2025 for their exclusive first interview back • Cover Feature • DIY Magazine

Just over seven years ago, Orlando Weeks, Felix and Hugo White, Rupert Jarvis and Sam Doyle walked off stage at Alexandra Palace and closed the curtain on what they were sure would be their last show together as The Maccabees. For any of the 10,000 people in attendance that night (the final of three at the hometown venue), the emotion in the air was physically tangible; the applause after each track a visceral amalgamation of gratitude and sadness, climaxing in an extended closing outpouring that all-but-refused to let them leave. When they finally did, after 13 years spent in each other’s pockets growing from hopeful teenagers to beloved festival headliners and one of their generation’s true success stories, the five men that were no longer a band went back to their shared dressing room for the last time and shut the door.

“We were there just the five of us and we all cried for I don’t even know how long,” remembers Hugo. “That moment was really, really intense; we really grieved it. And because it was so amazing and the atmosphere was so incredible, it just heightened all of that. It was such a [strange] experience to end it on such a high, knowing it’s over but not understanding or knowing what your life is without it.”

In the years since, they’ve all done a better job than many of figuring that out. Orlando has released three solo albums and moved to Lisbon; Hugo and Felix have paired up once more as half of 86TVs, alongside a host of production work for the former and an entire multi-prong sporting-podcasting-journalistic empire for the latter. Sam has made short films and music videos, while Rupert, now a carpenter who proclaims himself “so out of the industry”, still found time to moonlight as a touring bassist for The Vaccines and on Jamie T’s latest LP. Some of them have young families; all of them have found a rich life after the band. But every time, says Felix, that he would go to All Points East in the summer, he’d feel a familiar twinge.

“It’s the one time when it would always sting a little bit because I’d think, ‘Fucking hell, that could have been us’,” he says. “You’d go into that fantasy for 20 minutes in that situation and think: ‘Oh shit. Fucked it’. And then you’d forget about it again.”

“ “The contrast of internally knowing that we were reaching the end while externally looking like we were reaching the top level, it was incredibly confusing.” — Hugo White

When Orlando, Felix and Hugo pop up on Zoom for the first part of today’s summit (the vocalist is in Portugal, but the other four live within short enough distance to make a later South London pub trip an easy commute), it’s an hour since tickets for their own All Points East headline show went on sale and a week since the reunion that no one dared expect blew up the indie internet. Felix isn’t worried about the show itself. “I know the playing will be great; I know when I hear Maccabees music, my hands will do exactly what my hands did before.” But everything else around it is clearly imbued with far more gravitas and weight. “The analogy I keep thinking about is that it’s almost like an Indiana Jones film where they take an artefact out of the ground but when they take it out all these skeletons and ghosts all come out at the same time,” he says. “It’s scary having all those feelings and that history get unearthed.” “I think that’s called opening up a can of worms,” his brother notes wryly.

Ironically, the public unearthing came somewhat quicker than intended. When the band started the announcement ball rolling with a functional changing of their logo on social media, they didn’t expect internet sleuths to catch on quite so quickly. “We genuinely didn’t realise,” laughs Hugo. “We thought we were gonna announce it in a few weeks, but then the logo changed and it just went off, everyone’s phones were going mad…” Such was the excitement surrounding even the tiniest morsel of potential, the news was picked up everywhere. However, that potential had been long in the cultivation. In fact, had you been having a pint at Brixton’s Effra Social last Christmas, or watching Jamie T’s album launch gig in Ladbroke Grove the year before, or – admittedly less likely – hanging out at Hugo’s wedding back in 2020, you might have seen the stitches slowly being made to pull the friendships and, eventually, The Maccabees back together.

There was, all parties readily admit, a lot of suturing to do. While, to the outside world, the band had announced their split in August 2016, eventually playing their final farewell tour the following summer, behind the scenes they’d already spent an entire year under the ominous cloud of what was looming. Exhausted and overwhelmed by how entirely all-encompassing the band had become, Orlando had announced his intentions to leave shortly after finishing up 2015 fourth album ‘Marks To Prove It’. In solidarity for what they’d created, the quintet decided to present a united front when it came to how they would tell the world. And so, with a host of commitments still to complete, they embarked on the most objectively successful year of their career, scoring their first chart-topper, headlining Latitude, playing a memorably celebratory Other Stage set at Glastonbury and fielding endless questions about the sky-high possibilities of where it could all go next while knowing the answer was nowhere.

“The last shows were the most emotionally-taxing things. To have started a band when you were 16 with the dream of getting to that kind of place, and with everything that had gone into it over the years, and then you’re finally reaching that peak while it’s falling apart…” begins Hugo. “The contrast of internally knowing that we were reaching the end while externally looking like we were reaching the top level, it was incredibly confusing.”

For Orlando the need to release the pressure valve was constantly in tension with the weight and consequences of his decision. “There was the feeling that [the band] was all and everything, and if it wasn’t all and everything it had to be nothing. But that nothing felt so final and serious,” he says. His own experience of that final gig night was, unsurprisingly, painfully polarising.

“Because it was the end, then the compression of that all-ness was released a bit, but then I could also look around and see it in all their faces, and that was hard,” he continues slowly. “That was hard. But I wasn’t second-guessing myself. I felt very compromised because I could see how that feeling was writ large on the other boys’ faces, but I was feeling a release that I hadn’t felt for a long time.”

With hindsight, Felix notes that they were probably all reaching a tipping point. “I think we were all exhausted and maybe no one else was gonna say it or do it. It just happened to fall on Land to take that responsibility for how he was feeling,” he suggests. Yet even among the pain and conflicting viewpoints of the split, The Maccabees kept their heads held high and their dignity – towards each other and the thing they’d created – intact. Unlike another band with brothers who joined the reunion circuit this year, they never aired any grievances in public or gave anything except their everything on stage. It left their memory among fans bright and untainted but, more importantly, it also left a strong foundation for the five old friends to start to rebuild on.

“I’m sure it happens with lots of bands and dynamics, where those things can fall apart. Whereas we were like, ‘We’re not gonna go out that way. It’s been too much to end this band in a mess’,” says Hugo. “It wasn’t in the nature of us as a group to want to burn it all down; it’s not what we as a group represented,” nods Orlando. “And I think that the empathy that was required across the board [to enable that] is what’s meant that we have the opportunity to now do something like what we’re doing. It’s testament to that compassion that was hard-earned by us all as people that we’re in the position that we’re in now, and that is no mean feat. That is pretty amazing.”

“ “It wasn’t in the nature of us as a group to want to burn it all down; it’s not what we as a group represented.” — Orlando Weeks

Re-adjourning in a Camberwell pub later in the evening, the White brothers, Rupert and Sam have the easy manner of old friends toasting the day’s activities; tickets for the show are selling fast, and they’re already getting cheeky requests for guestlist from more brazen members of their social circles. It’s Halloween night, however, and the band members are all off to their various individual engagements after we’re finished: Hugo to a gig down the road and Rupert back to help with his kids’ trick or treating, while Felix is gearing up for an inaugural watch of The Wicker Man.

Though conversations about getting the group back together have been bubbling under the surface for more than a year within a comically top secret WhatsApp group called NO SUBJECT, they only received the offer from All Points East a month ago. Going from an idea where, as Hugo notes, “there was an opening to do it again but it might not be for a few years” to something that was happening literally right now has given the decision, it seems, a sense of impromptu fun with no time to overthink it all. The band haven’t played a note together since performing ‘Pelican’ at the guitarist’s wedding, while Sam’s drum kit is currently stacked up in the living room of his flat and being used as a lighting display. “It’s my Christmas tree. Last Christmas I did actually hang baubles off it. So yes,” he grimaces, “I’m definitely going to be doing lots of rehearsing.”

In many ways, the total commitment to the cause that dominated The Maccabees’ previous tenure was the magic ingredient that kept them moving forward and rising above the competition, making four albums in 2007 debut ‘Colour It In’, 2009’s ‘Wall Of Arms’, 2012’s ‘Given To The Wild’ and then ‘Marks To Prove It’ that significantly leapt forward in skill and maturity each time. “That all or nothing-ness, you can really hear it in the records,” says Felix. “I don’t know if we always got the records right in how we sounded, but in terms of how the music was made and the parts and detail and feeling, you can really feel the commitment that went into it and that’s why it’s lasted.”

But, free from the demands of constantly pushing for the new, there’s an ease to the way the band speak today that feels like something of a relief for them all. They’re not secretly sitting on an album; there are no plans to play any new material when they take to the stage next August. Instead, says Felix, the show is a chance to celebrate everything they achieved without the nagging worry of what might come next. “The cool thing of listening to The Maccabees catalogue, musically and lyrically, is every time we made a record you could really hear that we’d become older people. It had changed to be very recognisable but also unrecognisable between the first and the fourth album, and I think that’s a really cool and rare thing for a band to have that specific arc,” he enthuses. “So to get outside of it and just enjoy reflecting on that for a second might be a powerful thing for us and for people that love The Maccabees.” Hugo puts it simply: “The idea that we can come together and do something like that seems, to all of us, like how could we turn that down?”

“ “Getting Oasis tickets made me double down on the fact that this was a good idea, thinking that there’s gonna be people that feel that way about us.” — Felix White

If the old adage goes that it takes half the length of the relationship to get over the break-up, then The Maccabees have got it almost bang-on schedule. They’re enjoying these first steps back into the throng – new press shots; first interviews – with a renewed vigour now that the band can be a treasured part of their lives, but not the whole, entire thing. “We just kind of slipped back into old dynamics, it was surprisingly easy. Tall person at the back, classic formation,” chuckles Sam. When Felix, a lifelong Oasis obsessive, got his hands on tickets for Wembley next summer, it dawned on him just how much moments like this can mean. “The feeling of when the screen said: ‘You’re going to see Oasis’, it did make me double down on the fact that this was a good idea,” he smiles, “thinking that there’s gonna be people that feel that way about us.”

As the reaction to the announcement has shown, people in their droves do undeniably feel that way about The Maccabees. Full of heart, able to excel at both effervescent melodic joy and tender introspection, and comprised of a group that bounce off each other’s differences to create something inimitably theirs and greater than the sum of its parts, they’re a band that have inspired just as much glee upon their return as they did tears upon their farewell.

Whether All Points East is the start of a whole second act or just a heartfelt addendum to the story is still yet to be seen. “I think we don’t really know. To begin with, it’s a reunion for the show, and we’re gonna see what it feels like,” says Felix. “The idea is, we play this gig, we come off stage, and go: Did you enjoy it? Are we doing more?” nods Hugo. Either way, don’t worry about them accepting the job lightly. The Maccabees might mean a lot to many but, having fought for their friendships and each other, there’s no one it all means more to than The Maccabees themselves.

“I was so conscious that if we did it again, it would somehow change what that last gig was. But that moment is gonna be exactly the same for everyone forever,” says Felix, “that’s not gonna change. So if we still love each other, and we still want to do it, then life’s short so why not feel that thing again? It could be really magical.”

The Maccabees headline All Points East on 24th August 2025; get tickets here.

Tags: Cover Features, Features, From The Magazine, November 2024, The Maccabees