Latitude 2016: The Maccabees on headlining Latitude: “To be honest, we should be able to do it by now!”

Speaking a few hours before their first ever headline appearance at Latitude Festival, The Maccabees are visibly nervous. Frontman Orlando Weeks and guitarist Felix White look dazed, the latter being astonished that he’s caught a fly in mid-air. They’re looking for distractions, a reason to stop thinking about the biggest moment of their career so far.

“I’ve managed to distract myself pretty well,” claims Orlando. “We’ve been playing gigs, these last two nights. There’s an odd feeling where you’re imagining, just for a split second, the different view you’ll have at Latitude. You realise it’s gonna be bigger than this.”

Felix says this moment’s been a long time coming. “We felt like we were ready to do it, to be honest.” And he’s right. Four albums in, and with ‘Marks to Prove It’ boasting headliner cred in spades, they’re a band capable of stepping up. “To be honest, we should be able to do it by now!” he says.

“When we first started as a band - it was chaos, crowd-surfing, bodies flying around,” Felix remembers. “The last record and the last tour, there was a different type of attentiveness.” They cite fellow Latitude headliners The National as a personal “source of reference and of comfort,” in that both bands took the long run to the top. “It took them ten years to crack it. They put a lot of music out pre-‘Alligator’ and ‘Boxer’ that actually sounds, in comparison, really adolescent. They were just learning. It was really nice to chart the path of a band like that.”

“I definitely feel a bit prickly,” admits Orlando, but he’s also fronting a band that’s raring to go, ready and able to conquer the top.

The Maccabees play Latitude’s Obelisk Arena tonight (15th July), 9.30pm.