“We sort of had to start again”: The Maccabees on ‘Marks To Prove It’

Following up their last album ‘Given To The Wild’ was no mean feat for The Maccabees. In fact, as they tell us in the new issue of DIY - out this Friday (22nd May) - they wrote an entire other album of new material before scrapping it and starting over.

“We thought we had written the record, but then when we started recording we just felt like it wasn’t good enough,” admits the band’s frontman Orlando Weeks. “We sort of had to start again. That’s why it took so long; with the way that we work, it’s really important for us to get a momentum going and feel confident.”

Holing up in South London’s Elephant & Castle turned out to be the solution, and The Maccabees were inspired by the area’s mythology and dark Victorian tales on fourth album ‘Marks To Prove It’. “We wanted it to sound more like the place we were making it, and Elephant & Castle doesn’t have very much space in it, and it’s not filmic,” explains Weeks.

“I didn’t realise,” Weeks adds “but a friend told me that there’s actually a hidden river that runs underneath Elephant & Castle called The Neckinger. It was in Dickens’ Oliver Twist; that was where Bill Sikes was supposed to have hung himself. Dickens called it ‘The Venice of Drains’ and it was always this squalid place.”

What a charming piece of trivia. You learn something new every day, eh, readers?