After the news that the band will be reforming to play at All Points East next year, The Maccabees joined Toby Tarrant in the Radio X studio this morning, where they revealed that the offer to headline the festival was ‘too magical’ to turn down. The band also revealed how they reformed briefly in 2020 for an impromptu set at guitarist Hugo’s wedding alongside Florence Welch and Adele!
Key
Felix White – FW
Hugo White – HW
Toby Tarrant – TT
The Maccabees admit that All Points East reunion gig was ‘too magical’ to turn down for the ‘indie generation’
TT: “So, you are playing All Points East Festival, which is an amazing festival. Every single year, All Points East, the line-up comes out, and they put the posters all over the place, and you go, ‘Wow!’ I’ve seen The Strokes there, I’ve seen LCD Soundsystem, so many good acts there. So, this is a festival that you guys have been at as fans a lot, right?”
FW: “Yeah. Well, that was the one that’s like – as Hugo said – we’d all written off in our heads. ‘We’re not going to do this again.’ So, I was personally like, making peace with the fact that maybe never going to play those big shows again. But what would happen every year is, because a lot of our friends or whatever are locked into what All Points East do sort of curatively. So, we’d be going to those shows, and you couldn’t help but think looking at it like, ‘Oh, if we were there, like, where would we be playing? Would we be headlining? Would we be second top?’ And then Nick Cave would do very definitive sets. LCD, as you said, The Strokes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs I’ve seen have a magic moment there. So, it felt like… You know when you’re going and Reading and Leeds, the poster? And used to look at that yellow poster for Reading / Leeds and think, ‘Oh, where are all the bands?’ In a way, All Points East has sort of become that for the indie generation, because Reading and Leeds has changed a little bit, so you always look at the line-up. So, that was the one that, like, when it got offered to us, it was like, ‘Argh! We can’t not do that!’ It just feels too great, too magical. So that’s where we are.”
HW: “It’s incredible as well, and just a kind of testament to it that we’ve actually been able to come back and do a show that huge, you know? I mean yeah, it’s a lot to think about.”
[…]
TT: “And presumably, All Points East, you’ll have a nice little line-up underneath you as well?”
FW: “It’s going to be amazing. It’s going to be of bands that if you were coming to see The Maccabees in 2007, early years, there’s going to a few of those gold bands. There’s some of our favourite bands at the moment. If you like The Maccabees, it’s going to be every single stage of every different type of band, it’s going to be that sort of world.”
The Maccabees admit that they ‘weren’t going to do anything ever again’ before impromptu reunion at guitarist’s wedding alongside Adele and Florence Welch
TT: “Hugo, you’re entirely to thank, because it was your wedding that caused all of this. Is that correct?”
HW: “To a degree. I mean, it was the first time… So, it was probably four years after we’d split up the band, and it was definitely we weren’t going to do anything ever again; we had to do that in order to move on. And I think yeah, my wedding, we had a line-up of people that were going to play, and we hired out a pub and we had the stage set up and stuff. And I asked, I thought it was one of those things that we should end the night with The Maccabees, we should do it. And asking Orlando [Weeks] was the big one, where I was like, ‘I don’t think he’s going to do that, even for my wedding.’ But he did, he came, and we did The Maccabees again.”
FW: “Yeah, so we played as The Maccabees for Hugo’s wedding, for like family and friends.”
TT: “That is so cool! Also, because there are also a couple of people at weddings that have got no right to be there, right? Because your plus ones, do you know how lucky they are? Going, ‘How do you know Hugo? ‘Don’t really know, I’m just here with my girlfriend, but I’ve just got a Maccabees gig for free. What result!’ Now, when you say that you had a few people playing, it was quite a good line-up, wasn’t it?”
HW: “Yeah, it was. Go on, Fe. Do you want to reel it off?”
FW: “In which order?”
HW: “It started with a Beatles cover band.”
FW: “Yeah, The Beatles were first on. Then it was us and Jack Peñate, then us and Jamie T, then us and Florence Welch, and then us and Adele.”
HW: “We did ‘Rolling In The Deep.’”
FW: “And because it was Hugo’s wedding, he was doing the billing. Supporting The Maccabees was Adele. So, we went on after Adele.
TT: “She was merely the hors d’oeuvre! That is amazing.”
HW: “It was amazing, because it was in this pub in Battersea. It was like, you know, 200 people in the pub, and you could hear it all from outside, you know? It was amazing. And it was a week before COVID happened, and there was sort of the whole lockdown thing. So, it felt like the last, and then all gigs were cancelled, and it was like, ‘Wow, we just… literally had the biggest gig of the year!’”
