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WHAT EVERYONE SHOULD BE TALKING ABOUT THIS WEEK

readdork.com

The Agenda Setter: Watch the indie throne - The Maccabees are back

Returning to headline All Points East next summer, for The Maccabees, the best endings are just new beginnings in disguise.

Words: Stephen Ackroyd.

The thing about goodbyes is that they’re terribly unreliable narrators. Back in 2017, The Maccabees bid farewell at Alexandra Palace with all the finality of the last page of a beloved novel – tears were shed, hearts were heavy, and those songs rang out like the world’s most beautiful full stop. But sometimes, life has a funny way of scribbling in the margins.

Take Hugo White’s wedding in 2020 – not just a marriage ceremony, but an accidentally perfect festival lineup (Adele! Florence! Jamie T! – the kind of bill that makes Glastonbury look like your local pub’s open mic night). Five attendees, in particular, found themselves sharing familiar air again among this casual collection of casual British music royalty. Not as The Maccabees, mind you – just as friends celebrating love in its purest form. As Orlando Weeks puts it, with characteristic gentle wisdom, “I didn’t go because it was The Maccabees playing together again, but because it was a beautiful gesture to be invited and to contribute to the spirit of the day. What I wanted, band aside, was to find a way to be in each other’s lives.” (Spoiler alert: sometimes the best way to be in each other’s lives is to accidentally reform your beloved indie band.)

Now, Victoria Park is about to host the kind of homecoming that screenwriters dream about. The Maccabees – those chroniclers of London life, those cartographers of growing up – will headline All Points East on 24th August 2025, exactly where they belong. It’s the 10th anniversary of ‘Marks to Prove It’, their love letter to Elephant and Castle (because if you’re going to make a comeback, you might as well layer your symbolism as thickly as one of their signature guitar lines).

Their story began in 2004, reading like an indie-rock bildungsroman – from the wide-eyed enthusiasm of ‘Colour It In’ (remember ‘Latchmere’? Of course you do – it had a wave machine!) through to 2009’s ‘Wall of Arms’, where tracks like ‘Love You Better’ and ‘Seventeen Hands’ proved growing up in public could sound this good. By 2012’s ‘Given to the Wild’, they’d somehow managed to make existential crisis sound like the most beautiful thing in the world, weaving cinematic soundscapes through tracks like ‘Ayla’ and ‘Forever I’ve Known’ while ‘Pelican’ emerged as the kind of anthem that could close the final show of your career (which, as it happens, it did).

Just ask SOFY, who explained in Dork’s recent cover feature with the White brothers’ post-Maccabees outfit 86TVs that they were “a truly wicked live band who remain timeless storytellers” – high praise that had her diving headfirst into the scene herself. Or take IDLES’ Joe Talbot, who got properly deep about it: “They were the first band that I followed, loved, and believed in as more than music. They moved people forwards creatively.” (No pressure for the comeback, lads.)

‘Marks to Prove It’ arrived in 2015 like a love letter to their adopted corner of London, with ‘Spit It Out’ and ‘Kamakura’ capturing urban life with the kind of precision that only comes from really knowing your postcode. It shot straight to Number 1, which should have been cause for celebration – but behind the scenes, things weren’t quite so rosy. In an interview with the Independent back in 2020, Orlando laid it bare, explaining that he felt they’d “not moved on as far again” as they had with ‘Given To The Wild’, and they’d been doing it for “a very, very, very long time.”

The end, when it came, was almost annoyingly mature – no dramatic bust-ups, no creative differences, just the quiet recognition that sometimes the best stories know when to end their chapter. “It was everyone knowing that that was what was going to happen. We’d had a difficult time making that final record, and we’d reached the end of the line,” Orlando explained in that same Independent interview. “It just ran out of steam a bit” – making one of the most significant splits in British indie sound like a slightly deflated balloon.

In the years that followed, they scattered like seeds on fertile ground. Orlando went solo, crafting the kind of introspective gems that make rainy days feel intentional. Felix founded Yala! Records (“The idea for Yala! was to be in service of good music,” as he told us earlier this year. “Being involved in helping music reach people was really special.”) and somehow became cricket’s most unlikely podcast star via Tailenders. Hugo produced for some big names (Jamie T, Jessie Ware – the usual suspects) before forming 86TVs with his brothers Felix and Will. “It took a long time to figure out who we were outside of The Maccabees,” Felix admitted to Dork, “but 86TVs has been a revelation – a way to keep the passion alive without trying to recreate the past.”

Now they’re back – not with a bang, but with the kind of quiet confidence that comes from knowing exactly who you are. All Points East is a homecoming, after all. “In the intervening years, we’ve been to All Points East a lot, separately,” admits Felix, who’s spent years watching other headliners with what he calls “a pinch of regret… I thought that moment had passed, and it was something I was prepared to come to terms with that I was always going to miss. I think we’re all kind of shocked and excited that we get to do it together again.”

For Hugo, watching The Strokes at the festival was like looking into a mirror that reflected back possibility. “I could see that they were enjoying it,” he explains, “realising how great what they had created together was. Being a band, you are usually in a mindset of, ‘We can do better’, and you’re always chasing something else. This is an opportunity to realise that whatever we had in that moment was pretty special and get to enjoy it again. It’s a chance to appreciate everything, and especially how it impacts other people and created a community.”

There’s no promise of new music (yet), no grand plans beyond this one perfect moment (supposedly) – though the announcement does state they’re “happy to keep their minds open and see where these shows take them next” (which in band-speak is about as subtle as a brick through your favourite record shop window). For now, they’ll curate their own lineup at Victoria Park, a perfect blend of old friends and new faces, because The Maccabees were always about putting the music first.

Sometimes, it turns out, the best endings aren’t endings at all – they’re just really long interludes. And sometimes, if you’re very lucky, those interludes lead you right back home.

The Maccabees will headline All Points East on 24th August 2025.