Hanging out on a boat with a Maccabee

[Here's an interview I did a while ago in Bristol with Hugo White of The Maccabees. It was published at t5m.com]

If upon arriving for my chat with The Maccabees I was told by a credible source that if I persisted on going through with the interview I would be putting my soul in grave danger of being possessed by a rabid set of demonic leprechauns, it would have been a risk that I would have been willing to take. Fuck it. Souls are there to be given up at some point.

Call me cold-hearted, but I have my priorities. Getting handed the chance by some vaguely anonymous PR lady to interview one of my favourite bands on the day that their brand new album came out (Wall of Arms, which The Maccabees all went out and bought a copy of as soon as it came out), was not something I was going to pass up easily.

To make things even better, the interview, and the following gig, happened one of my favourite venues, Bristol’s Thekla. Well, to be honest, it isn’t really the best venue out there. The sound is shit and the stage is kind of awkwardly narrow, but the fact that it’s a boat (in my mind at least) makes it damn near unbeatable.

So, getting back to the story at hand, my fellow interviewer and I boarded the boat with the enthusiasm of two schoolchildren skipping school for the first time in order to go to the park and, um, play catch or something. We quickly grabbed some cider from the surly bar-keep, and waited for The Maccabees to appear. Next minute, lo’ and behold, five of the most hung-over looking people to be witnessed in Bristol (and trust me, that’s saying something) suddenly appear from the starboard (read right) of this great hunk of nautical gig-hosting goodness.

After a quick chat with their tour manager, who appears to be the only one capable of uttering anything more than monosyllabic grunts, we are greeted by Hugo White, guitarist of The Maccabees, who has appeared to have drawn the short straw among the band interview wise. Hugo, who has the pallor of a man whose stomach doesn’t much agree with life aboard a boat, promptly tells us that the first four days of touring have already caught up with them. After all, they have been on a considerable hiatus from touring for quite some time, in which they recorded.

Surprisingly, then, Hugo is actually in relatively good spirits, and after a few jokes had at my expense (regarding the plastic camera that I brought to photograph the band) we get down to business.

Regarding the long time period between Colour It In and Wall of Arms Hugo tells us that it wasn’t something that was planned. “We initially thought that it would be done really quickly, and once we started doing it we had this realisation that it wasn’t actually going to be as easy as we thought. We really just wanted to be totally happy with it and have no doubts”. So, they ended up spending a whole year and a half on the new LP, and in that time finished with only three more songs than what ended up on the album (which I’m told you can also have when you purchase their new single, "Love You Better").

The new album was recorded by famed producer of the Arcade Fire and Bjork, Marcus Dravs, who Hugo says did a pretty good job of reigning them in. “We initially had ideas of having string sections and all sorts of things going on, but Marcus kind of corrected us there”. Instead, he brought in two multi-instrumentalists that work with the Arcade Fire (“the most incredible people”) who brought a sense of texture to a few of the songs on the Wall of Arms.

Our conversation then moves on to the incredible photo that makes up the album artwork for Wall of Arms (the pic above). It was a marked shift away from their previous artwork, which had been done by lead singer Orlando Weeks, and Hugo says that they “wanted to move away from the more twee aspects of it [Orlando’s artwork]. We couldn’t agree on it, and although we wanted to be on the cover, we didn’t just want it to be us just standing there, as that would be kind of stupid”, he says with a mocked-up grin.

Instead, they tracked down an artist that Orlando was really into, Boo Ritsen, and after covering themselves liberally in barrier cream to stop blood poisoning and skin clots, were covered head to toe in dripping paint. “For the photo, it all had to be done really quickly, as the paint had to be wet, so there was only like a one minute gap where the photo had to be taken in. We were really happy with though, and I think it really suits the album”.

I then ventured in testier waters, and asked about Hugo’s view on filesharing, as their album had leaked a week before release. “It was just so painful to hear. People even had the nerve to post it on their Myspace”. Yet, for The Maccabees, it wasn’t the money side of it that annoyed them the most. It was “just that we put so much work into it”; and who could blame them, after working on something for one and a half years.

Moving away from painful subjects, as Hugo’s hung-over appears to be deteriorating, I ask about the video for their free to download single "No Kind Words", which stars Mathew Horne from Gavin and Stacy fame. Apparently, he’s been coming to The Maccabees gigs for ages, “and he just kept asking when he can be in one of our videos!”. And the result, I must say, is pretty impressive, as even Kanye West has been blogging about it.

At this point, we were kind enough to let Hugo head off, as he is clearly starting to struggle, and tells us that he’s straight off upstairs to throw up and catch up on some sleep before the gig.