Sunday 04 March 2012
The Maccabees: Major League Music Players Set For A Triumphant Brighton Return
The Maccabees are three albums into their career (no mean feat for a modern day indie-rock band), and their latest release, Given To The Wild, has garnered a plethora of music industry critical acclaim.
But expectations – their own and the outside world’s – made completion of Given To The Wild an intensive period of creativity that at one point seemed beyond their own collective talents.
The band’s guitarist Hugo White said: “Now we've reached a place of achieving what you want and making it a reality.
“Part of that was the production, which this time was predominantly us. The vision is ours, and that's something we never could have done before."
Hugo admits that a lot of their collective decision making is reached via inter-band arguments.
“Yes,” he laughs, “the album was two years in the making and we all believe we have the best ideas. But it works for us, we thrash out the problems and get a better end result.”
The band’s first album, Colour It In, described now as a collection of ‘spiky indie-pop songs’ was easily surpassed by their second, Wall Of Arms.
The ‘not-so-difficult second album’ was also the one that saw them free of the shackles of their home town, Brighton.
But it’s without a doubt that Given To The Wild is the album where they become serious contenders. They knew it while making it, and the reaction to the thirteen tracks has confirmed it .. The Maccabees are now major league players.
Hugo also believes that their frustration would soon show through if they were hauling a below-par album around the live circuit.
“I think we’d all get massively frustrated playing it for the rest of the year if we didn’t feel like we’d achieved something special.”
The band have already played main stage slots at Reading and Leeds Festivals, as well as two sell-out shows at Brixton Academy.
And now The Maccabees are set to return to their old hunting ground when they hit the Brighton Dome stage on Friday 9th March. For more info visitwww.brightondome.org
by: Mike Cobley
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It really should be ridiculous, but it isn't. Somehow concocting a seemingly obnoxious stew that includes such tasty ingredients as incest, violence, mutilation, and nudity - at Theatre Royal Brighton, no less - all comes together in the mix to serve up one of the tastiest treats of Brighton Festival.
With tongues firmly in cheeks, Spymonkey brought Oedipussy onto the hallowed Brighton stage and unravelled the tale o...
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 The Temper Trap pic by Andy Sturmey
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Once, all the standing-ups cheered loudly, like football fans, as Edmund the Bastard was finally killed off i...
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The Bee Detective must have looked, to the assembled band of worthies from the cultural Olympiad, to be just up their street. As they clutched their list of 'things we need from our attempt to show that sports people are intelligent too and that the Olympics is actually not a boring load of expensive shit, a fitness contest sponsored by McDonald's and Coca-Cola, a drug-fuelled cheats paradise with mind numbing events like rifle shooting and wrestling actually CHARGING money to get in' they must have thought like this.
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