Orlando Weeks
The Maccabees frontman Orlando Weeks has said despite spending two-and-a-half years completing the band’s fourth album, he’d still go back and tinker with it again if he could.
Although Orlando is proud of Marks To Prove It, he confessed he would change everything on there if he had the opportunity.
“I would tinker and tinker,” he said. “That’s not because I don’t like it, it’s because we’re always moving on and an album should capture what you were doing at the time. But I know I can’t change anything – I’d have to get past four other people before I could anyway.”
Working on the album for so long means there have been a lot of ups and downs, but having bandmates Hugo and Felix White, Rupert Jarvis and Sam Doyle around helps with that, according to Orlando.
“It’s natural when you’re working on something for so long to lose sight of what you’re trying to do, or to have a dip in motivation,” he said.
“But that’s the great thing about having five of us in the band. It might mean there are five opinions to wade through, and as a result, everything takes five times as long to do anything. But when one of us is having a dip, there are four people to say: ‘No, come on, it’s great’ and keep things going.
“We work quite slowly,” Orlando added. “And I’m quite sure we could’ve all made albums on our own in the time, maybe two each, but it wouldn’t be a Maccabees record if that were the case. It has to be all five of us, doing everything, working together.
“We didn’t want to spend this long making a record, and after about eight months of working we thought we’d got it, but we realised it wasn’t that different from the previous album, and where with Given To The Wild we’d wanted that big, massive sound, this time around, we thought it was a bit naff.”
The desire to get better, and as a result, never repeat themselves, is one of the reasons Orlando believes the band have lasted as long as they have.
“We’ve never wanted to make an album that sounded like our last. What would be the point of that?
“I don’t know if we ever thought we’d make two albums, let alone four. We were just excited to be signed to a record label and be making our first,” he said. “But we have got so much better, and we’re much more aware of our own abilities. And we’re so much more confident now, we can get closer to the thing that we envisage.