Late life special

Releasing their debut self-titled album this week, it’s a riotous blast of full-throttle angular guitar lines, blissful sunset production, inventive dynamics and tender sentiment. While there are all the touchstones of the brothers’ prominent past, it nods to a richer appreciation of those who came before, and masterful direction on where next to go.

Absent is third brother, guitarist Hugo, and drummer Jamie Morrison. Felix and Hugo are best known for their fifteen years in The Maccabees, one of the most inventive, emotive and loved indie bands of the past few decades. Bowing out at the height of their career in 2017 off the back of number one record Marks to Prove It, there’s more than a slight burden of expectation on the White brothers’ shoulders.

Will had also played with the band as part of their live show, alongside his own solo project BLANc. The three brothers were brought closer together following the loss of their mother to MS in 2002, and have gone on to campaign and fundraise in her honour.

Saying farewell with a run of emotionally-charged headline shows at Alexandra Palace in 2017, The Maccabees departure left both loose strings and broken hearts. The Elephant and Castle studio that acted as a central part of the narrative of Marks to Prove It sat empty as the various band members moved on. “Orlando [Weeks] moved to Lisbon pretty quickly. We were the only people available to use the space while we were selling it,” says Felix. “We just started turning up there as a sort of gravitational pull, but there was no idea about starting a band.”

Over the course of several months the brothers began to play music together, indulging in the catharsis and simple joy of creating. “One of the heartbreaking moments for me in terms of The Maccabees and the way that ended was I felt like it was going to be impossible to be in a band like that again,” says Felix. “All those things of being that age at that time and meeting the right people and all the hundred million things that have to go your way coincidentally for a band to work, it was really present in my head that that would almost be impossible to achieve again.”

Having worked on the production of Marks to Prove It, Hugo continued to hone his talents in studio with the likes of Matt Maltese, The Magic Gang and Jessie Ware. At the same time, Felix was building a career for himself as a writer, broadcaster and label owner, covering shows on Radio X, launching his Tailenders podcast with Greg James and Jimmy Anderson, and founding Yala! Records. Starting a new band was not in anyone’s sights. “The band ended up becoming the thing that we were going back to in our spare time without telling anyone,” Felix says. “There was a similarity there to being a teenager where you start a band and you're almost a bit embarrassed to tell anyone. You do it completely in your spare time. That was one of the endearing aspects. It ended up being something we were doing because we wanted to, because there was almost a genetic pull to doing it while our lives were taking us elsewhere. That was a healthy foundation to make music on because we knew the music we made was for music’s sake.”

Felix’s new found (and humble) celebrity has proven useful in the rollout of 86TVs. For their recent single “Komorebi,” a tender, cinematic cut of rich orchestration, they staged a tongue-in-cheek family therapy session for the video. “If we were to have band therapy, family therapy, who would be the least appropriate person for being a therapist?” asks Felix. “It turns out I happen to be a friend of John McEnroe, so he came and did it for two hours. I played guitar with him yesterday and he was buzzing about the video. He loves it.”

Originally, the brothers felt the music they were creating could become an instrumental score, voice-less and atmospheric. Their intentions began to shift once Jamie joined them on drums. “Jamie was the final piece in the puzzle,” says Will. “He definitely brought an element to the band of just live power that we didn’t have before. That just turned us into a band that was like, we could be outward-reaching, filling rooms. Jamie’s a massive part of that.”

Probably best known as the current drummer for Welsh rock band Sterephonics, Jamie got his start in music around the same time that The Maccabees were ascending, playing drums in the formidable alt-pop trio The Noisettes. “He was such a mythical drummer. People used to be in awe of him,” says Felix. “Crazy technical ability, really loud, looks very mythical, all that stuff. It was quite surreal for Jamie to end up landing in our band and us finding each other at a particular time in our lives. Jamie, without really realising it, is a very good mediator. He uses the phrase ‘positive vibrations’ about every four seconds. Once you’ve heard that enough times you do start to believe it.”

It wasn’t just Jamie who pushed the brothers to add vocals to the music they were writing. There was another big name drop in their process - Johnny Marr. After The Maccabees had announced their split, Felix bumped into Marr at an NME Awards, and was inspired to confide in him. At the time, the band was something of a secret project, quietly evolving in the background. “Set The Boy Free had come out just as The Maccabees were ending. I love Johnny anyway, but I really loved reading that book because it's obviously about reinvention and there's a humility to Johnny and the way he goes about it all. I was really struck by the tone of the book, him resetting himself, forgetting about the past and working on something new despite what the perception might be and whether it’d be more successful or not,” he says. “I sent him loads of the instrumental music at the time which I hadn’t sent to anyone. I was very bold to send that to Johnny Marr. I was looking for some sort of North Star guidance, but he emailed back the next day saying, ‘I've listened to it all multiple times and I think that you guys should sing on this yourselves.’ We didn’t take it as a light bulb moment, but years later that is what ended up happening.”

Once the studio in Elephant & Castle was sold, the group moved their gear to an empty boardroom in Wandsworth which became their base throughout the pandemic. “It's where they bid for the Olympics,” laughs Will. “It was just an empty room and we filled it with all of our gear. It was amazing and we went there basically every day. That's where all the work was done as the band.”

Out this Friday, 86TVs was actually recorded three years ago in that Wandsworth boardroom with the help of producer Stephen Street (Blur, The Smiths). Having worked with Street on the first The Maccabees record, 2007’s Colour It In, the group embraced his professional approach rather than dwelling on the early association. “The first time we worked with Stephen he had a sort of paternal vibe. It was a bit like being in a proper studio for the first time and dad's gonna tell us what to do, because we were only teenagers then,” says Felix. “He's very no-nonsense and quite straightforward.”

“He’s not really got an ego or anything. It’s not like, here comes the big producer now,” says Will. “That’s what we need, really. We have so many ideas and so many creative people in this band inputting things, we just need someone to go like, stop, that’s fine. He definitely played that role and delivered on it.”

While the initial live tracks were recorded in single takes three years ago, it wasn’t until the start of this year that the album was complete. Hugo lent his hand to additional production, as did Richard Woodcraft (Gabriels, Paolo Nutini), the band finessing and fiddling while still working in the shadows. “It was a nightmare,” laughs Will. “It got to the point where I'd stop talking about it because everyone I knew was like, ‘How's the band going? You've been in this band for six years and no one's heard any music.’ So I just stopped talking about it after a while.”

The catalyst for finishing the record and launching 86TVs into the real world was their old friend, Jamie T. Hugo had co-produced his 2022 record The Theory of Whatever which T was touring, and looking for a support act. “He kicked us out the door a little bit,” says Felix. “When we’d done that tour it gave us a bit more focus and vision about what the band actually was. When the audience doesn’t know a band, and you’re just confronted with each other, you’re sink or swim and you could drown so quickly, especially these days with attention spans. That gave it an edge, like a real thrill and danger to it. That was the beginning of the genesis of how the band felt on stage - it gave it some vitality and purpose and energy.”

“That’s a really important moment because we’d made a record that was unplayable live, almost, because we had loads of keyboards on it and pianos and stuff,” says Will. “We were like, we know what we are now. We have to go on stage and win these fans over and we do it with just guitars. We went back to the recordings and we're stripping things back. We kept all the original stuff but we were just peeling stuff back and just being like, it needs to have that energy.”

With the band no longer a secret and their sound defined, they needed a home for the record. Launched in 2016 and having released the likes of Willie J Healey, The Magic Gang and Cathy Jain, Felix’s label Yala! Records was an obvious solution. But instead, the group signed to Parlophone. “I did for a long time think about that,” says Felix. “I was pitching it to the guys for a while but I'm so glad we didn't do that because there has to be a sort of tangible healthy-ish friction between label and band when you're trying to do something. Even the concept that I would have been responsible for all the logistical stuff, all the admin swamp and the chaos that you get loaded with when you run a label. It feels so convoluted and made me feel a bit cross-eyed, but we just didn’t go there at all and I think that was a very, very good decision. There has to be an element of distance to it.”

Running the album campaign would also take away from what has the energy of a vivacious and joy-fuelled debut. Rife with unapologetic references and audacious guitar-lines it sounds like a group making music for themselves. From the explosive rollercoaster of opener “Modern Life” to the intimately personal charm of “Living Is A Drag,” it’s an album that pulses with presence.

First single “Tambourine” swaggers with angular guitar lines, the kind of pop-punch chorus that would pack out an indie-sleaze dancefloor in seconds. The first song that the band wrote for the record, it started life as a slow, acoustic guitar cut before Will’s brothers brought some mid-00s dissonance to the production. “There’s great bands from that era, when we were at the right age to hear it, who made some gnarly straight-ahead guitar music that somehow sounded orchestral as well,” says Felix. “It was a real sort of tapestry, real artfully done, but also direct post-punk music that grabbed you and made you feel like you were driving a car late at night. That was kind of the thing that ‘Tambourine’ just fit into nicely from our sort of muscle memory of doing that music.”

Across the album, 86TVs jump between decades with tracks like “New Used Car” and “Days of Sun” delivering the kind of sunset moments you’d expect to hear on the soundtrack for a 90s coming of age teen classic. “It’s very euphoric guitar music, isn’t it?” laughs Felix. “When we were young (and it was quite a cultish thing to be into) we loved the first Ben Kweller record. Obsessed with that record and for some reason ‘New Used Car’ always makes me think of something off of it.”

For all the moments that burst with bright guitar work, 86TVs balances itself with raw, reflective songs and tender production. “Dreaming,” a confessional narrative of delicate harmonies, equally uplifting and cutting, shares the emotional weight of The Maccabees’ track “Silence,” a standout on Marks to Prove It. “That's also one of Hugo’s,” says Felix. “He's so good at writing those songs that say something very specific and universal in a straightforward way, but you haven't thought to say it like that. Towards the end of The Maccabees we toured with Spiritualised for a bit and we were so in awe of him and them. They were playing the guitars really softly and quietly and nothing was extremely loud but they would have everyone’s full attention and be really moving and somehow it filled the space but everyone’s playing really softly. That’s what we were trying to really take on board, that discipline towards making emotive, universal guitar music that isn’t fireworks.”

A highlight on 86TVs is “Settled,” a knee-jerk of arresting percussion and swooning dynamics that feels both hopeful and questioning. “I’m not really a bass player, so when I was like, ‘I’m gonna play bass,’ it felt like I didn’t really know how to do it,” says Will. “But then ‘Settled,’ that’s the song where me and Jamie were looking at each other when we were making that beat and the placement of the kick drum and the bass on that, we were like, we’ve actually got something here. There’s something about that song that puts it in a different place. It feels almost Dr. Dre in terms of its head-nodding kick drum placement but it’s also got that Tom Petty middle-eight.”

The encapsulating “Spinning World,” has the cacophonous momentum of Blur at their most rousing, the song’s intro abbreviated after the Jamie T touring lessons. Instead the outro is a cinematic showcase of the band’s sonic capabilities. One of their most collaborative tracks, it also highlights the camaraderie and connection between the brothers. “That actually started as two or three different songs,” says Will. “One of them was Felix’s and I think Hugo just put the chords and Felix's song over the second half of my song, and that's how it was born. I was walking out of the sitting room and I've got a baritone ukulele which is the top four strings of a guitar. I just picked it up and I just happened to play the first two chords of it, then suddenly in ten minutes I'd written ‘Spinning World.’ I remember thinking it wasn't that good and sending it to everyone and they were like, no, this is something. That's a good thing about this band - you can just let go of things and some people will be like, actually that's really good. Because if I was on my own I probably would have discarded it.”

On their debut record 86TVs have created a body of work that pays homage to the past, a history they greatly impacted, while also making music that feels confident and personal. Packed with energy, ideas and depth, it shows the space that experience can create. They might not be indie’s freshest faces, but some things are worth the wait.