86TVs: 'It’s difficult to replace what it feels like to be playing your music onstage with your brothers'

Speaking to The Yorkshire Post, Felix says that after 15 years of being deeply attached to The Maccabees – “Because I’d grown up loving guitar music and bands and believing in all the myth and folklore, I’d really told myself this is what I was put on this earth to do” – it had been hard to adjust to life afterwards.

Matters had been made harder by the fact that the band had bowed out at their creative and commercial peak, with farewell shows at Alexandra Palace following their number one album Marks To Prove It. “I thought I’m never going to do anything again that matches this,” he admits. “I was desperate not to be in that classic situation you see in so many bands where they try to do something immediately after and it can’t carry the same emotional heft as what they’d done before, no matter what the music’s like. So for years I was sort of thinking that part of my life is going to have to be done, I’m going to have to make peace with it and I’m going to do other things and I’m going to find it elsewhere.”

For a while he tried his hand at a cricket podcast, composed music for soundtracks and also wrote a memoir, but he found that “it’s really difficult to replace what it feels like to be playing your music on a stage with your brothers and people are into it”. Hence Felix, Hugo and Will “ended up back in studios chasing that thing” all over again.

The addition of Jamie Morrison proved to be the final piece of the puzzle. “He would call himself a ‘vibration station’ and I couldn’t put it any better myself, that’s what he brings to the group,” Felix says. “We were making music at the time that was just instrumental and we were having a few different drummers in at the time just to play with us while it was a loose, private thing that didn’t have form or name or anything.

“Within 20 seconds of him playing whatever it was we were playing at the time, he threw his drumsticks down and went, ‘Could I just say, I’m really enjoying the way everyone communicates together and this really feels like a thing and I’m feeling really good in this place’ and we just thought what an outrageously positive thing to say based on very little experience.

“You couldn’t have a more perfect foil for three brothers in a band than Jamie because everything runs through him and he’s always like, let’s see the bright side, and he’s quite good at conflict resolution.”

The sound of 86TVs’ debut album has brought them back “full circle” to the “high energy guitar music” of bands such as XTC, The Clash and The Beatles that The Maccabees fell in love with in their teens. “Even though we’re much older and we’ve made a lot of music, this is the debut record, so it felt natural to pack it with that same feeling of like how bands used to behave,” Felix says.

“That XTC stuff was music that just popped out of the speakers and you could see the band playing it while you were hearing it – that felt the most exciting thing to do, really.

“We had a video of them on The Old Grey Whistle Test doing Radios in Motion and Statues of Liberty and they were so exciting, that was really a blueprint of what a band should be for us.”

A feeling of missing someone pervades one of the album’s key songs, Komorebi. Twenty-two years on from the loss of his mother to multiple sclerosis, Felix says he has found himself reflecting more on the family’s bereavement.

“For anyone who’s lost a parent young or anything like that, you know that whether you’re articulating it or not, that stays with you every day and it’s sort of implied in your every act,” he says.

“Being brothers and men and being there for our dad when our mum was ill, it wasn’t something that was spoken about as it might be now, you might be encouraged to move through your feelings a bit, but when it happened at that time it was just about getting through to the next thing and there was silence around it, I guess.

“So that’s the interesting thing about this song, it comes up quite a lot the idea of wanting to be with someone again and missing that. It’s not necessarily stuff we’d talk about but it is easier to put it in a song and sing about it together somehow, which just tells you something about men and the human condition a little bit.”

86TVs’ album is out on Friday August 2. The band is doing instores at Bear Tree Records, Sheffield and Jumbo Records, Leeds on August 5, and they play at Siney & Matilda, Sheffield on November 23 and Brudenell Social Club, Leeds on December 1. https://www.86tvsband.com/