86TVs’ Felix White: ‘The way The Maccabees ended stung… it was heartbreaking for me’

The guitarist tells Mark Beaumont why it took eight years to make an 86TVs debut album, why he made the Tailenders cricket podcast, and how he and his brothers dealt with losing their mother to MS

86TVs’ Felix White: ‘You spent a lot of your early life, if you’ve lost someone really young, being emotionally reactionary to things' (Louise Mason)

For all his anger therapy tapes and Zen meditation techniques, it takes just a few sessions as a psychiatrist for 86TVs before John McEnroe snaps.

As the tearful band of brothers, sprouting from the ashes of indie rock heroes The Maccabees, weep and brow-clutch about the trials and tribulations of the music industry, McEnroe’s hard-won calmness cracks, the old red mist descends. One mither too many and he’s smashing vases into their heads, taking a cricket bat to their pictures and screaming in their faces – “get a real job!” and “you’re the worst band ever!”

“It was quite close to the bone what he came out with,” says Felix White, still a little shaken as he explains the above concept behind 86TVs’ latest video, for relatively serene single “Komorebi”. He had struck up a “really trippy” friendship with the racket-lobbing tennis legend after writing the music for the 2022 documentary film McEnroe, ending up playing in his regular post-Wimbledon party band.

“I’ll get a call at 11 o’clock at night from John McEnroe telling me to learn two songs by The Cars and ‘Rock and Roll’ by Led Zeppelin and turn up the next day,” he says. It seemed fitting, then, to invite McEnroe to play their driven-to-the-brink shrink, bawling their troubles away with his own brand of rage counselling.

“We did it to the point where it felt like ‘f***ing hell, John McEnroe is really telling me this’,” Felix says, seated with his younger brother and one-time live Maccabees member Will in a glass-fronted room at their London record label offices.

“He took to it, he didn’t need to get told twice.”

‘It was quite close to the bone’: John McEnroe in 86TVs’ music video for ‘Komorebi' (Press)

Indeed, the emergence of 86TVs – and this week’s impressive self-titled debut album, released eight years after The Maccabees’ farewell shows at Alexandra Palace in 2017 – is as much therapy as sonic fulfilment. Brothers Felix, Will and Hugo White started to work together just days after the split, which by all accounts was a vague and opaque affair, a simmering cauldron of fractures and differences rather than any monumental blow-up.

“A lot of things happen over 15 years, like every single band you’ve heard about,” Felix says. “It wasn’t a big fallout, because X has done this. That almost made it harder to get over.”

From outside, the split seemed wildly ill-timed too. “It just ran out of steam,” Maccabees’ singer Orlando Weeks told me in 2020, citing the creative frustrations of working as a group and “a difficult time” making their fourth album Marks to Prove It in 2015.

‘It just ran out of steam’: Orlando Weeks performs during the Maccabees’ final show at Alexandra Palace (Getty)

Yet, alongside Foals, the band were gaining huge respect as exploratory pioneers of modern rock textures and seemed in steady ascendance: Marks to Prove It went to No 1, they had recently headlined Latitude festival and seemed primed to step up to the biggest leagues. For Felix, enthralled by the romance of the once-in-a-lifetime alchemy of bands like REM and Blur and not wanting the band to split (“The Maccabees was my dream,” he says) a personal and creative rug was pulled away.

“I felt like The Maccabees were three-quarters up the rungs of that ladder and we were pretty much there,” he says. “So the way it ended stung in a perfect way… it was heartbreaking for me at the time. We were mid-thirties and there was a real sense of saying goodbye to a part of your life.”

While his Maccabees siblings continued down musical paths – Will sporadically released electronic pop noir solo tracks as BLANc and Hugo turned to producing for acts including Jessie Ware, Paloma Faith and Jamie T – Felix spent the following years developing a polymath life.

He launched Yala! Records, penned the cricket-themed memoir It’s Always Summer Somewhere and started a cricketing podcast called Tailenders with radio host Greg James and fast bowler Jimmy Anderson (whose autobiography he’s currently ghostwriting). Such exploits, he claims, gave him the confidence to exist outside of The Maccabees’ bubble but left him struggling with crises of life and identity.

‘A lot of things happen over 15 years’: The Maccabees at the Mercury Prize in 2012 (Getty)

“The false sense of security of being a band like The Maccabees is that you walk around with this feeling of ‘I’m in The Maccabees, that’s who I am’,” he says. “On stage playing, I never had any doubt that I belonged anywhere but on that stage with those people. And people respond to you in a certain way that you might not be realising. When you’re not that person, you can’t label yourself so clearly. You’re at sea a little bit, without being able to explain who you are.”

A greener-grass mentality quickly had him chasing all of the alternate, Sliding Doors Felixes he could be all at once. “There’s so many possibilities [in life] and I think subconsciously I decided to try and do all of them,” he admits. “The thing that always jarred with me is the feeling of I’m in a room, but there may be six or seven other rooms that could be better and I should be in. If I’d made a few different decisions there might be something more exciting or more homely or more fun and you belong there. I’ve loved doing the other things but I’m not thinking, ‘I was put on this earth to do cricket podcasts’.”

The three brothers, instinctively aware that their true purpose was music, began privately bringing each other songs to work on in a Wandsworth rehearsal space once used as the 2012 Olympics Committee HQ. Felix describes the process as “almost like putting bandages on”. He poured his ideas into a thumping indie punk track called “Someone Else’s Dream” and tropical loss-of-youth anthem “Days of Sun”.

And, as much as the driving, cosmic indie rock the siblings stewed over the next six years naturally married the bristling energies of their favourite teenage bands (The Beatles, XTC, The Clash) with The Maccabees’ spacious art-rock textures (“we’re making it with the same gear,” Felix smirks), other subconscious matters swam to the surface.

Sharing the vocals, all three brothers found themselves writing songs about loss, regret, missing someone. It was only in retrospect, having recorded the album in the rehearsal space with producer Stephen Street and ex-Noisettes drummer Jamie Morrison two years ago, that they realised they were all referencing the death of their mother from MS when they were teenagers.

Felix White: ‘There’s so many possibilities [in life] and I think subconsciously I decided to try and do all of them' (Louise Mason)

“That is obviously a huge part of our lives because she was ill for most of our childhoods,” Felix says. “There’s a theory with people that have been ill for a chunk of time, that it almost takes the same amount of time again, after their life has inevitably ended, that you process it and come back up for air. It’s quite interesting that we would then be regrouping and talking about that as brothers, but in songs. You couldn’t have done it before because you’re trying to make sense of it in your daily life.”

Was now the right time for songs about her to emerge? “Maybe emerge in a way that’s not reactionary,” Will muses. “You spent a lot of your early life, if you’ve lost someone really young, being emotionally reactionary to things. So maybe now is a good time because I feel like we’ve all lived a bit of a life. The conversation can happen in a much more reflective, understanding way. So that my experience isn’t the experience, everyone has an experience that’s different. That took a long time to understand.”

A seemingly abstract line from recent single “Worn Out Buildings” – “lovers, warriors, kings and magicians all walk beside us” – also hints at the album’s therapeutic nature. It references a support group Will has joined which uses those Jungian archetypes as a roadmap to self-discovery.

“The archetypes represent each part of the session,” he explains. “You start with the lover round which is the part of you that opens up to grief and is vulnerable. You get to the magician round, which is the part of you that can plan for the future and understands what you’ve learned in the past.

“The warrior is the part of you that takes action and the king is the one that can bless and be blessed and understands sacrifice.”

We’re a quarter Palestinian, so I find it impossible to say that I have hope for Starmer

In spotlighting the personal, 86TVs bypasses the political – a good thing, considering it might otherwise have been a tornado through Starmer’s honeymoon. “We are quarter Palestinian,” Will says, “so I find it almost impossible to say that I [have any hope for Starmer] knowing that he’s willing to wipe that whole nation off the planet…

“The really sad part of it is that we’re now shifted so that any Left thought is completely out of the question,” he continues. “We’re talking centre-right, far right; that’s where we’re discussing everything, society-wise. And that is nowhere near what we need to be talking about. We need to be talking about hardcore Left stuff to do with the environment. Because otherwise we’re f***ed.”

Whatever conscious and unconscious processes 86TVs went through in making their debut album, they worked. Felix has found fresh purpose and identity in the band, and come to terms with the death of The Maccabees.

“Accidentally, The Maccabees ending when it did has been an extremely positive thing for me in my life,” he says, brushing off – but not entirely dismissing – questions of any possible future reunion. “My life’s been full of so many other things and that feels good.”

Felix White: ‘ The Maccabees ending when it did has been an extremely positive thing for me in my life' (Louise Mason)

With his new band tightened into attack formation by the “sink or swim” experience of supporting Jamie T on tour, he feels that their “blood harmony” melodicism could cut through the decade-plus barrage of post-punk sprechgesang bands (“is singing out of fashion?”) and become a unifying new alt-rock force.

“[86TVs] started reminding us of all the bands we loved growing up where you’d go and see a guitar band and they changed the way you felt about the world or would kickstart your life a little bit,” Felix says. “That’s maybe what this band is.”

For all John McEnroe’s on-screen shout-downs, 86TVs have the potential to match, even exceed, their former band’s glories. And yes, we can be serious.

‘86TVs’ is out on Friday