After his son was born, Orlando Weeks started to see danger everywhere. “Soft edges suddenly become very pointy edges,” says the singer. “Floors you’d never thought of as hard – suddenly they’re far too hard.”
Weeks has always understood himself to be an anxious individual. That jitteriness – a tendency to focus on the cloud rather than the silver lining – had been a gift to the Londoner in his past life fronting perennially fraught indie urchins The Maccabees, who broke up in 2017. But as a new parent, his highly strung personality went straight into the minus column. What if he was too crippled with panic to actually care for the child?
“I was nervous that the strains and pressures and the relentlessness of looking after a small baby would be too much,” he confesses. “It’s the nature of being anxious: you’re just anxious about being anxious.”
In terms of the joy and excitement of parenthood – I hadn't documented that aspect of our time nearly enough. That's what Hop Up started as
He worried in vain. The turmoil of early parenthood (his son is now 3½) has, in fact, become an unexpected source of inspiration for the 38-year-old. He documented the responsibility he felt about bringing, along with his partner, a new life into the world on 2020’s A Quickening. Now, 18 months later, he’s letting in the sunshine in the form of a playful, effervescent and defiantly buoyant companion piece, Hop Up.
“With A Quickening coming out in the middle of lockdown and therefore not having the opportunity to tour it – it meant that, for the first time in my record-making life, I’ve had a chance to live with a record, without having the live celebration of the music,” he says.
“So I think I’ve looked at it slightly differently. I saw A Quickening as being a witness to what was going on with myself and my partner and us having a child on the way. With a tiny bit of hindsight, I just saw holes in it. In terms of the joy and excitement [of parenthood] – I hadn’t documented that aspect of our time nearly enough. That’s what Hop Up started as.”
He’s slightly concerned that Hop Up, which is released on January 14th, might verge on cheesy. There’s no need to fret, however. If unapologetically upbeat, the project stays clear of that dreadful genre of Cloying Dad Pop – as most notoriously exemplified by Stevie Wonder cringe-fest Isn’t She Lovely.
“I’m thrilled that that’s how it feels,” he says. “And if I’ve avoided toe-curliness, then all the better.”
One of the things Hop Up has going for it is that, musically, it is pretty out there. Drawing on electronica, R&B and hip-hop, it resides in a place beyond genre. You’d certainly never guess it was the work of the artist responsible for such supremely jangly tunes as the 2007 Maccabees’ single About Your Dress.
That track had a surreal second lease of life in 2020 when Vice magazine published an overview of the much-derided UK “landfill indie” scene of the early 2000s. Naming About Your Dress 14th best “landfill indie” song of all time, Vice hailed its “noisy, sharp-cornered guitars that feel like the soundtrack to the inner monologue of a 17-year-old”.
“The realms of what I want to do or how I want to approach songwriting have totally changed,” says Weeks. “I’m not going to be stuck in a manifesto that I wrote when we were all in our teens or 20s. Everything [at that age] is high drama and the worst possible thing and the most tragic. You survive all that. I put it down to becoming a parent.”
Weeks is four years into life as a solo artist. And yet many people are still confused as to why The Maccabees split. They had never been massively popular until very late into their career. At which point they suddenly decided to pull the plug.
The band had come of age in the glory days of the aforementioned “landfill indie” movement that also gave the world The Kooks, The Libertines and Razorlight. It ultimately turned into a bit of a black hole and not everyone escaped with their reputation intact. Razorlight will, for instance, always be damned by their association with the “L word”.
The Maccabees, though, were one of the lucky ones. Among their saving graces was the fact they were friends brought together by their love of music rather than strangers assembled by a record label – as was the case with many of their fellow travellers.
We couldn't believe that us lazy boys were doing anything at all. Yet here we were. And people were coming. We got less lazy
They were also quite posh. Weeks, the son of a public affairs lobbyist, attended Highgate, a £20,000 a year private school in Hampstead (and also the alma mater of Razorlight’s Johnny Borrell, as well as Ringo Starr’s son Zak) And so, instead of flying with small-town ragamuffins such as Pigeon Detectives or The Enemy, their true peers were probably the equally comfortably-off Mumford and Sons and Florence Welch (a huge fan).
“It was exciting,” Weeks says of those early days. “Starting anything is exciting. Especially if you’re as green as we were. And we really were. We played six months of gigs in every dive and one-man-and-his-dog pub in London and the south east. I don’t think we had a tuner for most of that. We certainly didn’t have a reverb pedal. And we would have looked very curiously at you if you suggested us getting one because we didn’t know what it meant. We couldn’t believe that us lazy boys were doing anything at all. Yet here we were. And people were coming. We got less lazy.”
They also got better and better with each release. Their third album, Given to the Wild, was nominated for the 2012 Mercury Music Prize. And the 2017 follow-up Marks To Prove It went to number one in the UK. The Maccabees were by then selling out the Olympia in Dublin and the 10,000-capacity Alexandra Palace in London. After years of standing still, suddenly they were going places. The irony was that Weeks was by then desperate for a change of scenery.
“It felt like the time had come where I couldn’t be doing that any more. I needed to make a change. It was a long time. We kept the same job longer than any of our peers. Everyone we grew up with had had four different jobs, five different jobs, lived in other countries, or moved away. And we had been living a wonderful time, living this dream of being a band that could survive as a band. Everything has to come to an end.”
He’s no longer afraid to write “happy” music. As a younger man he believed that for art to be worthwhile it had to contain an element of suffering. Now he’s over all that.
“I’ve always felt the only way that you can sort of justify the sort of indulgence of writing songs about your state of mind was to take those difficult moments and to try and exorcise them or to find catharsis,” he says. “Instead of living with the painfulness. And I think that might be absolute nonsense actually.”
Weeks lives in South London. And yet Hop Up doesn’t feel at all like an urban record. Rather, there is a sense of harmony with the great outdoors. “Deep down under the ocean, you come shimmering up,” Weeks sings on Deep Down Way Out. “No stopping this sky, high as it’s wide,” he croons on Big Skies, Silly Faces. It’s hard not to picture him under a canvass of clouds, exalting in the simple loveliness of it all.
“I can feel me looking at the world through the window. I think that’s because I wrote it when we were all stuck inside looking at the world through a window. I was trying to make sure every choice was to move the record into something buoyant and joyful, keep it as ‘cloud nine’ as I could. Part of that was enjoying those big skies – taking the pleasure from as much of that stuff as you possibly could. And savouring it. Because you miss it when it’s not there.”
One thing Weeks doesn’t miss is the coddling that is part of being in a big indie outfit. On the road with The Maccabees , the crew would take care of everything. But when he played some dates around London recently, it was just Weeks keeping it all together.
“You have to make sure the merch desk has a light. And if it doesn’t you have to go and borrow a lamp from the bar downstairs because otherwise no-one can see the T-shirts. You have to make sure the lighting guy, who may or may not care about what you are doing . . . you have to make them care.”
The aim is to “tick every possible box” so that the concert is as good as it can be. “And there’s something in how time consuming and involved that is that means that when you come to do the gig you’ve earned that. When you get to a certain level as a band, you turn up and the one thing you have to do that day is the hour and a bit you’re on stage. It’s very hard not to relax into that. Not having it suits me much better.”
Hop Up is released January 14th
