86TVs discuss brotherhood and life beyond The Maccabees
86TVs, who take their name from an I Am Kloot track, may have only released one song, but they’ve been on this voyage for almost a decade. When The Maccabees split in 2016, singer Orlando Weeks embarked upon a solo career while brothers Hugo and Felix White enlisted their other sibling, Will, as part of their new musical project. However, rather than unveiling their band to the world, it stayed confined to their studio in Wandsworth for several years.
With The Maccabees, they tirelessly worked their way up the ladder for over a decade. Their final album, Marks To Prove It, earned the group their first number one and crowned a gradual success story. With each record, they added a layer to their sound and matured, but shortly before they seemed destined to reach the pinnacle, they were no more.
Following the end of the band, Felix has occupied a unique cultural space, blending the lines between cricket and indie music. Meanwhile, Hugo, who co-produced The Maccabees’ final album, has taken a step into that space and produced Jamie T’s chart-topping 2022 album The Theory Of Whatever.
While they seemingly splintered down different avenues, they’ve been hatching secret plans with brother Will and drummer Jamie Morrison throughout this period. This process has been years in the making, but finally, the Whites are ready to get back in the van and start this journey all over again.
Although The Maccabees bowed out with three sold-out shows at the opulent Alexandra Palace in London, I met Hugo and Will in very different surroundings as we got cosy in the back of a Sprinter Van in the car park of the intimate Adelphi Club in Hull.
As Hugo points out to the amusement of Will, these are the venues you only play twice in your career, once on the way up and once on the way down, noting: “There’s a nice thing about it because it’s like we’re not playing it on the way down.”
While they are undoubtedly on the rise, it’s taken seven years to reach this point of a headline tour. Following the band’s split, Hugo explains how they would rehearse “at least twice a week”. However, they were making purely instrumental music back then, and Hugo confesses, “We didn’t really know what we were doing.”
Initially, they thought their new project didn’t need a singer and instead invited friends over to their studio to experiment as vocalists. “That went on for a while,” Hugo explains. “We pretty much wrote an album of instrumental music, but we didn’t know what it was for. During that process, we met Jamie by chance, and we’d known him since his Noisettes days. He came down one day to play with us, and the whole thing just gelled”.
The group had tried a few drummers beforehand, but nobody else slotted into the environment quite like Morrison. Although they continued to make instrumental music following his arrival, within a few months, 86TVs began a “natural progression” of evolving those songs into what they are today.
Will notes how Morrison was also a “super positive” influence who encouraged them to follow their ideas. He adds: “To be honest, we weren’t searching for a drummer to make the band. We were mucking around and didn’t even know if we were going to do a band. Maybe it was going to be a project, and we make albums with collaborators, but when he came, it was like, ‘Wow, we’ve just got a band’. He’s a really rare find.”
In the beginning, 86TVs had no identity and no strict plan for their future. While this may sound daunting, for Hugo, it was refreshing to return to making music without the stresses of being in a band the size of The Maccabees.
“We were figuring out life, really. After being in a band for the majority of our lives, there was actually a big thing until not that long ago where we were making music, but personally, in my head, I was thinking, ‘I don’t know if I want to be in a band,'” Hugo confesses.
While Will wasn’t an official member of The Maccabees, he did tour with the group as a keyboardist and enjoyed a solo career as Blanc. However, as he and Hugo are now fathers, they are throwing themselves into 86TVs with less force than when they first took a swing at the music industry. Will admits: “It’s a completely different experience, and we need to think twice about the idea of touring, or if we’re playing a show because we can’t slog it across the country to do something if it’s not 100% necessary at this stage because we’ve got kids.”
Although 86TVs are taking a considered approach as they all have other commitments, they are revelling in the experience of being in a group again. Hugo refers to the beginning of The Maccabees as a “whirlwind” and “the most exciting time for the band”, which makes him eternally grateful to “do that again”.
Unconventionally, 86TVs don’t have a lead singer. Instead, the three White brothers jostle over vocal duties in true sibling fashion and rotate starring roles across their set at The Adelphi. Ultimately, their brotherly bond separates them from other bands, with their chemistry radiating across the entire room during their performance.
The decision to democratise the frontman role eventually came naturally, but it took 86TVs a long time to reach this conclusion. Will explains: “None of us wanted to be the frontman, but we all wanted to sing. As brothers, you have to work out the dynamic, and when we all started singing together, we realised, ‘Oh, this is our secret thing’.”
He continued: “Every band needs that one thing they do that no one else can do, and ours was this blood harmony thing that naturally happens with siblings. Weirdly, we hadn’t thought about it before until way down the line, but when we found it, we were like, ‘Oh shit, we’ve got a band’.”
It was still a long way to the finishing line from that breakthrough moment, and they were years away from their first live performance. Sometime later, the group sought the assistance of legendary producer Stephen Street, who previously worked with The Maccabees, and he was tasked with overseeing the operation.
Will describes Street as the “adult in the room” and labels him the “perfect person” for the project. Although they’ve made enough songs for a double album, the White brothers say it will be released as a traditional record, and fans are likely to wait until the back end of 2024 to hear it.
So far, 86TVs have only released their debut single ‘Worn Out Buildings’. Hugo believes the track was a “good place to start” for the band, noting how it’s a “really good representation of us as a band and our dynamic”.
A year before their first release, 86TVs took to the stage in 2022 when they performed in front of friends and family at the Omeara in London. Reflecting on the nerve-wracking occasion, Will says: “We had no idea who we were on stage. We’d never stepped on stage as a band before, and we’d spent all this time in a room making 20 songs. That gig was basically just to prove to ourselves that we were in a band and to prove to everyone that would ask, ‘How’s the music going that you’re doing?'”
A few months later, before releasing a note of music or signing to Parlophone, they supported Jamie T across the United Kingdom, including at Alexandra Palace, the location where The Maccabees bowed out. After spending half a decade working away in Wandsworth on a project which Hugo admits was “stupid” and “crazy” because there was no clear goal, they finally began to see a return on their investment of time.
For most of their tenure, Hugo wanted the project to be a creative release, and touring with 86TVs has scratched an itch he didn’t know he had. “I was quite satisfied not to play in a band again, but once we started doing it, you realise that’s such a big side of our lives, and it’s really important to have it back,” he reveals.
In their past life, the White brothers achieved musical greatness and success, but by the end, it was a challenging task that took them to their limit. With 86TVs, there’s a strong emphasis on enjoying themselves and caring more about the flight than the destination.
It’s still unknown how far 86TVs will go at this early stage, but that almost doesn’t matter. The Whites are back doing what they do best and appreciating the opportunity to take a second bite at the apple.
