The Maccabees joined NME backstage at Glastonbury 2025 to discuss their recent reunion and returning to Worthy Farm for the first time in a decade. Check out the full interview below and part of the video above.
The band broke up in 2017 but announced their return last October. They played their first gig back on June 20 at London’s The Dome for a charity gig in aid of MS Society.
At Glastonbury 2025, the band headlined The Park stage on Sunday (June 29) to close out this year’s festival – where they were joined by their old friend Florence Welch. Speaking to NME beforehand, frontman Orlando Weeks and guitarist Felix White shared how they were feeling.
“We’re about two or three hours away from playing, so we’re in that moment of, ‘Oh, it’s real’, but it feels good,” White said. “’Land’s been saying to me since we got here – he’s been giving me numbers of how nervous he is and it’s changing quite wildly. It’ll be a for and then suddenly a seven, so maybe I’ll just ask Land, what’s the number now?”
“Oh, I think I’m on a pretty even five, actually,” Weeks replied. “I’m quite hot. Quite hot, dusty, but I don’t know that that’s impacting on my nervousness.”
Check out the full interview with Weeks and White below.
NME: Hello The Maccabees. Welcome back to Glastonbury. It’s been 10 years since you were last here. What do you remember of that set?
Felix White: “Well, that is quite big in The Maccabees’ story, because obviously Jamie T came and played with us and that’s one of the things from our history that seems to get clipped up and used quite a lot. So that was a big deal at the time. I think this might be the fifth time we played Glastonbury and it always went up from being the first on or the second on the new bands tent to we were second top of what’s now the Woodsies tent, covered in mud, me wearing one sock, playing to not that many people. And then we did some quite big shows on the Other Stage.
“The coolest thing, really, about this is that we never felt like The Maccabees were going to do it again. And for me, personally, I used to buzz and live for these moments so much, so I just had that time where I thought, ‘Oh, we’re not going to do that, that’s not really part of my life – other things are, but that isn’t’. So it’s just exciting to feel like we’re going to have that experience again. It’s great.”
What does it mean to be able to be back at Glastonbury headlining The Park stage?
Orlando Weeks: “I don’t know about on the larger scale, but it’s the first time my son’s going to see me sing, on a stage anyway. So that’s exciting for me. We’ve been on tour in the last week, just some shows in northern Europe and it’s been so good, I think. Also Glastonbury is such another world that it feels like you don’t have to connect it too much to anything else. It can just be this standalone, bizarre moment.”
White: “That’s really true. I think we just feel like we want to really appreciate what it is – not that we didn’t before, but it just feels like it’s not a given. So we’re just going to try and really grasp it and live inside it.”
You mentioned the tour there – you started off with a charity gig in London last week. How was that being back on stage together for the very first time in eight years?
White: “Yeah, that was a really mad evening for a number [of reasons]. We were doing it for MS Society, which is a thing that’s important to us and when we did the last Maccabees shows, we did a gig for MS Society again. So that just felt right to bookend it and it gave the whole thing a really nice feeling. But you were there – there was a lot of feeling in that room. It surprised me, actually, because I was finding that on stage, in a split second, I was euphoric and then I was actually crying at Tufnell Park Dome and then feeling other things.
“You felt all this feeling inside your body that the action of playing the music brings out in us, and it was all happening in there and just felt amazing. I haven’t felt like that for a very long time, as we did in that room. And to be honest, all across Europe, it’s been quite similar to that show.”
Weeks: “Absolutely, yeah. We’ve been turning up in these cities that we haven’t been to for [years], that aren’t our hometown and they’re sold out rooms and people having a very good time from the moment we start playing. At the first show, I had norovirus or something so I was just on survival mode, so I missed all the crying. I was just desperate not to be sick. Since then, I’ve felt all of the nice feelings and I think tonight might be a bit of that.”
White: “Are you gonna cry?”
Weeks: “I might cry. Yeah, I might cry. I’m not ruling it out.”
White: “Let me know when you cry so we don’t cry at the same time.”
Weeks: “Yeah, we don’t want to waste crying. Good point.”
What does the response that you’ve had at these shows mean to you? You have been away for a long time, so it’s not a given that you would have that reaction still.
Weeks: “In all honesty, what I have been concentrating on is just how it’s felt for us and that is in no way demeaning how it might have felt. It’s just as part of getting through this and sort of easing back into all being together. Absolutely my priority has just been how am I feeling? How is Fe’ feeling? How are the boys feeling?
“All of that has been great and I think that’s what has come across. I think that sense of our pleasure at doing it is what people have said to us after the shows. People have said to me, ‘I think you’re having a good time’. So yeah, I think it’s a weirdly complicated emotional experience, so the more you can simplify it, the easier it’s felt and the better it’s felt.”
In a five-star review of the band’s Glastonbury 2025 performance, NME wrote: “This could go down as one of The Maccabees’ most euphoric shows. There are few things more joyful than witnessing White grinning ear to ear as he hypes up the crowd between songs. Frontman Orlando Weeks, meanwhile, looks happier than ever, joining his bandmate in some rare instances of geeing up the crowd and looking truly appreciative of the moment.”
Elsewhere, the festival was headlined by The 1975, who appeared to tease a new era at the end of their set, Neil Young, and Olivia Rodrigo. The latter was joined on stage during her performance by The Cure’s Robert Smith to cover two of the band’s songs.
Secret sets across the weekend came from Lorde, who performed her new album ‘Virgin’ in full, Lewis Capaldi, who completed his Glastonbury 2023 set on the Pyramid Stage, and Haim, who celebrated their new record ‘I Quit’. Pulp were also revealed as the mystery band behind the pseudonym Patchwork.
Check back at NME here for the latest news, reviews, interviews, photos and more from Glastonbury 2025.
