Orlando Weeks on life after the Maccabees and writing a children's book

Writing and illustrating a new children’s book helped indie frontman Orlando Weeks through the trauma of his band’s split, he tells Johanna Thomas-Corr
Artist at work: Orlando Weeks working on his illustrations
Kate Friend
Johanna Thomas-Corr30 August 2017

Orlando Weeks likes it when things fall into the right place. On his 33rd birthday last year, his band, The Maccabees, announced that they were calling it a day, barely a year after their fourth album, Marks to Prove It, had reached No 1. Precisely one year on from that announcement, on his 34th birthday, Weeks revealed what might seem a surprising move for a recovering indie rock singer. He has written and illustrated a children’s book.

“It’s usually a good sign if neat things happen,” he says as he flicks through a finished copy of The Gritterman, a tender fireside story about an ageing labourer who just really loves spreading grit. In the summer, the old man sells ice creams and lollies from his rusty van but his real passion is de-icing the roads in the winter.

Alongside the words and pictures, Weeks has also recorded a suite of new piano music. The companion album features the voice of comedian Paul Whitehouse narrating a quintessentially English tale of grit and stoicism between Weeks’s tear-jerking tunes.

“It started with writing a song about a seasonal hero and thinking that I could spend more time with him,” Weeks explains. “I had little snatches of piano that felt relevant to the story. And I liked the neatness of a character who could grit ice in the winter and sell ice in the summer. Those things kept happening and the story fitted together. Then, after we announced we were going to split, I just really stuck at it. It was definitely a help being able to focus on something.”

I meet the London-born singer at the Shoreditch House members’ club, where he’s sitting in a corner quietly sipping water, wearing black jeans, a white T-shirt and a silver hoop in his left ear. He comes across rather more like a reticent children’s illustrator than a rock ’n’ roller — but then again, The Maccabees were among the more well-spoken indie bands of the past decade, the kind that played with an anxious intensity yet expressed themselves in bashful double negatives. In their final, emotionally charged gig at Alexandra Palace in July, Weeks told sobbing fans: “We’re not averse to booing, so if you want to boo, get it all out now.”

Two months on from their send-off, the singer is glancing philosophically into the middle distance of the club’s bar, as if its metropolitan decadence is now foreign to him. He nods slowly when I ask if ending a 14-year relationship with the much-admired band was “traumatic”.

“Yeah, and I needed to feel like there was something I could be doing,” he says. “Because I love writing songs, drawing and sitting on my own — it was therapeutic.”

New chapter: Weeks’s illustrations for his children’s book The Gritterman

The result of his lonely efforts is a witty, affectionate book that sets the dignity of toiling away at night against an elegiac tale of climate change. The Gritterman takes place on our hero’s final night of work — he’s been told that his “services are no longer required” because “the planet’s heating up”. While the world sleeps, the widowed labourer heads out into the wind and snow to say a final, surreptitious goodbye to the work he loves.

Weeks’s style clearly owes a lot to Raymond Briggs (he studied illustration at Brighton University before his success with The Maccabees). He’s also drawn inspiration from illustrator Edward Ardizzone and mid-century artist Eric Ravilious, both of whom captured provincial life. And a childhood listening to recordings of P G Wodehouse, Biggles, Roald Dahl and Blackadder on his Fisher Price cassette player has helped inform the language of the book. You feel the story, complete with its soundtrack, would make an enchanting Christmas special on TV, to be repeated every year, in the vein of The Snowman. “The dream is that someone says ‘let’s make an animation’,” the musician says.

I liked the neatness of a character who could grit ice in the winter and sell ice in the summer

Weeks doesn’t have any children of his own but road-tested the book on his seven-year-old godson. “I was just pleased he didn’t throw it across the room.” He was initially told by literary agents that he would need a child protagonist if he wanted to engage children’s interest. Though he appreciated the advice, the music he had already started writing — intimate, nostalgic “wonkily played piano” — perfectly suited his gruffer character. And he found the world of leaking wellies appealing.

“There’s something particularly ungrand about road-gritting,” he says excitedly. “It just seemed really un-romantic. It doesn’t seem heroic in the way that a doctor working all hours and saving lives is, or paramedics or firefighters.”

The multi-media story not only allowed Weeks to draw on his artistic talents, it also gave him the excuse TO move abroad, something he’d never been able to do because of his music commitments. With his girlfriend, to whom he has dedicated the book, he went to Berlin for 10 months and then Lisbon.

I have to psych myself up and be in the mood for London. It’s amazing but it’s big-wave culture

Having grown up in Clapham, gone to school in Highgate and spent most of his adult life in Elephant and Castle, he craved the isolation of a foreign city. Here he managed to “work at my own tempo for the first time… which was much better for my brain”.

He feels the band called time on The Maccabees at the right moment — when I ask what gets him worked up, he says he finds it hard to process his own anger, which was often challenging in the studio. “I’d like to think I could be better at that. Maybe it comes with age.”

He talks about how his voice gets wobbly with emotion when he’s angry. As far as the singing went, this was an asset, “but in the discussions about trying to finish a song there was a lot of [he mimics a weak, wobbly voice] ‘I don’t know…’” He laughs. “Occasionally, that would be the moment when we got some good stuff done but more often than not, that was when the walls would come up because we’re all not good at confrontation.”

Weeks and his girlfriend are now living in Margate, a refuge for many London creatives. “Home will always be London… though actually maybe not,” he reflects. “If you haven’t been in London for a while, you have to really brace yourself for it. There’s a brilliant album by Idles called Brutalism, and every time since that record came out I put it on to psych myself up for London. You have to be in the mood for the city. It’s amazing but it’s big-wave culture. You either stay on the wave or crash out.”

He believes it was by touring with The Maccabees for so many years that he got to know the English landscapes of the Gritterman’s beat. And though the labours of a man shovelling rock salt over the B2116 in the “blue-black hours of night” may seem like a world away from headlining the Latitude festival, Weeks feels a deep kinship with his protagonist.

 Therapeutic: Weeks says writing the book helped him after the Maccabees' split
Kate Friend

He says the Gritterman was partly inspired by his own father, who recently retired as a lobbyist. “There’s this weird teetering going on between people starting new families and the elder members of the family beginning to enter a more precarious stage.” But it’s also, in part, a self-portrait.

“We are massively different but I totally understand that thing of feeling very lucky to enjoy what I do. Because I see so many of my friends who are still trying to find that thing that gives them pleasure. And they are so much cleverer and more hard-working than me. Yet I got lucky because that thing happened for me. So I like the Gritterman because he can go through all that he does and remain unjaded. If the disappointment of this is that he is saying goodbye to what he has known, I wanted him to have a positive outlook. I wanted there to be joy. How amazing to have found pleasure and comfort in a purpose.”

The Gritterman is published on September 7 (Particular Books, £17.99)

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