The Maccabees, Coronet London, review: Band lights the fuse on an explosive night

They work the stage with focused, patient gusto

The Maccabees in 2012 (Getty Images)

For the Maccabees’ unassuming frontman, Orlando Weeks, this was a homecoming and the crowd at London’s Coronet, in Elephant and Castle, could not have been more jubilant to be in the company of a band who work the stage with focused, patient gusto.

So, as the Maccabees lit the fuse on a career-spanning set, “from the very new to the very old” in Weeks’s words, the excitable crowd were swept up in the cacophony of pummelling rhythms and percussion. Oldie “Latchmere” trembled precociously. The audience stomped and sang loudly to “Precious Time”, while jet-propelling summer anthem “Marks to Prove It” hurtled skyward with its vigorous, Led Zeppelin-like intro. When the band wasn’t silhouetted by blinding strobe lighting, the faces of Weeks and guitarists Hugo and Felix White beamed brightly.

Dedicating encore song “Forever I’ve Known” to the Coronet – an ageing structure that is also a stone’s throw from the Maccabees’ studio – Weeks said the building has inspired his band’s upcoming as-yet-unnamed fourth album, because it “takes you someplace else”. The Maccabees did the very same tonight, taking their adoring fans up, up and away effortlessly.