Record Rewind: The Maccabees – Colour It In
2 min read
2007 truly was a golden age for British indie music, forget the landfill side to the genre that dominated the charts and you’re left with the birth of some truly iconic bands. In 2017, we had to say a painful goodbye to The Maccabees as they bowed out after their most successful album to date, but as we revisit their phenomenal debut, it’s easier to remember the good times we had together.
It was quite the year for UK talent, the NME still reigned supreme and we didn’t even know about Florence Welch quite yet, but Colour It In got the once incredibly influential journalists dishing out 4 star verdicts and the public followed suit. Making music for the Skins generation, The Maccabees embodied a youthful naivety that millions would continue to tap into over the next ten years.
About Your Dress and Toothpaste Kisses will still instil great feelings of optimism and hope when played some ten years later. The Maccabees youthful spirit reminded a lot of us of the hot indie boys we discovered at sixth form – flash forward ten years and a good few of us now identify as LGBT+, but for a brief period it was nice to kid ourselves with a gentler and more sensitive looking boy in a band.
I will forever remember Toothpaste Kisses being a formative ‘love song’ that I still find myself adding to mix CDs for girls all these years later. Ditto with First Love, which chronicles the unnerving chaos that initial attraction continues to bring to anxious souls seen after a few forays into romance.
The Maccabees were one of the first bands most people my age were able to latch onto as a consistently great band, their departure from the music scene will always hurt. But at the same time, bowing at during their prime was a brave decision few bands are brave enough to make. I will forever be grateful to The Maccabees as being one of the first ever bands I wrote about as a young girl trying to gain experience as a music journalist, they filled my word counts when nobody really took me seriously enough at age 13. Ten years later, there’s still not many people that take me seriously, but Colour It In gave me a confidence and a sensitivity that I now count as invaluable.
