Meltdown 2026: Orlando Weeks

The Southbank Centre is not the only institution bringing a Meltdown to London this weekend. With the Victoria Line in crisis, I found myself decanted off the tube at Stockwell and walking up toward the river, wending my way through Elephant and Castle. The area has changed beyond recognition in the last decade, but the gargantuan Michael Faraday Memorial remains at the centre of the neighbourhood. On their last recorded album Marks to Prove It, The Maccabees used a photograph of the huge stainless steel box for the cover — the band had owned a recording studio nearby, affectionately known as Elephant Studios and captured in the 2015 documentary Elephant Days. It felt fitting to remember all this as I made it to Waterloo and took my seat to see the band’s frontman Orlando Weeks put on a solo show as part of Harry Styles’ edition of Meltdown.

In the early 2010s, The Maccabees were the sensitive face of the indie scene, making music that captured the tender, frenetic sound of youth. In the years that have followed, Weeks has grown and become a father, and with it his music has slowed, attuned to the baggier pace of life that parenthood often requires. Though just as finely wrought, the songs are no longer about staying up past midnight but instead concerned with long-term relationships, parental love, and marvelling at a child’s first words. In step with this sensitivity, Weeks has always been something of a nervous performer. Tonight, his anxiety felt palpable as he took to the stage, performing a run of songs with little more than a piano and a spotlight, the rest of the room in darkness. As time passed, however, more lights appeared and illuminated a full backing band. Weeks loosened up with their support, playing the harmonica and full-on dad dancing in the shadows. 

At its best, the show proved why Meltdown is such an important event: the festival offers artists like Weeks the potential to flesh out their sound with a full musical accompaniment in a space that can carry the tenor of his distinct voice. Fan favourites like ‘Look Who’s Talking Now’ felt buoyant and dreamy, while unreleased material had the space to breathe and wash over the audience, a real delight. So too did Weeks take the opportunity to show the depth of his experience, pushing the arrangements of the songs to interesting places by variously singing off-mic to add a thrilling hush to the music. Only in a fine-tuned space like the Queen Elizabeth Hall can such risk taking pay off, and Weeks made sure to thank Meltdown for the funding to strike out with the band in a pitch-perfect environment. 

With The Maccabees back on the scene, it is interesting to see what has changed for them musically in the past decade. Like Elephant and Castle itself, the band have transformed, but fixtures of the old charm remain in their performances. In his solo work, Weeks adds yet more texture to their collective musical cartography, charting charming backstreets and unexplored alleyways that take a lifetime to discover. Long may he keep mapping life in all its wondrous sensibilities.