Morning,
Yes, it’s early for a drink, but please join Ted in Norman’s Coach & Horses in Soho, London, for a couple of pints in the company of Felix White, the most charming and hardest working man in all of the British creative industries.
I will no doubt forget one of the careers that Felix is currently mastering, but at the moment he is:
About to release this Friday a self-titled debut album with his 86TVs, the band he formed with his brothers Hugo and Will, after his and Hugo’s former band The Maccabees split at their peak in 2016 with a number one album.
This morning, announcing he’s working with England’s greatest ever bowler Jimmy Anderson on his biography.
Presenting Tailenders, Britain’s leading cricket podcast and live show, alongside Anderson and Greg James.
Incredibly, co-commentator for BBC’s baseball coverage.
Co-owner of Yala!, the record label that’s home to Willie J Healey and Egyptian Blue, among others.
Co-host of The Fulham Fix, the official Fulham podcast.
A member of John McEnroe’s band…
Just writing that list and laying out this newsletter is a morning’s work for me. Let’s buy Felix a pint of Guinness and find out how he fits it all in.
Enjoy the edition,
Ted, Niall and Chris
Start The Week With…Felix White
So, welcome Felix, the hardest working man in show business.
Ha!
We’re going go through each of your hustles and activities.
Alright, let’s do it. OK.
I often think I’ve had a productive morning if I compose five emails, so I want to know how you get it all done.
I have days like that too, mate.
Let’s start with the music and your band 86TVs, who have an album out this week. How’s that been?
As you know, we’re living in a brutal, brutal time to be putting music out. You can spend five years working on something but it’s totally disposable because everyone can have it for free. I guess it’s managing expectations with that.
Whose expectations? Yours?
Good question. I think it is my expectations. We’ve been doing 86TVs since Maccabees broke up really. I used to always get asked in the Maccabees about when I’d do a band with my brothers, but we never really played together growing up. It wasn’t a Haim situation. It just happened out of the debris of the Maccabees. We still had the studio in Elephant and Castle, the old Jesus and Mary Chain studio called the Drug Store which was going to be knocked down. This was before my brothers had kids, pre me doing the sports stuff and all that, I was trying to work out what I was going to do next…
Everything. You were going to do everything.
I didn’t know that then though! We were just playing. I don’t think any of us wanted to sing any songs. We were thinking maybe we’d get a lead singer, all this shit. It only occurred to us three or four years into it, that if we sung together it sounded like three or four people or one person at the same time. Singing together brought some kind of comfort to it, and meant we’d all bring songs…is that an answer?
Pretty much explains it.
The best thing about it is it was like when you start a band when you’re young for something to do. We weren’t thinking of deals or anything, it was just for ourselves.
And before you know it, you have expectations for it to be managed.
It’s hard, isn’t it? I don’t even know what the expectations are, but we started doing some supports in big places. We did the first Brixton Academy with Editors, we did the Noel [Gallagher] gig outside at the weekend, and when you’re in those spaces you can’t help but dream. I was always so happy in those places in Maccabees, like that’s where we’re supposed to be.
And that’s where you split up, doing the biggest gigs of your career at Alexandra Palace.
Well, I didn’t want to break up the band. I was desperate about it. I was, like, ‘We’ve just been doing this for fifteen fucking years and now we’re finally headlining festivals so maybe we should just keep doing this for a little bit?’ It ended up being a positive thing for me, though, maybe for all of us.
You wouldn’t have ended up doing all that you’ve done if you’d carried on with Maccabees.
No, definitely not. But having read so much about bands growing up, to stop just before our R.E.M. moment…was kind of perfect really.
What I like about your 86TVs album is that it is a nice mood marriage of melancholy and positivity.
I’m glad you think that. When we started singing together, we realised that all the bands we’d fallen in love with when we were teenagers, even Interpol, were guitar bands who were high dynamics, and you went into their space and felt exercised of something. You felt uplifted, they changed the direction of your life. Doing this band, we felt there weren’t that many bands that gave you that feeling. So, it’s in our DNA, even in the Maccabees, to take something really sad and make it positive. Lyrically, it is quite melancholic in 86TVs: a lot of it is that sense of missing someone.
And, being in a band with your brothers, is it fractious, because historically – Gallaghers, Davies, etc – it can be? Did you fight when you were kids?
Well, because we had a mum who wasn’t very well when we were growing up, you find in those families, siblings don’t argue as much. There’s something bigger happening in the house. So, we didn’t wrestle about shit, we never squabbled. Which of course means it’s probably manifested in close to forty years of passive aggressive looks. Instead, we’re making songs together which is quite sweet. There’s so much we wouldn’t say to each other, but instead you hear us singing it to each other.
Let’s look at your next full-time, part-time role…
You know what I keep thinking about? There’s a line in your My Old Man book at the very start where you describe a sense that there’s always a better room that you could be in. That landed in my head in such a way, so when I’ve been doing interviews for this record I’ve been talking about that a lot. Because there’s that feeling of not knowing where you’re supposed to be ever, and if you made five different life decisions then there’s a funnier or more loving or whatever place to be. And I’ve started to realise that that feeling when I’m playing music on stage is the only time when I’m in the right place.
When you’re doing Tailenders, do you feel like you should be making music?
With Tailenders, I feel more manic. I do feel like I belong. I do feel like it’s almost a band. But it’s wild. I always think, ‘What am I doing?!’ There was no inkling that when the band broke up, I was going to become a cricket commentator.
It’s so mad.
So mad. How it started was right towards the end of the Maccabees, there was a woman called Lisa Ward who worked at Fiction, our label. It was that classic thing where she was trying to work if any of the band were into anything. She knew that I liked sport, but in my head, it was very uncool. We were very contained, so I was worried they’d think about me talking about sport. But she convinced me to give it a try. Greg [James] had a show at the time with [England’s great spin bowler] Graeme [Swann] and Jimmy [Anderson], so I went on as a guest. I made a lot of goofy analogies about how if I was a cricketer I’d want to be the guy at second slip who’s always looking at his fingernails after the catch has gone by; how the slip cordon is like bands, the hierarchy and in-jokes. From there, it just…when the Maccabees split up Greg asked if I wanted to do a show with Jimmy, a few episodes, and then seven years later…
And that was the start of your friendship with England’s greatest swing bowler?
Jimmy came to see the Maccabees play at Reading, with Graeme Swann, on the same day they’d been playing South Africa. Came straight to the festival afterwards and it was like, for me, The Avengers turning up. That was the start, yeah. We’re really close friends now. We’re in touch all day, every day.
Of course, you’re also a baseball commentator too now.
The baseball thing is so…when we were doing the last tour of the States with the Maccabees the baseball was on in every bar that we’d go to. It clicked that it’s got the same function as cricket. It’s got a beautiful colour to it, the uniforms are amazing, it goes on forever, there’s a sadness to it…all the good shit. I was emailing everyone about it as I wanted to maybe write a book about: MLB got in touch saying they’d got the rights for Europe. ‘Do you want to be the English guy doing that?’ I was, like, yeah! But, of course, you become Alan Partridge on the American broadcast because I actually don’t know the rules.
Or the co-commentator Fred Willard plays in Best in Show.
Ha! Yes! That’s me. I go to baseball games in America and pretend I know what I’m talking about on BBC TV.
And at the Olympic Stadium in London.
When you broadcast you get a special allotted time where you speak to managers in an isolated room. So, there’s the three of us who are broadcasting and the coach of, like, New York Mets and we’ve got twenty minutes of questions. I don’t know what I’m doing! It’s wild, because you have to think on your feet with people who really live this. I tried to make it general things about the baseball experience in London, but they’re like cartoon characters and they’re absolutely massive, walking around like Vs.
It's so competitive though. The pool of players is vast, not quite like cricket.
Not like cricket but the thing they both have mostly in common is both sports are obsessed with the idea that they’re dying, that they’re the traditional sport that’s going extinct. And the pitching, they also have the grips, the wobble seam like cricket. Technically, hitting a pitch though is one of the hardest things to do though. They’re so skilled. I find it fascinating. We’re going out in September to do some post-season games…I do love it.
Meanwhile, alongside releasing an album, doing the biggest cricket podcast, commentating on baseball, you’re also writing books.
I am.
You’re writing Jimmy Anderson’s memoir.
You can mention that, yes. It’s announced the same day as this, I think. I’ve also got a football book I’m writing.
You’re writing a what?
I can’t publicly say the details just yet, but I’m writing a football book. That’s also underway. Doing the Jimmy book is such a privilege, because he’ll go down as England’s greatest cricketer probably. I’ll tell you the problem with all of this, is that I’m spending a lot more time with athletes than I probably would do. They all look amazing. They’ve all had their teeth done. So when you’re sitting with someone like Willian in a white studio at Fulham, a real specimen with dazzling white teeth…it’s provoked a self-consciousness in all seriousness about whether I should get my teeth whitened.
They don’t spend much time in Soho pubs.
No, but they do spend a lot of time in sliders with white socks, sliding along at half walking pace.
So, that’s another thing you do: the official Fulham podcast.
I think the club had seen Tailenders, heard I loved Fulham and just put it all together. It was like a fan-ish thing they could do with the stadium announcer Ivan where they get players in and we chat. I was, like, sweet. I don’t even have to do any preparation because this is one thing I actually know about. If Danny Murphy comes in, then that information is already in my head.
Have we covered all the Felix White jobs?
Maybe, Yala?
Ah yes, of course. Sorry, you also run a record label.
That’s actual real work. Admin. That’s helped me in terms of a reality check in the number of things that have to go right to get a record into a shop. I’m never a musician when we’re doing that. I’m always in awe of the artists and at their service, especially Will[ie J Healey], who I love.
How often do you speak to Morad, who you run the label with?
Oh, every day.
How do you it, keep all these WhatsApp communications going?
They’ve all become my friends. All my work is my social life. People ask how I do it all and the answer is, I don’t have kids. In the Maccabees I used to over think everything. So, I’d spend a lot of unproductive time worrying about everything: is so-and-so happy, are we going in the right direction etc, etc. Now I don’t have time to worry about those things anymore. In the time that I would normally have spent spinning myself into a web of whatever, I’m now presenting the baseball. That’s healthier than getting in a knot being angry with this person about what they haven’t said but I know what they’re going to say.
If there was one more thing that you could fit into your schedule, what would it be?Great question. God, that’s a good one. Well…I do film scores as well.
Of course! The McEnroe score! He was even in your recent 86TVs video.
So, I did John McEnroe’s film score and he was quite sceptical about me to begin with, because the Rolling Stones and Pearl Jam are his mates or whatever. I’d done the score for The Edge, about the England cricket team with Barney [Douglas] the director, and Barney really wanted me to do it. So, I had a couple of Zoom meetings with John McEnroe.
I am already anxious on your behalf.
Well, he was clearly very sceptical. But he semi-grudgingly said OK, as long as I didn’t make it sound like Titanic. Did it and clearly went alright, as he announced at the Tribecca Film Festival when I was there that I was now in his band. So, at Wimbledon as soon as the final finishes he has this do afterwards where he flies his band over, and they do covers at this bash. So now I get a late-night call three days before the do saying ‘learn this Cars song, these Led Zeppelin songs’…Since doing that I’ve thought I’d really like to be a really good rock and roll or blues guitarist. I’d like to be able to just pick up a guitar and when someone says, ‘It’s in B flat,’ know what they mean.
So, you want to be a real musician.
I want to be a real musician. That’s the final thing I’d like to achieve. Correct.
TK