(Credits: Far Out / Album Cover / The Maccabees)
Tue 26 August 2025 12:00, UK
It was 2008, and love was out of fashion.
The ‘Meet Me in the Bathroom’ indie era had left a legion of youngsters craving something sleazier than silly old love songs. In fact, it had left them wanting something sleazier than silly old love in general.
The outlook of the swept fringe frollickers of a generation could aptly be surmised by their favourite son when Alex Turner sang: “Oh, there ain’t no love, no Montagues or Capulets / Just banging tunes and DJ sets and / Dirty dancefloors and dreams of naughtiness.”
This live fast and flirt with as many people as possible frenzy was reflected in the music – music that the Maccabees’ very own Felix White described as “angular” and “very high energy”. They were one of those “angular” bands, attracting a fanbase with frenetic riffs that almost sounded like an aural incarnation of Ian Curtis’ dancing.
When they were recording Colour It In, they followed this familiar formula. The songs were a blitzkrieg of choppy chords, rapid drums, and stabbing lyrics. Like most bands of the age, ‘love’ wasn’t all that high on their agenda. Even the emerging stars in the perennially sentimental world of folk, like Laura Marling, were nihilistically singing, “It’s not like I believe in everlasting love”.
But that didn’t mean that they didn’t exist entirely. Somewhere on every kid’s iPod Nano was a little go-to soppy love song that you’d listen to alone, strictly in private, safe from anyone asking to lend a headphone for a strange form of conjoined listening experience (completely destroying every song recorded in stereo).
These heartfelt tracks were stashed away on B-sides or acoustic bonus songs. Occasionally, they’d be squeezed into an LP for the purpose of breaking up the manic mixing. And that’s exactly how ‘Toothpaste Kisses’ came to be. The Maccabees feared that their debut album was potentially a little one-paced, so they cooked up a soft, crooning coda on the fly.
It turned out to be so catchy that it then became the coda of indie discos when the band had the gall to release it as a single. Then, it became the coda of a generation. Spotty kids could no longer pretend that they denied the repugnant appeal of love, and MSN bios changed from ‘The Charmless Man’ to ‘TG <3 ST 4eva ISDT lol PC4PC’ overnight.
It achieved this not just through catchiness or being brave enough to make a love song a single, but also through the careworn and domestic sincerity of the sweet little song’s disposition. In a blur of angularity, it stood out as a cloudy haze. It began with the crackle of a sparked-up match, was performed on kids’ guitars and used amateur equipment intentionally.
This imbued the track with a certain careworn charm. It breezed like a sigh of relief. But above all, it was the title itself that proved to be a send-up to love’s charming return. ‘Toothpaste Kisses’ is a phrase that conjures notions of domesticity. If love was dealt with at all in the indie era, then it was the dramatic extreme of sex, break-ups and bad arguments. Whereas, a toothpaste kiss is a gentle peck at the start or the end of the day with a partner who you live with.
It’s not an overtly romantic moment, either. It’s a habitual thing implying a steady relationship. Suddenly, being saddled with a mortgage and popping to bed before midnight on a Thursday rather than guzzling three trebles for a fiver had a certain je ne sais quoi that encouraged kids to maybe give romance a try.
We had softened, our fringes became less pointy, and the way towards Mac DeMarco and ‘My Kind of Woman’ had been signposted.
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