Smash hit

This tour has gone on for almost three years, ever since Levine, Madden, Carmichael and the drummer Dusick called time on their rock band Kara’s Flowers, and Levine moved to New York and started soaking up R&B music. He returned to LA with a new musical outlook, and the band reformed, adding Valentine and sporting a new name. After writing the jittering funk-rock track Not Coming Home, they constructed a homogenous series of songs that told the story of a relationship from infatuation to separation. Songs such as The Sun, which owes a debt to Stevie Wonder’s Substitution, and Sunday Morning, with its middle-eight homage to Sir Duke, sit happily alongside the U2-influenced Must Get Out and She Will Be Loved.

Honing their set in the clubs of LA, the band took their show to places such as the Six Flags amusement park in a bid to build an audience the old-fashioned way. They signed a deal with indie label Octone, recorded an album, Songs About Jane, and continued to tour. As the album sales grew, Clive Davis’s J-Records took an interest and released a new version of Songs About Jane. A year on, the record has sold more than a million copies in the US and 500,000 in the UK, where their first two singles have been Top 10 hits.

Yet there are signs that, for some of them, the relentless touring has come at a cost. Maroon 5 have more injuries than Newcastle United, and one band member has had to excuse himself temporarily from the non-stop gigging.

“Ryan isn’t with us right now,” Levine explains. “He’s got a shoulder injury and has tendonitis. I’ve had a sort of broken throat for a while. And when Mickey’s hand started to hurt a while ago, we really freaked out. However, we’re having tremendous success and we’re doing all the things that we wanted to do in life.”

“Ryan needing to take a break left us kind of in limbo,” Carmichael explains. “It was very stressful. We spent a week or so trying to work out what to do. We had to play one of our shows acoustically because Ryan was hurting so bad, and we even had to cancel a show.”

“It’s a good thing being on tour, though,” Madden says, brightening. “You have so much free time. But somehow it’s hard to get anything else done. I always set out with some sort of ambition, but it never seems to amount to anything.”

“I sent off for a correspondence class but I didn’t get anywhere with it,” Valentine says, slightly despondently.

Yet later on, in front of a record County Fair crowd estimated at well over 15,000, the injuries, oddities and lack of postal qualifications all seem irrelevant. Levine’s fine blue-eyed soul-rock voice, somewhere between Sting, Phil Collins and Michael Stipe, and his lyrics of love and loss, hit their mark with both the male and female members of the audience. New converts are made, while fans who have come solely to catch the band are bowled over.

Big already, Maroon 5 are going to get a lot bigger. They have a sound that captivates a huge range of people, and have replaced the remoteness of rock giants such as U2 with the sort of accessibility that pop fans in the 21st century seem to be demanding of their idols. And, unlike Levine’s girlfriend, there’s nothing to tether them down.

She Will Be Loved is released on August 23 on J/BMG Records. Maroon 5’s UK tour begins on October 4 at the Cambridge Corn Exchange (01223 357851)

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