David and Peter Brewis have had diligent careers to date, all the while distancing themselves from the ever-present stereotyping and pigeonholing that goes on in the music industry. No wonder they needed a break. After their second album they decided enough was enough and moved on to pastures anew, for time at least. Back with vengeance, Field Music are now onto album #4 and, better still, the genre stereotyping has dispersed.
Having intruded on his morning activities of fixing the merchandise stand for the upcoming UK tour, I thought I would give David Brewis the pleasure of explaining just what Field Music’s style is…”What I would generally say is we make weird pop music. We’re influenced by a huge range of music, but it comes out sounding like pop music. I’ve really got no idea how to describe it so I tend to try and avoid these questions. So it’s a funny one, I don’t really mind the art rock tag, but that’s about it really”. Fully satisfied that I could now use the tag ‘weird pop music’ without offending, I continued.
The new single ‘(I Keep Thinking About) A New Thing’ boasts David’s impressive falsetto vocals coupled with the very sound the Field Music boys used to pride themselves on. Rather ironically it’s the last track on the album and the first to be released to the nation. “It’s generally the song that works best out of the context of the album, it’s sort of like an appendix so that’s why we put it at the end. Also because the rest of the album has a very definite flow and the tracks run into each other, so it’s quite difficult to take a song out from that and give it to radio stations because they generally don’t make that much sense on their own”. David also delves into the bits we don’t see here on the other side of the fence, such as the science behind picking the perfect singles, and why bands don’t utilise all the songs on an album.
“If when you go in to record an album you treat every song as if it could be a single or if you treat every song like it should be on the radio then the ones that are best you might put at the front of the album and they will also be the singles, it kind of makes sense really. We don’t do that. When a bands done a new record you need at least three or four tracks that can be singles, so that means the rest of the songs can be anything, they don’t have to be three minutes long, they don’t have to have a chorus – they can be anything you want them to be. Also when you play live the chances are you’re only going to play three or four songs anyway, so the rest of the songs on the album don’t even have to be songs you can play live. I’m always surprised that bands don’t do more within their albums and do more exploring. For all those songs that you’ve created which are never going to get played again or heard on the radio, so you should really ditch the rules and do whatever you want”.
As the majority of bands will tell you, the reason behind a split is more often than not that they can’t stand the sight of each other for another second. However, in Field Music’s case it differs somewhat –just a simple amicable parting, and nothing’s changed, in studio or out. “I mean I think we set ourselves a way of working for ‘Measure’ where we didn’t try and pretend we were a band which I think we’re really good for us. So the big changes this time round are that we moved studio, because we’d been in the same studio for about 10 years, we recorded all of our records there and some of the Futureheads stuff was recorded there as well, so that was quite a big change. Also within the new space, because we’re not sharing it it’s a little bit more set up for how we like to work, so there were keyboards lining the walls in every free space, that type of thing. So I think it was a little bit easier to follow any creative ideas we might have had at the time because everything was already set up. There was no rooting in the back of store cupboards to find those instruments you were imagining – that’s the kind of thing that can put me off”.
With the current economic climate in such a dramatic state I wondered if, like all of us, musicians were also feeling the pinch. “The big thing which affected us from the current economic climate is the closing of the old studio space, which was reliant on voluntary organisations renting out its space, but obviously voluntary organisations don’t have any money at the moment so it was basically empty except for us there at the end. So it was one of the reasons we had to move in the end unfortunately”.
Always willing to get their teeth into a challenge, Field Music’s tour for previous album ‘Measures’ was relentless and gruelling in every way, totalling ninety shows throughout the year of 2010. About to embark on a less intensive ten day tour of the country I wondered how the new material would be received by the UK audience and crucially how the band themselves were feeling about the experience. “I’m quite excited about it. The rehearsals have been going really well and they’re sounding really good. I mean it’s quite different the live thing to how we go about making music in a studio but I think all of the lads who play in the band have really taken on the challenges of the new stuff. So yeah I’m really looking forward to it and it’s always interesting to see how people respond to the newer material. We’ve got about ten dates across the UK and we’ve got a few festivals kid of confirmed, it’ll certainly expand but there is no way we’ll do as many dates as we did for ‘Measure’. We’ve just been confirmed for Primavera Sounds as well so that’ll be good and give us a chance to go to Barcelona”.
The recent death of a truly inspirational jazz and blues artist, Etta James, leads to a discussion of the legacy Field Music would like to leave behind. “I’d like to leave behind a bunch of good records that people are interested in and will listen too a couple of decades down the line and hopefully a few really funny interviews which people smile at when they rediscover. I still find myself laughing out loud to some of the past interviews I’ve done, and I think I’d like to have a good back catalogue that people went back to and thought ‘yeah these guys did some amazing stuff’.
Well, ‘doing some amazing stuff’ is something Field Music need not worry about currently, but the future is still there to contend with…
“Probably more records but in the immediate future probably not another Field Music album, I think it’s probably time we tried a few other things. They may be releases from Field Music there may not be, but I think it’s good for me and Peter every now and again to take little breaks and do things in slightly different ways. The two of us will defiantly be very busy because that’s just what we like, so, more records some of which will be Field Music and some might not be”.
I’d best let David get back to repairing his Merchandise board…
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Words by Ben Gilligan
Field Music’s new album ‘Plumb’ is out now
