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Field Music are a tidy little outfit from Sunderland, who, in keeping with its incestuous musical scene, have been affiliated with Maximo Park and the Futureheads. For some they represent the clinical, thinking head of Indie music, fastidiously melding strange keys, tricky time signatures, and antiquated musical referents into easily digestible indie-pop ditties. They are applauded for bringing prog-rock full circle, realising that rock music can be expansive, explorative and interesting but it needn’t require that Rick Wakeman disappear up his own navel on a twenty-three minute organ solo. For others they peddle a stale, emotionless abstraction of the Indie form, overthinking an essentially ‘felt’ pop music sub-genre. Field Music, they would argue, deal in a currency of aging rock leitmotifs that are no longer du jour or pertinent.

   David Brewis – for figurative purposes let’s say he’s the left side of Field Music’s brain, his brother Peter being its right – is wandering the slowly populating floors of The Musician. It’s about an hour before their show tonight and the band has just returned from one of Leicester’s numerous curry houses. Suddenly I’m struck by the realisation that this split in perception with Field Music, its foundations resting on the supposition that thoughtful and emotional music are two mutually exclusive terms, is a decidedly pernicious threat to creation of good pop music. Moreover, it completely misses the point with Field Music. After managing to turn David’s ear, I finally, after the obligatory enquiries into the hiatus and new album, plucked up the courage to ask him about this. As you’ll discover below, his response is eager but slightly misses the point. Maybe it’s not Field Music but its fans that are being the overly thoughtful ones.

Your Wave: After touring your second album, Tones of Town, you imposed a ‘hiatus’ on Field Music; both your brother Peter and you spent time apart to work on solo projects. At what juncture did you feel as if it was the right time to resurrect Field Music?

David Brewis (multi-instrumentalist): We first mulled over the idea when I’d got back from the School of Languages tour of the US, which was around March 2008. It was also around that time that Peter had just finished recording his album with The Week That Was. We had nothing pencilled in the diary and we thought it would be fun to get together and write a new Field Music album. But we didn’t get anything done really until March 2009. We got to the studio, sat down and began to ask ourselves whether we could do it and whether we would have fun doing it.

Your Wave: Did you feel as though you had learnt a lot from the experience of working apart from Peter on your solo project?

DB: Most definitely. When you’re in a band such as Field Music you understand that there are four people, four instruments and certain criteria need to be met. You’re fixed with that way of doing things and I think Peter and I felt as though we couldn’t escape that methodology. We hoped that our solo projects would liberate us from these constraints. Yet in the end we found it wasn’t very different from working as Field Music! We’d worked separately on some tracks for our first two albums – it wasn’t like every song [on those albums] had Peter playing drums and me on guitar or vice versa. Some songs had been completely written and performed by either myself or Peter. So we were used to working separately anyway. That was what we needed to realise. That realisation I think helped us get back to Field Music.

Your Wave: The double album seems to be 2010’s music product du jour with the Flaming Lips, Joanna Newsom, and countless other artists opting for an extended album format. What was the thinking behind making your latest album, Field Music (Measure), a double album?

DB: We just thought if we’re going back to Field Music and we’re actually bothered about Field Music being more than a twee, piano-driven indie outfit, as some perceive us as, we want to show that we’re above that. The double album was like a message of intent.

Your Wave: You seem to be defiantly anti-indie.

DB: Oh yeah. There’s very little music I listen to that may be classified as ‘indie’. The Flaming Lips and Joanna Newsom are about as ‘indie’ as it gets! So, yeah, with the double album we wanted to give an indication of how broad our influences and abilities were and the best way of doing this was to produce a really long record. Doubts about whether we’d be able to write enough songs or have the patience to go through with such a thing were definitely answered when we finished it.

Your Wave: You mention it being a ‘long record’ but it never seems overwrought – it’s quite economical and very listenable.

DB: It’s more like an old vinyl double album where anything that was above fifty minutes had to be pressed on to two different vinyls. It’s different from say that Smashing Pumpkins album [Mellon Collie and Infinite Sadness], which was massively long and quite a tough listen. But we sit back now and think that we could have written something of around thirty minutes while keeping it equally if not more [stylistically] broad. Maybe that’s what we’ll do next time! The two previous albums were short and we’ll always write short songs because I’m very much opposed to repeating things unnecessarily.

Your Wave: Could you tell me about the writing and recording process?

DB: When we started recording for Field Music (Measure) I had one song finished, ‘Share the Words’, which we had been playing on the School of Languages tour. But once we got started the songs came quickly. We’ve been attempting to make music for more than seven or eight years now; our skills in the studio and our songwriting experience allow us to write and record music at a much faster pace. So we’re a lot less worried about whether the record we’re working on sounds like a real record.

Your Wave: Was there anything or anyone you were listening to at the time of writing and recording that inadvertently bled into what you were attempting to create? I can definitely make out Tusk-era Fleetwood Mac.

DB: I don’t have that many musical influences from the past two decades. If I’m brutal, it’s only really the Flaming Lips and My Bloody Valentine who I’ve enjoyed in the last two decades. Maybe a couple of Beck and Pavement albums, perhaps. But I think Field Music doesn’t wear its influences on its sleeves. Not like the Libertines, whom you know loved Britpop. I enjoyed only a few Blur albums but for the most part that decade passed me by. As far as influences go, it’s always the Beatles. From, say, 1965 to 1968, you could take any song and establish it as the bench mark for a whole new genre.

Your Wave: ‘Clear Water’ in particular, sounded like one of you had been listening to a lot of Cream.

DB: I wasn’t listening to Cream, but Peter definitely was! He’s been experiencing what you may call an Eric Clapton renaissance. But I’m not sure what the hell I was doing in ‘Clear Water’. You can’t tell just from listening to it how weird the harmony is in that song. If you sit down and work out the notes and the key… I think it could be a Hindustani scale [a North Indian system of music]. But anyway, I was listening to a lot of Bowie, especially the late records of the ‘70s/ early ‘80s.

Your Wave: Such as Let’s Dance?

DB: I think I’ve only listened to that entire album once; it was more Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps) that I really enjoyed. The thing with Let’s Dance is that it lives in the shadow of the singles, ‘Modern Love’ and ‘China Girl’. But Nile Rodgers [who co-produced Let’s Dance and a slew of other records by Duran Duran, Madonna etc.] and his ability to reduce things down to a bear minimum really caught my ear. The records he produced are funk but somehow straight, like a new-wave funk. It’s an approach I aim to adopt when I’m recording and producing in the studio.

Your Wave: Is music very much a cerebral thing for you or is it more a physical outlet? I suppose what I’m trying to establish is whether you approach it as a puzzle to be solved – the correct combination being a prerequisite to creating a ‘good’ pop song – or a deeper primordial urge?

DB: To me the cerebral and physical aspects of making music are impossible to separate. You can’t get very far with inspiration and passion; you need to be able to do something with it. Right this minute I could stop making music but the only thing stopping me is that, as a listener, there’s a type of music that I want to exist, a particular combination of things that I want to listen to but don’t already exist. And we, as Field Music, are trying to figure out what that sound is. If, for example, I discovered that David Bowie had made this album in 1984 that possessed all these sounds that I’m yearning to hear in my head then, then by all means, I could quit and get a real job.

Charlie Harding

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