Field Music interview: Film-making crazy ass polymath

Image: Field Music 

The amount of mid-2000s indie bands that have managed to survive or make it through to 2016 with a great deal left in tact - or even a shred of relevance - are few and far between. As tastes and fashions changed, the indie bubble burst; It left a lot of bewildered and desolate winkle picker-clad men in leather jackets roaming the streets of Camden unsure what to do with their lives.

Whilst their early music recalled some of the jangly popular indie leanings of that period, Field Music were always shooting for something much more than that and it’s not a huge surprise to find them just having released their best ever album, Commontime, in 2016. 

However, evolution has always been at the heart of what the Brewis brothers (Peter and David) do and on their latest album they have created a rollicking, funk-strut pop powerhouse of a record that feels as fresh and punchy as anything they’ve ever done. 

Part of their on-going relevance and ability to consistently surprise has been around not only their panoramic musical viewpoints but their independent spirit, doing things by themselves whilst tucked away in the North East.

It’s here that Peter Brewis speaks to us, from the band’s studio in Sunderland ahead of Electric Fields at the weekend and a short tour which includes a date at Manchester's O2 Ritz on Saturday 29th October.   

Find Field Music tickets

So, what have you been up to since album release?

We’ve been busy but not too busy. We did two months of touring after the album, which was not too heavy, as we've all got family and what not. We did two weeks in the U.S, which was better than expected. 

Why so? 

I suppose I was dreading it, so anything other than dreading it was good. People turned up, we had a nice time, the band sounded great.

Tell us about the Asunder project you just worked on?  

That was hard work. We were approached by Bob Stanley from Saint Etienne to be involved in this collaborative project for a film about the North East and the First World War. Rather than talking about what was going on in the trenches etc it focuses on what was happening in Newcastle and various places, which led to various fascinating stories.

We were composing the score at the same time as the film was being made, which I don't think is normal, I imagine normally you score to a finished film but it wasn't really like that so it ended up being a bit of a rush at the end but I think we pulled it off. We worked with an orchestra, which was a little bit out of my comfort zone, I normally do the string arrangements - just 3 or 4 instruments - for Field Music and I find that a little bit daunting, so when it's a 20-odd piece orchestra I found that difficult.

The other thing was collaborating with another band, Warm Digits. Field Music is normally just me and Dave and we have such a bunker mentality, we go in the studio and sometimes we don't even collaborate that well with one another. We played it live as a bit of a one-off and we're discussing whether we can do anything else with it but the practicalities and costs of an orchestra make that very difficult. 

Find Field Music tickets

Over a decade in to your career you’ve made what is my favourite Field Music record. How do you keep things fresh and what mental approach do you adopt to avoid repetition? 

I've never really thought about it like that but I think Commontime is my favourite album too, I think it's the best one we've done. There's that quote someone said when asked what the best thing they've done is and the answer is always the next thing and that's always been the attitude with Dave and me.

We just like the idea of pop music and music we would like, therefore other people would like. So our first port of call [in terms of judging things] is always ourselves. So we're never trying to repeat a formula as such, we like to give ourselves little musical and lyrical problems, like a game really.

So that's what keeps us interested, we have no huge level of success that we need to maintain or keep a big record company happy or anything like that, we don't owe anyone any money, so we don't have those stresses.

All the worries we have are self-imposed and they are about the music. We have our own little recording studio, so we don't have to worry about those sorts of things. I think as time goes on we're trying to have more fun, more fun making the records, get slightly dafter really with the ideas. A bit less precious, even if the subjects are serious we don't want to take ourselves too seriously. 

So your state of independence leads to more creative freedoms and therefore less stagnation? 

Yeah, I suppose that's it really. We've had long breaks too because we're not bothered about that. We've often had three or four years between Field Music records, plus we do a lot of things outside of the band. Although speaking of independence, we live in a cheap part of the world.

It's not expensive to live and have a studio up here. We have our own studio in Sunderland for not that much money, you couldn't have the same thing in London. We have an industrial unit which is 10minutes walk into the centre of Sunderland. It's ridiculous really, so we're lucky to be able to have that independence, it helps.  

Find Field Music tickets

How have some of the massive changes in the industry impacted on you as an independent band? 

Our last Field Music album was kind of - not pre-Spotify, it was 2012 - but sort of, and people were still buying CDs and downloads more and we haven't really seen the accounts as yet for this album, so we don't know how these changes will have affected us as yet.

The streaming thing has changed things a lot in the independent record label sector and the music is reaching more people because people can get it instantly and it's being played more but obviously the income isn't at the same as it was. 

Speaking of money, several years ago you gave a Guardian interview about sometimes earning as little as £5,000 a year. Has that come to follow you around a little bit over the years? 

It was kind of true at the time but it was a rather flippant remark I made at the time that got blown out of proportion and it's my fault. But it is interesting, I am interested in it, we've written songs about it, about how little money we make from it.

Don't get me wrong though, since that things have got a lot better and I don't think it's through anybody being charitable and buying our records because they feel sorry for us...or I hope not anyway. It must be the same for everyone though, I don't know how people survive otherwise.

Possibly we might be sometimes guilty of romanticising that side of things a bit, we were quite interested, when we were younger and growing up listening to music, in new wave and Scritti Politti writing out their accounts of how they made their single on the cover and I thought that was brilliant, it was funny but quite stark and real too.

You have to be careful romanticising this starving artist thing though or being really boring about it, I sometime think 'oh god, it's really boring talking about money again', it's not why we do it. Our thing is to survive so we can do the things we want to do, I’d much rather make more money! 

How’s the on-going role of Sunderland in your lives and music. Have you stayed their on purpose or did it just pan out that way? 

Well I’m a traitor now, I’ve actually moved to Newcastle but Sunderland is very much I feel my town. It's interesting to see the differences, with Newcastle being a double university town with all of its cultural goings on, having that many young people around makes a big difference, whereas Sunderland doesn't really have that.

You see the difference, you walk around Newcastle during the day and it seems really affluent and positive and it doesn't always feel like that in Sunderland, it feels depressed but there are a lot of people trying to do things there.

An almost stubbornness of sticking and doing things there, like Frankie & the Heartstrings doing their record shop, that's not easy for them to do. I see those guys every week and they always look tired but they're trying to do it, they're trying to do something important that is going to work for the city and make a difference. 

I think from our perspective we've kept our studio here and stayed here because all our friends are here, our support network, the people that we want to show our records to first are all here. I think we've made it difficult to go anywhere else now by having children.

Starting a family whilst still trying to remain making music, that isn't easy. You start to realise why bands break up now, you start thinking 'oh, I wonder why that guy hasn't made a record for a while' and it's like oh yeah, because you have to deal with real life and real problems.  

Prince tweeted about one of your songs, ‘The Noisy Days are Over’, at the beginning of this year so I wondered how you felt about him dying so soon afterwards? 

The original tweet is gone. Time to back up this screen grab (on multiple hard drives) and get on with our lives. pic.twitter.com/WsuLpFNr2Y

— Field Music (@fieldmusicmusic) November 27, 2015

Just really sort of sad about it, really. Just because when we were over in the states we were joking about him maybe turning up and wanting to jam so we better learn '1999'. So from that to happen and then him die within a couple of weeks of that was shocking. The fact that it appears to have been self-administered drugs too.I just thought ‘wow, that just seems really un-Prince’.

You used to hear stories of him fining people in the band for having a beer in their hand and things like that, him being quite strict with his band in regards to that sort of thing. I dunno, I just felt really weird, it was quite shocking really.

His death, in a way, hit me harder than Bowie's death I think. Bowie was an old man in a way, really, he was older than my granddad when he died. When Prince died I thought it was some kind of prank or something. It was just odd.

I still think he's the greatest rock star, he's like a post-modern amalgamation of loads of different rock characters in a way: Sly Stone, Jimi Hendrix, James Brown, Jackie Wilson, he was a proper crazy rock star, you know? Independent as well, a visionary.

It's hard to tell if we'll ever get anyone like that: writer, instrumentalist, producer, studio owner, video director, film-making crazy mad ass polymath. Any one of those things would have been enough for most people. 

You were nominated for the Mercury Music Prize for your 2012 album, Plumb, and some may have expected to see your name on the shortlist again this year. I wondered what you make of the nominations?  

I can't remember the shortlist. I couldn't even remember the shortlist that we were on, I was that bad. I basically don't really pay much attention to awards really. 

Fair enough. Have you set to work on any new music as yet?  

Yeah, I think that process has begun again. Dave and I have been in the studio a few days together and we just started what I think might be another Field Music album. 

Find Field Music at O2 Ritz Manchester on Saturday 29th October tickets via the box below.

Buy tickets:

Like this? Read Five of the best at Electric Fields Festival

Tickets are no longer available for this event