The point is that this musical collective is fluid, not confined to the band format and the results have always been some of the consistently brilliant guitar pop in the UK. Below is the result of two inspiring phone conversations with the two men and they remain two of my favourite musicians to talk to, to quiz and to challenge. That they were so well rewarded by the UK press upon their return fills me with a lot of satisfaction. They are two of the few who truly deserve every good thing that comes their way.
What’s your motivation for making music? Have you ever questioned why you are doing and how you are doing it? Are you afraid of cracking open that particular Pandora’s Box for fear of what may spring out at you? The reason for asking, for even getting those though processes churning, is that Field Music’s new double album – their finest work to date – was born almost directly from the consequences of those questions.
The way to purify the music making process is to strip away any distracting notions that pervade upon your creative intentions. Peter and David Brewis halted Field Music’s progress after 2007’s Tones of Town because of a myriad of reasons but the one they both seem to agree on is this: “Wait a minute! We’ve accidentally become a band!” Peter exclaims, mirroring his thoughts after completing their second record. “We were in the same sort of game as Kaiser Chiefs or Bloc Party. We didn’t ever see ourselves as that sort of thing. It wasn’t really the kind of music we listen to but we felt like we needed to try and be successful because we ended up in that game and I think we just thought: let’s just stop. Let’s not do Field Music anymore.”
The result was not the loss of a promising and dedicated pop band, but rather the production of two more excellent records the following year: the laptop-rock groove of School of Language, helmed by David, and the ambitious orchestral concept album The Week That Was, led by Peter. These two releases proved David’s point that “within the sphere of indie band music, it seems like a lot of people care more about bands than the music and being in a band gets in the way of making interesting music. For us that’s a definite no no.”
With such undeniably diverse output from the same team members, albeit under the guise of solo projects, the decision to go back to Field Music feels less of a surprise and more like returning to a blueprint with a permanent black marker and some fresh designs. The critically-acclaimed album Field Music (Measure) refuses to adhere to preconceptions of what a double album should be. It does not run together smoothly. It doesn’t stick with a theme. It doesn’t even stick to a single genre with everything from funk, “musical nonsense” and found sound improvisation creeping in. “You always need something to begin with like ‘why are we actually making a record?’ It’s not to make any money because we’re never gonna do that. It’s not to be famous because we’re not interested in that. So what it is that we want to do? We’d been listening to Tusk and the White album and Physical Graffitti and things like that so we really though ‘wouldn’t it be really good fun and a good challenge to try and make a really long record?’ I think we just wanted to confuse ourselves a bit and try and make something a bit sprawling really, something that doesn’t make that much sense.” Peter’s honesty here is mirrored by his brother. Modest ambitions, a sense that music is not just their passion but something to be enjoyed and, perhaps most of all, as suggested by his own question, the need to remain true to the core of their songwriting experiences.
“We were of the mindset of: ‘oh I’ve got this piece of music and though I’ve not heard any Pink Floyd albums I think it sounds like Pink Floyd but shall we put it on the album anyway?’ ‘Yes let’s do it!’ ‘I’ve got this song and it’s got this really kind of daft bluesy guitar riff which we would’ve never done before. Shall we put it on the album anyway?’ ‘Is it good?’ ‘I think so.’ ‘Yes then we’ll put it on!’ There was no attempt to make it seamlessly smooth and coherent.”
Of course, siblings in musical collaborations have a long rock history. As we’ve already covered in several short paragraphs, you’d expect by now that Field Music have very little in common with the Gallaghers and Davies’ of this stereotypical and outland musical world.
“I think we’re inspired by each other’s better songs. Peter brings in a song and I’m like ‘oh that’s great I wish I’d done something like that’. It may be slightly easier for us in that, well, we love each other! Sometimes we get pretty frustrated with each other but that competitiveness is never, ever a negative thing. It’s always tinged with pride and with love,” gushes David.
“Whoever writes the song, that’s the person who is in charge. It’s more difficult when we’re mixing and doing the mastering and deciding on track order because that’s when the democracy gets tested,” explains Peter. “We trust each other’s intentions and, it sounds really pretentious but, maybe also each others vision. Dave knows what he’s doing. If he needs me then he’ll ask me. If he can play something better than I can than he’ll do it himself and that’s fine. Some tracks I’m hardly on and some tracks Dave’s hardly on. In fact one of the tracks Let’s Write a Book…I went on holiday for a few days over the summer and I got back to the studio and Dave’s like: ’Hey I’ve recorded this song. Whaddya think?’ And I thought ‘Ah what?!’ To me that’s probably the best song on the record and I’m not on it.”
Nevertheless, there’s hardly a hint of jealousy, especially as Peter rationalises it by comparing the making of their new record to other classics: “I think Paul McCArtney played 90% of the instruments on the White Album, and probably Lyndsey Buckingham played 70% on Tusk. You start to think that’s fine. It’s important we enjoy the process. We’ve not enjoyed making records before. We tried to make sure everyone was involved all the time and now we just don’t bother. We’re fine getting on with things.”
Field Music (Measure) is an inspiring work. It’s a collection of twenty songs linked only by the Brewis’ and their studio. There were no rules laid down except for the one David expresses early on during our phone interview: “We wanna be able to make the best music we can make and operate in a way that conforms to our principles about music and our principles about how things should be.” From the exquisite merging of tinglingly picked acoustic guitar and regal string refrains on Measure to the bewildering “dissonant harmony” funk of Let’s Write A Book, there’s nothing here that doesn’t manage to capture those lofty goals. The result is armfuls of memorable melodies and a range of expressions which stretch from poignant all the way to celebratory.
Field Music’s key workspace is their studio to the point where David says that “our approach to making records is entirely formed by always recording ourselves.” It seems that self recording has been so essential to Field Music’s ethos that it’s inconceivable that they could work any other way. “I can’t imagine me not knowing how I wanted something to sound and I think really what we’ve found out over the years is we can pick up enough of the technical skills required to do whatever we need to do in an independent way much faster than we can explain to someone else what we’re trying to do. And that’s been made even more stark because there are so few new records we’re interested in. So it’s not like ‘oh I love the sound of that record. I want to work with that person because I think he’ll understand what we do’. There aren’t really any examples of that. The records that we like the sound of are usually stylistically a long way away from what we do. Of course we couldn’t afford a producer, so it’s completely theoretical anyway,” says David.
As well as saving money you don’t have in the long-run, ‘home’ recording has myriad benefits from the skills you develop to being able to realising the soundscape in your head in your own time. Field Music clearly relish the opportunity to craft the sounds they want within the confines of their own studio, as David explains. “Every song we keep trying to find a better way of doing something or we’ll have an idea and you’ll have to go through the quite fun process of figuring out technically how we can do that with our fairly limited resources. That’s something which entirely comes from recording ourselves. Also, coming form a point of really limited technical expertise, we don’t really know the proper ways of doing anything and most of the recording techniques that we use that I really like are, in one sense or another, against the rules. We record most things in ways that are unlike what you’d see in most of the studios that we could ever afford.”
Both David and Peter record ideas on their laptops, using software to compose before bringing those ideas to fruition in their studio. Not all the sounds on Field Music (Measure) are from instruments either. The last four songs on the fourth side – the Brewis’ always think in terms of vinyl with all their records – utilise sounds Peter recorded outside, including at his favourite café in his hometown of Sunderland. “It comes from an idea of improvisation when in our general every day lives people move around, they shiuffle their feet, they make noises they drive their cars they whistle they mutter away they beep their horns - there’s no such thing as an unmusical sound and that’s because everything has I suppose what you’d call a gesture. Rather than just having a pitch or a rhythm it has a movement to it, a certain shape and a dynamic to the sound. Those things aren’t really made by accident I don’t think. They’re made by physical things that we’re doing. In that loose sense the idea was that people are making music that I could accompany on piano or marimba or with strings.”
With refreshing approaches like these, a free spirit sense to recording thanks to their own studio and that constant guiding passion of principles throughout, it’s no real surprise that Playmusic considers Field Music one of the finest pop bands of the last decade. Similarly, it’s very hard to argue with David’s sentiments when he unexpectedly, but justifiably, let’s rip about a few untruths about music which Field Music are fundamentally opposed to. “There’s a real sheen of dishonesty which runs through the music business, which is distasteful because pop music sells itself by its authenticity. There’s fuck all of that as far as I can see. Authenticity has become like a genre rather than having anything deep seeded to it and musicians up and down the land are completely deluding themselves that they are honest and that they just ‘do what they feel’. When people say ‘I just do what I feel’ it means ‘I don’t want to think about it because I probably won’t like what it is’. I want to define us as being against that. It especially galls me that people associate not thinking about stuff as being authentic. ‘We don’t think about what we do, we just do it.’ Well for a start that’s not how thought works. It’s certainly not how my creative process works yet there’s this whole mythology around just ‘doing what you feel’ and not thinking about it coz that just spoils it. Well, what that mostly equates to is people repeating themselves, deluding themselves and making very sub-standard copies of whatever was most prevalent when they were 18. Obviously when I put it in those kind of propaganda terms it doesn’t sound like a very good idea.”
Field Music balance intelligence and intuition, understand that great accomplishments come from hard work, not some outdated notion of spiritual guidance and refuse to let anything get in the way of a good song. They understand that “the whole act of recording music is pretty contrived and ridiculous” which is why their new record is elaborate, open minded and, yes, in places just slightly ridiculous. Hardly ever does a musical duo come along that is so aware of what they want to do, why they want to do it and are so riddled with conviction on how they are going to do it. So, please, make the most of what we’ve got and hopefully you’ll be inspired enough to follow your own path too.
No comments:
Post a Comment