Interview: Field Music free to do as they will

"I certainly can’t see us doing a Field Music album in the very near future," David Brewis told Ragged Words the last time we spoke to him, then in his new guise as School Of Language. Less than two two years on, the Brewis brothers are back - though they were never that far apart even on solo projects. The pair's third album as Field Music is a biggie too, a 20-track double LP out this week on Memphis Industries. We'll review that in the next few days, but in the meantime Dave tells us about now being able to do "whatever the hell they want."

I suppose we should start with the obvious question of when you decided to take Field Music ‘off hiatus’, as you had put it in 2007? 

I think both myself and Peter were starting to mull over the idea as soon as he'd finished recording The Week That Was, and I'd just finished the School Of Language US tour. It was in our minds right from then, around April/May 2008 time. Both of us were kind of thinking “Well, maybe the next thing we do, I think we could do another Field Music”. We didn't actually start recording anything until a year after that, but we'd started to play 'Share The Words' during The Week That Was tour, and I think it was in the back of our minds that this was a Field Music song. And once we’d said explicitly to each other that that's what we wanted to do, the idea for a double album was there straight away. I remember doing a festival with The Week That Was in May last year, after we'd recorded a song or two, and bumping into the guys from Electric Soft Parade and we said “We're going to do a double”. Then they said “We're going to do a double!”, and we had that conversation. 

And Joanna Newsom is now beating you both with a two-hour-plus triple! One-disc albums don't seem to be very in this year! 

(Laughs) Oh my god. Aghhh. I'm really looking forward to that album a lot. I've heard a couple of streams on the Drag City website and I like them a lot. I'll be interested to see what she does. 

Sorry for veering momentarily off track, but when you said you were playing a song live and it felt like a Field Music song (as opposed to a School Of Language/The Week That Was song), was that an instinctive feeling that you were back to writing as Field Music? 

It was more a case of thinking, after that first song, that this and almost anything else could be Field Music if we say it is, whereas before we took a break we maybe didn't feel that so much. We had felt that this was a Field Music song and this wasn't, and we got to the summer 2008 and started to think that way again. We'd done these two different records and our circumstances had changed in various ways, and you think anything could be a Field Music song now if we so wished. It's us and we can get away with whatever the hell we want, we don't have to kiss so much arse that we have to tailor what we do to being indie or commercial. We don't have to do that. 

Speaking to you at the time Sea From Shore came out, that was the main reason for taking a break, that idea of being a band and the limitations that went with that. Did making those two records somewhat apart completely remove those limitations? 

I'm not sure that they were completely removed, but I'd say they're now lessened to a degree that we feel much more free. So for us, taking a break and doing those records the way we did them has worked perfectly and was exactly what we needed to do. I mean, there are other considerations as well, like Andy Moore wasn't going to tour with us, so suddenly it was a case of "Wow, we really aren't a band now". So it went down to Field Music being whatever myself and Peter write is Field Music. There's no consideration that it's got to be these three people in this room playing this genre of music. If one of the people isn't going to be there, and we've opened up the idea of what the genre can be, it's then whatever me and Peter say goes. We still feel pressure and we still notice how people perceive what we do, and it's quite conceivable that we will write music and think “This isn't going to work on a Field Music record”, but thus far that hasn't happened. 

Having gone away and done a separate album each, did you come back with different ideas of how to write songs? 

I don't really think that either me or Peter have changed particularly how we approach writing songs. There's a practical side to it that Peter was slightly sick of writing on piano and wanted to play guitar again, so that affected slightly how we'd written the songs. But it was more about how we were going to play, how we were going to be in the studio and how we were going to relate to each other. We had that break and we learnt a lot, but what we learnt most was how best to appreciate each other. Because we weren't going to have rules about who played what in the studio - and we've always had a basic rule of whoever wrote the song is in charge of the production of that song. We can both now see our role as being to help the other person. So if I've got an idea for what Peter wants to happen in a certain song, then I have to do whatever I can to make that happen. And if that means going home for a few hours, then that's what I've got to do. That, essentially, is how our collaboration works best, and that's something we didn't realise explicitly two or three years ago."

You mentioned there's more freedom this time around, and I get the feeling (though I could be wrong) that it was perhaps a more enjoyable experience this time out?... 

Yeah, by probably quite a long way. It's probably the most enjoyable record we've made full stop, but again that was more down to realising how best to relate to each other in the studio. 

In terms of just recording it, you say you didn't really start until May 2009, so was it a relatively speedy process then? 

It was. Lots of the songs were very quick. We didn't really have much written before we started recording. We weren't writing in the studio as such, but we would just spend a few days at home finishing a song in the midst of doing it all. It was quick. I mean some songs took a while to figure out how to work them out, but there was quite a lot of spontaneity, more so maybe than before. There were quite a few songs where one of us would bring something in that the other one hadn't heard, and we'd just start recording straight away. So yeah, it was quick. Intense but quick. 

As regards what inspired this record more than the others, your press release aptly cites some of ‘pop’s overlooked adventures’ as influences. Would it be fair to say there’s maybe a ‘70s pop feel to much of the new material? 

There are certain things there that have been there all the time, or at least in the last few years. It's funny to think of someone like Lindsey Buckingham as being overlooked, but actually (Fleetwood Mac's) Tusk isn't an album people know all that well. But it's certainly a record that we were immersed in. Something like A Wizard, A True Star by Todd Rundgren... actually the two things I was listening to most while we were recording the album were David Bowie and The Black Crowes’ third album! I'm not sure if you'd call The Black Crowes an overlooked adventure - or David Bowie for that matter (laughs)! Peter has been having a Richard Thompson renaissance, and again it's hard to think of him as an adventure, but the way he was writing songs throughout much of the ‘70s was quite a new thing. Yeah... let's just say Lindsey Buckingham! 

I think the fact that yourself and Peter had such trouble coming up with your albums of the decade for our artists' poll was a fair indication of this too. 

Oh good god, yeah. It's funny, and I guess it's partly to do with our age, but the last decade hadn't been great for us finding new music. Towards the end of the ‘90s, when I was in my late teens, there were loads of records from then that I loved and got really excited about. But this last decade - the decade in which I was actually making music - I was mostly disappointed by, which is annoying. Except for Joanna Newsom, who Peter doesn't like because he can't come to terms with her voice, and Jim O'Rourke. Although Eureka, which was late ‘90s I think, is probably my favourite Jim O'Rourke album. 

I saw that Uncut, in giving the new album 5/5, describe you as being "at odds with the modern world”. Are Field Music at odds with the modern world?

As long as people don't think that means I want to live in the past! But yeah, I am certainly at odds with the modern world. I mean, I absolutely despise so many aspects of how things are, not least how things are with how people make music, but that's just a reflection of everything else. The dishonesty and self-delusion of it, the rock n' roll mythology - it's all there and it stems from a very consumerist kind of mindset. Everybody's trying to feed on everybody else's aspirations towards being cool. Everybody is constantly trying to make people feel dissatisfied, and that leads to all sorts of terrible things. For instance, the undercurrent of misogyny that goes through almost all music that gets made at the moment, even by women, totally blows my mind. So yeah, I'm at odds with that. And people don't think the misogyny thing is there, which just boils my blood. 

That self-delusion, as you describe, is something Field Music have always veered away from, though, right? 

Yeah, but we do kind of see that as a political thing. We do things the way we do them because it’s a reflection of our principles. It's not like we just want to remove ourselves; we kind of see ourselves as a negation of lots of things we see and despise. The fact that we can use it as a positive inspiration to be independent and to not be patronising or veer too much into self-delusion - those things are really important. 

I suppose another thing that sets you apart is that not too many bands have someone as musically learned as Peter! Was it a PhD or a Masters that he's just completed with distinction? 

He's just finished his Masters and is considering whether to do a PHD, which I think would be quite impressive. But he's in two minds at the moment. Dr. Brewis, I'd be impressed by that!

I know you both approach music in quite an intellectual manner, or at least don't dismiss that aspect of it. Is that something shared by Kev Dosdale and Ian Black, who have now joined the band? 

Em, that's an interesting question (long pause). There aren't many musicians I've met who share that way of thinking as their default position. Certainly Kev and Ian both have a love of exploration. They might not naturally do it the way me and Peter do it, but the fact that they have that means they can appreciate how we go about it. I mean, Kev and Ian think that me and Peter are completely daft! They think that we're probably insane, but they're respectful enough to keep playing along and take what they can get from it. Mostly I don't ask them what they think of the music. I might be scared that they don't like it, but they like it enough to have fun playing with us. In terms of the live band, we're all getting inspired by the same bits, which is when we really become a live band. And that feels like a very collaborative thing. But I have a feeling they don't sit at home listening to Thelonious Monk and thinking “I wonder how that works!"