“I wish I could change and make new rules, and love myself better,” comes the yearning call of ‘In The Mirror’, the opening track of Field Music’s new album. It’s the introspective mantra of an individual, but one that also serves as a manifesto for the reincarnation of this Sunderland band.
Having released their eponymous debut in 2005 and its follow-up, Tones of Town, in 2007, Field Music decided they needed to get something out of their systems.
Branching out into solo projects – David Brewis as School of Language and Peter Brewis under the moniker The Week That Was – the albums released were positively received. Now they’ve come out the other side to continue their work as Field Music and release their third album: again eponymous, but this time subtitled (Measure).
And the time apart has certainly made a difference. Whilst their previous releases were notable for their brevity, (Measure) is a double album that spans well over an hour and traverses new musical ground for the Brothers Brewis.
“It was always the intention from really quite early on that we’d do another Field Music record, to have something that was stylistically varied, where the character of the album comes through within its variation, rather than in a coherent binding together of the tracks,” says David Brewis.
“The idea is like, this time, Field Music is this new thing where we can do whatever the hell we want, so let’s do a record where we do whatever the hell we want. It felt like there were no stylistic boundaries, and really that feeling was what led us to feeling that, yeah, we could do this again.”
There’s no doubt that this is reflected in the musical output of (Measure). Any fan of old-school Field Music may be somewhat taken aback by the ‘70s rock styling of tracks such as ‘Let’s Write A Book’; however, it’s born of a desire to relish influences without shame.
“The process of touring for both the solo records has improved our playing to a great degree, and that gave us more confidence to try things, and also to be a little bit less embarrassed about lots of the things that we like. I mean, we both really like rock music and I don’t know that that particularly comes through on our first couple of Field Music albums.
“So there was a sense this time that we like Led Zeppelin, and we like Aerosmith, we’ve got a soft spot for AC/DC, and we’re going to let that come out. There’s plenty of things about those bands and the records they made which are pretty embarrassing, and kind of terrible and unjustifiable in this day and age. However, there’s loads of things about those records which are absolutely great, so just being embarrassed about it seems like a bad reason not to take what we can from them.”
A patiently realistic record label in Memphis Industries also helps in this respect. Field Music might never have mass appeal – a prospect made even more unlikely with the release of (Measure) – but with a modest fanbase accepting of change, there’ll always be an audience.
“We feel like because we’re not a national venture with very high expectations of sales, we can do whatever kind of music interests us.
“And yeah, lots of people won’t like it, and lots of people are going to say the album is too long, and that’s totally fine. We’re very much resigned to that, completely don’t mind, but we can make completely crazy music because that’s what we do.”
Inevitably, however, the hectic juggling act of touring, promotion and keeping one’s sanity means that the band’s side-projects have been forced onto the back-burner.
“For the moment, all thoughts are with Field Music, but it’s very difficult to know how you feel about something, especially when we’ve got quite a lot of touring coming up. At the moment, it feels like, “oh, Field Music’s great!”, but once we’ve done three or four or five months of touring, we might not feel the same. At the moment it just feels like whatever we need to do, we can do within Field Music.”
A re-shuffle of the band’s line-up means that the forthcoming tours of the UK and USA will showcase a different kind of Field Music performance, but one that won’t forget their previous incarnation’s output of catchy, concise indie-pop songs vocally marked by the Brewis brothers’ Mackem accents.
“Now we’ve got a back catalogue, we’ve got quite a lot of songs to choose from. The gigs have been great so far, we haven’t really kicked off in a very intense way yet, but it feels good.
“It feels very different from Field Music live in the past because we’ve got different people in the band and for the first time we’re doing Field Music gigs as two guitars, which is very strange, but in a good way.
“These are the first Field Music gigs since 2004 with a bass player. It just feels like we’ve become a lot more dynamic, we have a lot more options with what we can do.
“Me and Peter have always had a problem with coming to terms with not being able to recreate the records on stage, and now it’s a little bit different in that I think we’ve just accepted that they’re very different art forms, playing live and making a record. They’re very, very different things, so we should embrace what’s good about live music when we play live, and not worry about it the rest of the time.”
Worrying seems to be something that Field Music have cast aside; they’re all the better for it.
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