Peter and David Brewis grew up in a parallel world to the British mainstream. As children making their own fun in Sunderland on the north-east coast, they used to pretend to make their own movies.''Obviously there were no cameras involved,'' Peter says. ''We didn't really realise that's how films happened. I think we thought Star Wars was a kind of documentary.''
Their music evolved in a similarly naive context, ''an extension of playing games together, like building Lego'', he says. But missing from the instructions was the vital lust for glory that most children learn before their first guitar chords.''When we made the first Field Music album we had no intention of being a band,'' Peter says. ''We vaguely imagined we'd make a record, it would be quickly forgotten, and then in the future [specialty reissue label] Rykodisc would release it as some kind of lost classic.''
Alas, their 2005 debut was sucked into one of the British pop media's recurring tornadoes of nationalistic pride.''Essentially we had to get our own covers band together to play our album,'' Peter says. ''We had to relearn the songs. Me and Dave had to switch around between drums and guitar on stage. Then it dawned on us that, shit, we'd got ourselves in this whole other game. We realised we were in the same competition as the Kaiser Chiefs and Franz Ferdinand and all these other British guitar bands and we felt, well, we don't belong here. That's not what we were doing at all.''
After a second, largely misunderstood, album, they hit on a new strategy. Run away. ''We had to work out a new competition with our own rules,'' Peter says.David came back in early 2008 with his project, School of Language. Peter followed with The Week That Was. Each paved the way for Field Music's triumphant return with a third album: Field Music (Measure).
Field Music - 'Them That Do Nothing'
Measuring 20 songs from crunchy power pop to dreamlike progressive rock, it's a mercurial beast that has had critics citing seemingly random precedents from Fleetwood Mac to XTC to Prince.''A lot of people have taken it as a prog rock thing but really, it just comes from the Beatles I think,'' Peter says of the album's elaborate but immediate architecture.
These days Field Music hang together better on stage, too, Peter says. ''We've raised our ugly heads in a different era, it feels like,'' he says. ''Also, because we've had various records out now, we've built up a more varied audience. I find myself at gigs looking at all these men and women, old and young people, and thinking: 'Did you actually buy this record?' I suppose some of them must have.''
Michael Dwyer