The name may conjure images of aged blues buzzards bawling chain gang hollers into wax cylinder gizmos operated by Harry Smith or Alan Lomax, but Sunderland trio Field Music couldn’t be further from such cotton-pickin’ settings.
That said, what they are isn’t easy to quantify either. The band’s self produced second album Tones Of Town blends and cross references a dizzying number of styles and sounds: Beatles and Beach Boys melodies, Soft Machine and Steely Dan chops, the arranging skills of Jon Brion or Van Dyke Parks, the spiky virtuosity of Wire and Television. Beautifully produced and played, it’s a record that bespeaks a maturity far beyond their years.
“The three of us started playing covers in pubs, and we’d do two 50 minute sets and then encores,’ recalls the band’s singer and co-songwriter David Brewis. “We did that for maybe two or three years, starting when I was about 14. We got to the point where we started to associate listening with playing quite early on. As soon as you start doing that, it changes everything, it makes things a lot more difficult. I find it hard to understand bands who are basically doing a slightly worse version of the thing they like. There’s no point in me trying to make Revolver again because my version will just be slightly worse.”
Brewis also rejects the notion of guilty pleasures. For him, cheesy ‘80s pop singles have as much weight and substance as venerated Chess or Blue Note reliquaries.
“You can love Van Dyke Parks and The Pretenders,” he says, “both those things are totally relevant. A year and a half ago we started doing a nightclub in Sunderland, and the idea was to be completely eclectic, but what we were all drawn to was a lot of music from the ‘80s which we’d grown up with, but had fallen off the radar a bit. And it’s not so much guilty pleasures, ’cos there’s nothing to be guilty about, but suddenly rediscovering all these things, like how good a record like ‘You Can Call Me Al’ by Paul Simon was, absolutely phenomenal, but it’s not cool.
“But right from the most underground stuff to the stuff you see on Top Of The Pops 2, the music of the ‘80s has a sense of unease and ambition. I remember getting Revolver when I was 16, and then later on getting the Velvet Underground’s third album, or hearing something like Van Dyke Parks’ Song Cycle or Meditations by John Coltrane, they changed the way I felt about music, but underneath that there’s Police records, ’cos that’s what me mam was playing in the car. It’s great to strip back the layers of taste you’ve built up and go back and judge things again. I love Fleetwood Mac. Lyndsey Buckingham’s a bit of a hero – what a guy!”