Field Music to end the week (and get ready for the weekend), doing a live session for Marc Riley at BBC 6 Music on October 14th of this year.
Field Music are from Sunderland, Tyne and Wear, England, that formed in 2004. The band’s core consists of brothers David Brewis and Peter Brewis. Andrew Moore was the original keyboard player. Their line-up has at times featured members of both Maxïmo Park and The Futureheads.
Field Music have been called one of the few bands to outlast the indie guitar band explosion of the mid-2000s. Describing the band as “a truly artful proposition in the pseudo-filled landscape of contemporary Brit art-rock”, music blog The Fantastic Hope puts this down in part to their “un-self-conscious anti-fashion stance”, arguing that Field Music’s “wayward pop from the fringes of academia is one of the most worthwhile ways in which rock//indie/guitar music/white pop/whatever might evolve”. Critics have compared their music to acts as diverse as Steely Dan, XTC, Prefab Sprout, Peter Gabriel, Scritti Politti, Talking Heads and Todd Rundgren. They have also been nominated for the Mercury Prize.
In September 2013, it was revealed that Field Music had composed a soundtrack for the 1929 silent documentary Drifters. The film, which originally premiered alongside Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, was made by pioneering Scottish director John Grierson and follows the working day of a herring fishing fleet as it sets sail from the Shetland Islands. Field Music premiered the work with a live performance and screening for Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival. This commission saw the original line-up of Peter Brewis, David Brewis and Andrew Moore reunite for the first time since 2007. A subsequent screening and performance took place at London’s Islington Assembly Hall in November 2013.
David Brewis played as a member of the touring band for former Fiery Furnaces singer Eleanor Friedberger on her UK tour in the summer of 2013. He released a second School of Language album – Old Fears – in April 2014. Both David Brewis and Peter Brewis joined their former bass player Ian Black in the band SLUG, touring as support to Hyde & Beast in the autumn of 2014. Peter Brewis also released an album, Frozen by Sight, in collaboration with Maxïmo Park’s Paul Smith on 17 November 2014. This consisted of ‘baroque-pop’ compositions by Brewis with edited excerpts of Paul Smith’s travel writing sung in Recitative. A live performance of the album was staged, with other musicians including a string section, at Gateshead’s Sage.
In November 2015, Prince posted a link to Field Music’s then-newly released single “The Noisy Days Are Over” on his Twitter feed. In February 2016 the band released their sixth album as Field Music, Commontime. They performed two songs from the album—including “Disappointed”, which featured in the “live” edition of the programme—in the second episode of the 48th series of the BBC music show Later… with Jools Holland. The performance was cited in a BBC poll as one of the highlights of the series.
Early in 2016, the band completed their first UK tour in four years. It was followed up by a US tour, which included dates in Washington, Philadelphia, New York, Boston and Seattle. They also played in California for the first time since the tour to promote 2007’s Tones of Town.
In 2016, Field Music worked with Newcastle duo Warm Digits on the soundtrack for the film Asunder, directed by Esther Johnson, commissioned as part of the 14-18 NOW series of events to commemorate the centenary of World War 1. Writing for The Guardian, the film’s creative producer, Bob Stanley revealed that the compositions, which were scored for the Northern Sinfonia by Peter Brewis, had been inspired by Stravinsky, Schoenberg and Messiaen.
A seventh album, Open Here, was released in February 2018. The Guardian described it as a “grand masterclass in terrific tune-making”.
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