Rock & Pop - Bruv story: Brewis boys field questions
Published 28 January 2010
by RÓISÍN GADELRAB
The BBC’s sound desk is temporarily down and the brothers behind Sunderland band Field Music are taking advantage of the break by revealing how the icy weather nearly killed their new album.
They’re recording a session for Rob da Bank at the Beeb’s Maida Vale studios, ahead of their biggest-ever headline gig at Scala on March 3.
Their third album – Field Music (Measure) – a generous 20 tracks, considering their last album was a mere 30 minutes, is out on November 15.
But it nearly didn’t happen, younger brother David Brewis says: “Before Christmas I slipped on the ice and smashed the screen on the laptop. We do all our recording on our laptops. The press lost the CD master so I had to somehow burn a new master from my laptop even though I could only see the top third of the screen.
“The people repairing it told me there’s something wrong with the CD drive as well so it’s quite possible we’re sending an album out with some kind of terrible errors – but I’m sure they’d have spotted it.”
The album is a change from the band’s previous style, “a linear progression” David explains: “It’s not a major departure, just more wide ranging. In the past we tried to take all our ideas and make something coherent out of it. This time we’ve let things spread out a little, not to synthesise disparate elements of what we do into one thing but give ideas a bit more space to breathe.”
The boys began playing music when Peter, now 32, got a drum kit aged 12. David, nine at the time, had a £20 Argos guitar and they learned together. They begged for a Led Zeppelin tape for Christmas, and were playing covers in pubs by the time David was 14.
It is to these roots that the boys are returning, although the album encompasses more than just rock.
David says: “It’s like we should accept the fact that the first music we actually liked was Led Zeppelin. There are lots of things on this record that kind of embrace rock music, which probably would have been a little sad before.
“We’re not cool, we’re really poor blokes from the provinces and that comes through in what we do.
“I hope we come across as people who you can’t pin down.
“We’re very well behaved, we’re not rock and roll. We’re too old, grown-ups. I don’t want to be a stupid kid, I don’t want to be infantile.”
David says he and Peter have a harmonious relationship: “We just try and make the music we think should exist in the world and no one else has done yet. So when we get to the end of a record we think, ‘yeah that plugs a tiny bit of the gap of all of the things we like’.”
• Field Music’s single Them That Do Nothing is out on February 8.