Cool! I bought the vinyl and don’t even own a record player, so it’ll be good to finally hear it.
(we’re getting a record player when we move, which for so many bad reasons has taken 14 months and counting)
The Brewises have started a Doors tribute band, which has created some blowback (and not even “the Doors? Really?”), at which David has got very straightforward.
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They do amazing stuff and make bugger all money from it. More power to them. They didn’t need to explain themselves.
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Stereogum covered this story as well yesterday. Bit sad when David described the band as having “quietly passed into contemporary irrelevance” in recent years 
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Hadn’t realised it’s the original trio plus one of the Futureheads.
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Sort of think it’s both on the money, but simultaneously not sure what ‘contemporary relevance’ even looks like? I absolutely love FM, and saw them play fairly recently (again). They were as good as the first time I saw them, and also as funny.
- Field Music was always a niche band.
- The organic music scene is fucked (streaming).
- This generation of bands is surely part of the first wave of tiny bands who are playing obscure music into their 50s/60s etc and are learning the (unfortunate) significance of youth/novelty/newness in pop/rock. It isn’t enough to produce amazing music and be one of the best live bands in the UK.
I think they’re luckier than some/most in that they’re good enough to pull off a viable covers band for money. Absolutely no shame in that; I wish I could do it!
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Commercially, maybe. Not fair but perhaps true. But they will never be artistically moribund. It was something watching them at Union Chapel, thinking they were taking an extended bow, then realising what they were actually doing was starting to pack up their gear while we were still applauding. And then we had to wait around at the merch desk while they did that before David came up to sell stuff.
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That was so sad. They are so talented. Make great records, and work so hard. That they’ve stuck to their creative guns in the face of lesser relevancy is to their credit.
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20 years (and 1 day) anniversary of FM’s debut.
Copy of the Facebook post below.
Happy birthday Field Music / Field Music!
Today marks twenty years since the release of our debut album. A great deal has changed for the music industry in that time. In 2005, the vinyl revival was a long way off hitting its stride. MySpace was brand new and iTunes was barely a toddler. Facebook seemed like a quirky (poke-y) outgrowth of Friends Reunited. Spotify, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, WhatsApp? None of these existed. New music reached people through the print press and (analogue) radio. I seem to remember Mark Radcliffe playing our deeply-odd first single, Shorter Shorter, on BBC Radio 2. Truly, a great deal has changed.
Me, Peter and Andrew, however, have not changed all that much. In 2005 we were coming to the end of what I now call our “Years of Flailing”. That period where we had high expectations for ourselves, but very little idea of how to do, well, anything. We’d signed publishing contracts in 2001 (which in my case meant avoiding the world of graduate employment) and we’d set up a rehearsal/recording space (which we christened 8Music because eight of us, including the fledgling Futureheads, shared the minuscule rent), but nothing else seemed to fall into place. We spent a long time waiting for someone to tell us what we were supposed to do: How do we record? Mix? Tour? How do we make the most of the ideas we have? Then, in late 2003, we decided we couldn’t wait any longer. We’d just have to get on with it. We pooled our best (or most interesting) songs and started making an album. We also steeled ourselves for the (pre-streaming) challenges of self-releasing, though thankfully, our half-mixed CD-R with a half-pleading/half-defiant letter landed on Memphis Industries’ desk at an opportune moment and our two-decade long collaboration began.
Of course, we have changed a tiny bit. We’re definitely greyer and more wrinkled. We’re probably a touch more responsible. We’re a little bit better at giving each other the benefit of the doubt. We’re a little bit better at ploughing through our (frequent) crises of confidence. We’re a lot more skilled. We always said that we wanted to take the music seriously and not take ourselves seriously, but actually we were always pretty serious about both (though, having read a few early interviews recently, we’re a lot better at keeping our self-seriousness private these days.) What has definitely stayed the same is our determination not to rely on cliche, not to lean on repeated rearrangements of the long-established symbols of pop music. Of course, the reason something becomes a cliche is because audiences like it, and they’re happy to consume it over and over again. As listeners and creators, that isn’t for us. And it never will be. We have stayed awkward for this long and I think we’ll stick with it.
Happy birthday Field Music / Field Music!
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Looking forward to the gigs later this year with the early albums and original lineup, because I wasn’t into them back then so it’s a one off chance to see the show we’d have had.
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