Field Music Album By Album

UNCUT CLASSIC

COMMONTIME

MEMPHIS INDUSTRIES, 2016

Imbued with the joys (and worries) of new parenthood,

Commontime’s snappy funkpop gets a royal seal of approval

PETER: We were getting into the idea of enjoying pop music again. I was introducing my son to The Beatles and David Bowie and I wanted to make some music that he could sing along with. DAVID:Plumb ended up being kind of proggy, so maybe it was a reaction against that; the idea of getting back to radio music, compilation music, like we would have listened to when we were kids. PETER: So that was us trying to have fun while struggling [with parenthood]. I think that’s a common theme – everything else might not be going so well, but when we get together and make music, even if we have to deal with difficult subjects, let’s have a good time. I’d rather have a good time in the studio and get juiced up on coffee than have a bad time in the studio and have to go and sort it out down the pub later on. It’s more expensive, in lots of ways. DAVID: It was very strange to think of Prince hearing our music. I was onmywaytoTescowhenIsawhis tweet[linkingto“TheNoisyDays AreOver”].Itwasverygnomic,and becausethere’sadeliberatehomage tothehornarrangementsofParade attheendofthatsong,Ididn’tknow whether it was an approving tweet or an ‘I’m about to start taking legal action’ tweet. We wrote a little article [for The

Guardian] about how much we love Prince and the musical ideas we’d borrowed from him.

And then he retweeted that article as well, and at that point

I breathed a sigh of relief.

PETER:Itwasaroundthesame timeasthat‘musicalvibe’case betweentheestateofMarvin

GayeandRobinThicke.Iwas like,‘Ohmygod,I’vestolenPrince’s vibe!’Imean,Itriedtostealit–didn’tquitegetthere.ButIdon’t thinkhe’dhavemademuchmoney ifhe’dsuedus.

OPENHERE

MEMPHISINDUSTRIES,2018

TheBrexitvotecastsaforlorn shadowoverFieldMusic’smost lavishlyorchestratedalbum,perked upbyachild’stoykeyboard

DAVID: The schisms that the Brexit vote showed up in a place like Sunderland were pretty unavoidable. PETER: The first town out of Europe! I really struggled with the idea of us no longer being part of something bigger. How do you write about things like that? Don’t use minor chords, so it doesn’t become too dreary. And always approach it like a question: what’s going on? We’d just done a film project, Asunder, and that gave us a bit of confidence to see how far we could take the scoring element. DAVID: I got my son a toy keyboard forChristmas.Theproblemisnow thatthetwokidsargueoverwho getstocontrolthedrummachine. PETER:Ah,one’sbossanovaand theotherone’sabitmore16-beat? DAVID:Butwhenthey’renotlooking, I go and play on the keyboard and maybe I’ll record it on my phone. And it so happened that when I was recording this keyboard riff, I could hear my son in the background counting, so that became the start of “Count It Up”. I’m always wary of doing a finger-pointing song unless I’m also pointing the finger at myself. I’m saying, “I have this privilege and I need to not forget that when I start throwing out judgements.” We never had to worry about anything fundamental growing up, and that’s not the case for everybody.

Aiming for that “confidence in being loose”: Field Music in 2020

“We always try and write what is foremost in our minds”

DAVID BREWIS

MAKING A NEW WORLD

MEMPHIS INDUSTRIES, 2020

A commission from the Imperial War Museum leads to some oddly catchy songsabouttownplanningand genderreassignmentsurgery

DAVID: The museum were looking for someone to do a performance. I think they had The Fall lined up, but Mark E Smith passed away and somehow we got the call. PETER: They needed someone reliable to do something quickly… DAVID: I’m fine with that as a reputation!Itcouldhavejustbeen anordinarygigandthatwould probablyhavebeenenoughtofulfil thebrief,exceptwetookittoofar. Withtheirencouragement. PETER:TheMakingANewWorld season wasn’t about the first world war, it was about the after-effects. So let’s think about sonar, votes for women, the flu pandemic, and find a personal story in each of them. DAVID: The songs were all about an individual’s feelings on the subject matter. But it’s almost like some people were put off by the very idea. PETER: People are sold on this thing of ‘music’s for feeling, man, and not for thinking’ – but it’s for both, you know? There’s a massive tradition of being informed by music. Making A New World was probably too much for some people to handle. It was too much for us to handle, really. Especially at the time, when we were going through lots of personal turmoil. But it was good to be able to write about somebody else.

FLAT WHITE MOON

MEMPHIS INDUSTRIES, 2021

A return to first principles finds the brothersprocessinglossthroughthe prismofsun-dappledmemory

PETER: Our mother passed away three years ago. And I experienced a change in domestic circumstances, politically put. It all felt pretty heavy, so Making A New World was a good thing to be doing, to keep active but not have to deal with everything through music straight away. The new album is me dealing with it, but from a less horrific perspective. DAVID: We always try and write what is foremost in our minds, it feels like the most honest thing to do. But we weren’t ready for that in 2018. PETER: The Beatles are my go-to for feeling better about myself and the world. And [the later albums] are quite loose as well, so that’s what I wanted to try and do – to have a confidence in being loose. There’s some Zeppelin in there again, some Free, Dire Straits… you can only do so much with a clean Strat and not sound a bit Knopfler. Which is fine! DAVID: And a bit of every era of Fleetwood Mac, all of which were a fundamental part of our childhood. PETER: We wanted it to have warmth. DAVID: When it came to sequencing, we felt that “You Get Better” would be a good one to end with. I was thinking about Sly & The Family Stone and Parliament, so hopefully it has a little bit of that danceable energy. Although it’s still a very scepticaltakeonanoptimisticsong. That’sus–wecan’tdothingsina straightline. SAM RICHARDS

Picking up good “vibrations”: (l-r) Holger Czukay, Jaki Liebezeit, Irmin Schmidt , Michael Karoli

touring, and still run their own live-in recording studio, giving them a totally free hand over their own music production. Their posthumous reputation is now built almost entirely on the contents of those albums, their warp-drive Teutonic response to The Velvet Underground and the Stooges, veering from hypno-funk groove to avant-garde drone science.

“I always loved those wonderful relentless rhythms that used to chug away,” says Hawkwind’s Dave Brock, who bought a copy of Can’s debut, Monster Movie, as far back as 1970, “Because they were always rather avant-gardeish, with their electronics and stuff, I always found them a very interesting band. I’ve got all their records. I’ve always been a Can fan, really.”

With the deaths of Holger Czukay, drummer Jaki Liebezeit and guitarist Michael Karoli, Irmin Schmidt – the band’s 83-year-old keyboardist – has, by default, become curator of the band’s legacy. It has been his job to select which concerts are released for this new Can Live series, listening back to himself and his comrades for the first time in more than 45 years. When I ask him, over the phone from his home in rural south-east France, to dredge up any specifics about the Stuttgart show, he replies honestly: “I only remember them when there was something special happening. And in Stuttgart there was nothing special.”

Nothing special? Only a night with Germany’s greatest krautrock group at the peak of their powers. For Schmidt, though, at this distance “it sounds to me more or less like music from somebody else. If it’s good, the better it is, the more distant it is. Only the bad things have still got blood sticking to them, if you know what I mean. The good ones you can listen to without any emotional mixup. Our live appearances are so strange for some people, and so surprising, that they did maybe do more to build up the legend than the records, and I’m quite happy that we succeeded.”

BUT what was Can like in performance? Andrew Hall, co-author of The Can Book with Pascal Bussy, first saw the group at the Rainbow Theatre in north London in

January 1973. He tagged along on their subsequent dates at Aylesbury, Penzance,

Plymouth, Portsmouth, Chatham, Norwich and back to London at Imperial College. “There was a big difference between those gigs,” he remembers, noting that a small venue like the Garden in Penzance was less suited to Can’s long ambient build-ups and release than a middle-sized space such as the Guildhall in Plymouth. “Their Hatfield gig [in November 1975] was peppered with a few ‘Can moments’, normally centred around Holger. One was the encore following ‘Vitamin C’, during which Holger made some desperate attempts to vocalise, which rounded off the second half. Holger, Irmin and Jaki had emerged for the performance, but no sign of Michael. With an unbridled Jaki lashing at his drums and Irmin rollercoasting through the air waves, Holger screamed into his mic, ‘We are going to play LOUD!’… 30 seconds… ‘Where is our guitar player?’… 10 seconds… ‘Here he comes.’ After a further two minutes, from out of the chaos swirls Michael’s guitar, resolving into a hypnotic motif. Great ending!”

Part of this encore surfaced as “Networks Of Foam”, on Can’s Lost Tapes boxset. Can’s studio albums were the product of slow, painstaking work – days spent playing in the studio, then overdubbed and edited with razorblades. It transpires that on stage the band achieved even