INTERVIEW
FIELD MUSIC
DAWN STOREY TALKS TO PETER BREWIS ABOUT FIELD MUSIC’S APPROACH TO SONGWRITING AND THE EARLY INFLUENCES WHICH INSPIRED THEIR LATEST ALBUM When they came to make a new Field Music album, the Brewis brothers had a plan – to take it back to basics simply by getting together and playing live. Unfortunately, like so many other people’s plans lately, this one was halted by the pandemic – and so Flat White Moon ended up being a completely different set of songs altogether. “It’s not the album we set out to make,” Peter Brewis tells me. “Me and Dave [Brewis] just wanted to get in a room and rock the hell out. I think we were listening to a lot of Free, strangely, and I thought we were going to write ten All Right Now’s, and then we didn’t because obviously we couldn’t play together in the studio. So after doing a couple of tracks in that style I ended up doing a lot of stuff just in my flat.” Luckily there were still occasions when the pair could meet up. “We
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recorded a few songs together in the studio – really just banged things down – and then we had to do it separately for quite a while. Then we got back together and finished it off. The album prior to that [Making A New World] was…well, it was a bloody concept album and all the songs ran into each other and it was just complicated. I think we wanted to do something that was a little bit less like musical architecture. Sort of like ‘Can we just do some songs please?’.” He laughs. Flat White Moon comprises a real blend of song styles, opening with the lush, layered sounds of Orion From The Street, a track of which Peter is particularly fond. “In terms of the songs that I wrote it’s really important to the record, and I think it says a lot about where I was at. And also Not When You’re In Love and When You Last
