Field Music: ‘Every now and again we see ourselves as an indie rock band and we immediately recoil’

“It was the first time I’d ever been to Wakefield,” recalls David Brewis, one half of the sibling songwriting partnership at the heart of one of Sunderland’s most enduring bands. “I was impressed with the city and the festival. It’s clearly something which is a labour of love for the organisers and that’s always the best position for us as a band, going into something where the line-up is really considered and the people who buy tickets trust that it’s going to be the right kind of event where even if you don’t know a band there’s a decent chance you’re going to enjoy them because it’s all been curated so lovingly.”

Having toured their eighth album Flat White Moon last autumn, David and his brother Peter had planned to spend this year experimenting musically. “But when a nice festival comes along it’s nice to get the band back together and play some shows,” David says. “But we’re doing very few festivals this year, it looks like one a month until September, and the rest of the time we’re doing what we do, which is making too many records.”

Flat White Moon was quite a different album to its predecessor, Making a New World, a concept record which grew out of a project for the Imperial War Museum. Finding the complications of playing Making a New World live “wearing” because its songs could only be played in order “in one big 45-minute chunk”, they sought to go back to basics, “although we always end up making things complicated for ourselves,” David jokes.

“Now we’re so far away from it, Making a New World was a good thing to do because it was interesting,” he says. “Every now and again me and Peter see ourselves as an indie rock band and we immediately recoil because it’s not what we are. We need to chase whatever’s interesting to us at the time, so we’re always oscillating between not just making it difficult for ourselves but difficult for audiences... We have a natural inclination for being awkward because that’s what we find attractive.”

Next on the agenda is a commission for Durham Brass Festival which David spent the early months of lockdown researching. “It was thinking about what our reference points for that are,” he says. “We don’t know a lot of colliery band music and we didn’t necessarily try and imitate that. For us the brass references are Miles Davis’ stuff with Gil Evans or where The Band brought in Allen Toussaint to do brass arrangements for The Last Waltz. Closer to the colliery band thing, we played I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight by Richard and Linda Thompson a couple of times, a silver band comes and marches through that song, so those kind of reference points came up for me through lockdown, but specifically related to this commission.”

Field Music play Long Division on June 11. longdivisionfestival.co.uk