Interview - Field Music

A Closer Look At Closers - Part 1.

This Friday, Blowdry Colossus, the latest solo album from Field Music's Peter Brewis, was set to be unveiled by Daylight Saving Records. This marks Peter's inaugural solo effort since The Week That Was in 2008, and it comes on the heels of joint projects with Paul Smith in 2014's Frozen By Sight and Sarah Hayes in 2019's You Tell Me. Recorded over the past year at Sunderland's Field Music studio, the album boasts contributions from an ensemble that includes Peter's brother David, Sarah Hayes, and his son Alexander. The record may take a little longer now, but hopefully, here’s something to keep you going….

Last month, I was lucky enough to spend time with Peter and David Brewis, discussing their favourite album closers and how they close out their records, and here is the first part of that conversation with the Mercury-nominated Wearsider siblings….

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The Run Out Grooves: Thank you for joining me today; I don’t think a band have gone through their discography with a focus on their closing tracks only, so this is new territory for all of us! I want to start by asking, outside of your work, which closing tracks have influenced you?

Peter Brewis: It’s an obvious answer, but you have to say The Beatles. That’s kind of a big one.

David Brewis: A lot of our ideas, and maybe a lot of everyone’s ideas, about the shape of an album comes from them. Prior to Revolver and Sgt. Pepper albums were really a collection of singles.

Peter Brewis: I think before that, you’d be looking at the Frank Sinatra concept albums like In The Wee Small Hours and Only The Lonely.

The Run Out Grooves: I definitely feel like ‘One For My Baby (and One More For The Road)’ is the first attempt to put a full stop at the end of a record.

David Brewis: When I was thinking about our closing tracks, there were lots of things that you can say quite often that The Beatles were a precursor. We have a long, weird song - so we’ll put that at the end. We’ve already got the climax to the record - we need a coda like ‘Her Majesty’ on Abbey Road. Typically it is things you’d have as set closers. Another one I thought of is Roxy Music’s ‘For You Pleasure’.¹ It’s their long, weird one on the record. Being able to perform a song like that and walk off stage, “See you later”. Lots of ours fit that type of pattern.

The Run Out Grooves: It’s interesting; I guess that once you have a few album closers under your belt, you can’t close the set with more than two.²

David Brewis: When you structure albums as we do, I really think of them as albums with songs that open and close sides and can only work in those slots. Some songs only work as openers; as good as they might be live, they might fall by the wayside.

The Run Out Grooves: So how does that work when recording? Do openers and closers fall in your laps?

David Brewis: We tend to have an idea of what will open things pretty early. There’s usually not too much debate on that. Not as often for the closer, but we know which song it will be and looking back at the albums, it seems kind of obvious to me. There are not many times where I can recall a serious debate. We ended up with two closers on the first album.

Peter Brewis: There was a lot to close!

David Brewis: ‘It's Not the Only Way to Feel Happy’ could have been the closer just as much as ‘You're So Pretty...’ which does close the record.

Peter Brewis: Yes, we were thinking about that; even though we were very much in the CD era, we were thinking about openers and closers for both sides.

The Run Out Grooves: It’s interesting to hear that you think about that vinyl switchover point, not just the first and final track overall. One album I’m itching to feature is Neil Young’s On The Beach, which had B and A swapped from the original plan. So clearly, like yourselves, thinking about the A to B transition was something that Young was thinking about.

David Brewis: We’ve had A. B, C and D even as well to think about on our records as well³.

The Run Out Grooves: You mention that sometimes the closer is the weird one. Has this meant that any of them have been considered b-sides or bonus tracks?

Both: I don’t think so.

David Brewis: Normally, when we’ve put out b-sides, it is because they are too similar to something already on the album or not providing anything that isn’t covered on the rest of the record. Although we’ve not had b-sides since Measure, that’s 12, 13 years now. We did have some leftovers after Flat White Moon, but we’ve not had any b-sides over that stretch.

The Run Out Grooves: The B-side has died a death, with people not putting out physical products. You can’t flip a streaming platform over.

David Brewis: The way the structures of singles work on streaming platforms is that you start with a track, the next song comes out, and the first released song almost becomes the b-side as you stagger those releases. I’m not really into all that kind of stuff. I like records, but it’s too expensive for the tiny market interested in 7-inch releases. With Flat White Moon, the songs that ended up on Another Shot EP were areas we thought we’d covered on the record.

The Run Out Grooves: You’ve spoken about having a closing track that is the weird one or the coda to the record - there are probably two more that I see regularly doing the newsletter. One is the slightly sad, acoustic goodbye song. The other that interests me is what I call “James Bond will return in…” where the final track is a tee-up for what comes next. I recently wrote about Fiona Apple’s ‘Hot Knife’ from The Idler Wheel… and you can hear the ideas that would go on to be Fetch The Bolt Cutters starting to form on it. Do you have anywhere you are trying out a new sound for the first time, and it hints at what’s next?

David Brewis: I don’t think so, not deliberately in that way. When making a record, we are so within what we are trying to do right now. This never seemed a reason to get ahead of ourselves; we already make so many records!

Peter Brewis: Didn’t Queen do that once, on Queen? Put out a half-baked version of ‘Seven Seas of Rhyme’⁴

The Run Out Grooves: Moving on to some of your other records away from Field Music, with the first School of Language record. How did you go about ‘Rocklist’? Was the single split into the bookends, or was it the other way around?

David Brewis: So that started from one musical idea which formed the basis of those tracks and became the first part. I was making this slightly odd music built around samples of me dropping toothbrushes in the bath. It dawned on me that this weird bit of music kind of sounded like ‘Sweet Emotion’ by Aerosmith, and I thought it would be a cool way to bookend the album. Start the record with this concept and finish with this rejigging that would trip my brain to imagine Aerosmith. Again, it is an album with a reprise at the end - which is obviously what The Beatles did on Sgt. Pepper followed by an epic coda, there’s plenty of precedent for this; Neil Young’s Tonight’s The Night is probably my favourite of his records. I like the idea of taking a bit of music, which was the starting point for the whole record, bringing it full circle from this very experimental piece of music to a natural piece of rock music for the rest of the album and putting it back together again at the end.

The Run Out Grooves: Peter, I have a question about The Week That Was that has bugged me for over 15 years. On the closing track, ‘Scratch The Surface’, there are some voices as it fades out - is one of them Boris Johnson?

Peter Brewis: Do you know what, it was some random political conversation from the radio that I recorded in 2007 on my mum’s sort-of ghetto-blaster. I was tuning it in and tuning it out to get the effect Kate Bush uses on Hounds of Love for the second half, ‘The Ninth Wave’, where she has it cutting in and out with the digital delay instead of changing pitch.

David Brewis: ‘Scratch The Surface’ is another closer where we have said everything we wanted to on the album, the flow is finished, and we have a song that is the single. A bit like Pavement did on Terror Twilight with ‘…And Carrot Rope’. We’ve done that a bunch of times.

Peter Brewis: So like Terror Twilight is dot dot dot And Carrot Rope we had And ‘Scratch The Surface’.

The back covers of The Week That Was (2008) and Terror Twilight (1999)

The Run Out Grooves: That’s interesting as you’ve had a few different types of closer throughout your career. As you say, you’ve had a single at the album’s end more than once; you’ve had instrumentals, short little codas, real epics and even a hidden track on Measure. You’ve even had ones that tie everything up in a nice bow by revisiting the themes and instrumentation of the rest of the record.

Peter Brewis: We’ve even had an accidental one. Tones of Town was not long enough when we went to master it. It was 29 minutes, too short - so we put the glockenspiel and vibraphone from the album’s beginning. It needed a little extra at the end of ‘She Can Do What She Wants’ because we thought we’d missed a song out.

David Brewis: What happened is the master engineer managed to change the length of a couple of the tracks just by accident. It was the last album we had mastered by anyone else; we’ve done all the rest ourselves.

The Run Out Grooves: On Open Here, though ‘Find a Way to Keep Me‘ has got bits from the rest of the album layered into it - so that was more deliberate, no?

David Brewis: That is one that I think of as being a set closer, and quite often those are songs in which we start small and grow into something big. So it has that epic quality. For the first record, ‘You’re So Pretty’ was the set closer and most of our closers fit that template of building up. ‘Find a Way to Keep Me’ is probably the most musically complete example of us doing that, starting small and building to a crescendo.

The Run Out Grooves: When discussing an epic that swells and builds towards a crescendo, it is hard not to look back to ‘A Day in The Life’ again - reinventing the wheel can be tricky!

Next week - more from the brothers Brewis on their closing tracks to date

1. From the 1973 album of the same name.

2. I meant the main set and encore.

3. 2010’s Field Music (Measure) has four sides of vinyl.

4. Yes, they had an instrumental version on the first album, and the more familiar version ends Queen II.