Yawning at Field Music

It is an affliction of the internet age that, nowadays, a band must be tragically cool to get noticed. They must have the right haircuts, a certain amount of buzz about them and normally a postcode from Dalston, Shoreditch or at the moment South London. Field Music, however, are the antithesis of this; they are desperately uncool and do not profess to ride on any trends or jump on any bandwagons. They have stuck to their indie ethos from the start, forming in 2004. They have gradually garnered critical acclaim with their four albums, and have attracted a sizeable, if not slightly cultish, following. So I attended their London show at the Electric Ballroom in Camden with the anticipation that this was what music was meant to be about.

Music should not, I thought to myself, be about the importance of the hype machine, the coolness of the lead singers new mop haircut or how many synthesisers the band employ. It should be about the music… how wrong I was. Field Music, although being great musicians, basically play a mixture of indie and white boy funk with prog tendencies to a middle-aged crowd all doing embarrassing dad dances. (If you have been to a wedding lately you know what dance I am talking about.) When I looked around the busy venue it struck me that the average age was about forty, rather than the youthful crowds I am so used to. There is, however, nothing inherently terrible about attracting a crowd of middle aged couples. I am sure that these were some really cool forty year olds; the ones who have taken a fair share of pills in their time, the ones who plan family vacations around Glastonbury, the ones who are so ‘chill’ that they let their children choose their own names when they are old enough. BUT, it does not make their booty-popping any less cringe-worthy or embarrassing.

There were definitely some songs which shone to me, such as ‘Them that do nothing’ and ‘Who’ll pay the bills’. The majority of the material was taken from their most recent album Plumb which has attracted the notable glances of a Mercury nomination, and these songs on the whole were the strongest of the night. The ambling nature of the set, however, did nothing to keep me enraptured. Songs morphed into one another, held together with prog guitar noodlings, which meant that my attention was not held for a significant period all night. There is no doubting that Field Music have some fantastic melodies but just as one builds up, just as in ‘A new town’, it is quickly dismantled in favour of a further instrumental section which was definitely a shame. There was also an interesting dynamic between the two Brewis brothers but it seemed to me that the lads from up in the North East were actually fighting a losing battle to keep their middle aged movers and shakers firmly under their spell. There were moments when the tall man in front of me didn’t know whether to sway to the beauty of some of the more fragile sections, as in the beginning of ‘Start the day right’, or to have a white boy funk freakout session as he did one minute later in the same song. To say the poor bloke was both confused and exhausted by the end was an understatement.

What struck me most about Field Music was that they definitely had some promising songs and great melodies but they were lost beneath the more experimental and prog parts which are not so prevalent in their albums. I now realise that most of my friends who really like Field Music are either into jazz or are in white boy funk bands and this should have come as a massive warning sign to me. As I headed back into the night I felt slightly dispirited; let down in the knowledge that sometimes music needs the haircuts, the hipsters and the bloggers because without them I ended up at a gig with some dancing dads listening to some jazz ramblings of an indie band I once thought were quite good. I am sorry Field Music, but as a live proposition, I do not get you. Come back to me in twenty years time when my biggest hobby will be gardening and my happy marriage will be interspersed with an affair with Sheila from next door and I am sure I will happily bust out some terrible dance moves in Camden, but for now- no thank you.