GO TO GFT AND YOU’LL BE HERRING FIELD MUSIC
Band accept challenge of playing live score to fishing documentary
SUNDERLAND band Field Music are set for a full film experience this weekend – and they’ll be on edge throughout.
The group will be providing a live musical accompaniment to a screening of John Grierson’s 1929 silent documentary Drifters this Sunday at the GFT.
They’d previously composed a score for the film in 2013 at the Berwick Film Festival, and they found keeping in time to the onscreen footage is a tricky challenge.
“When you’re a bit on edge and performing it’s exhilarating,” says the band’s Peter Brewis. “That’s one of the things about watching live performances of things like this, you’re wondering if they’ll make it.
“One of the worst things in the world is to see a band play live that know exactly what they’re doing and they won’t make a mistake, so it’s like a replica of the record, just with people standing onstage.
“Especially when you’re doing gigs like this, you really hear where the instruments are coming from and see us sweating whether we’ll get this right.
“We have to watch each other or the film constantly and there’s a lot of communication going on, like raised eyebrows if something goes differently from what we’re expecting…”
The project goes back a couple of years, when they were approached by the Berwick Film Festival, and asked if they fancied providing a musical accompaniment to one of a selection of films.
They picked Drifters, Grierson’s film on Britain’s North Sea herring fishing, having been impressed at how dynamic the documentary was.
They’ve since revisited the music they recorded for a studio album that was released as an exclusive for this year’s Record Store Day, and decided to play a series of special gigs alongside the film, including this Sunday’s GFT show as part of the iconic Glasgow cinema’s Sound & Vision strand of events.
Peter believes the film suited the band’s own music, rather than forcing them to change styles.
“We thought we should really try and do something that was musically representative of us,” he recalls.
“It would have been pointless to do some of the more obvious things that you could have done, like a folky thing or a more obviously cinematic thing – we didn’t want strings and an orchestra on there, or to be self-consciously experimental.
“Me, Dave and Andy (Moore, keyboardist) grew up listening to those semi-improvised rock groups like Led Zeppelin or The Doors, and then started getting into Miles Davies or John Coltrane, so all that is in there.