Getting a Mercury Music Prize nomination for their latest album Plumb was a real surprise for the Brewis brothers – not least because they very nearly didn’t enter the 2012 competition.

“Generally speaking, thinking of music as a competition is a bad thing,” says David Brewis, one half of the Sunderland band he started with his brother Peter in 2004.

He admits the pair had discussed whether it was worth taking part.

“We tend to think the people who write about us, or who play our records on the radio, are sticking their necks out for us to a certain degree because we are such a small concern. For us to get a nomination means a lot of people have done that for us – it’s really nice it has happened.”

Compared with others in the competition, the Brewises are still pretty small fry.

“We were interested to read the sales figures for the other Mercury nominees,” he says. “The Maccabees have sold 80,000 copies of their record [Given To The Wild]. If we did that we could live in some luxury for many years! Plumb sold nearly 9,000 copies. It shows people are still buying records – but not necessarily ours!”

As the brothers told The Guardian in a very revealing interview in February, Field Music operate in a very tightly budgeted way, with Peter confessing that he sometimes earns as little as £5,000 a year.

In fact, when the band went on hiatus in 2008 to allow the brothers to focus on one-off solo projects – Peter with The Week That Was and David’s School Of Language – it was nearly a precursor to giving up altogether.

“Basically, at that point we had given up on the idea of making a real living from music,” David says. “We wanted to make a couple of records before we got a real job. We still feel like that – to get one more record done before we have to go back to the nine-to-five.”

The band are set to take another break after this round of touring.

“I think we are determined to get back to being creative in the studio as quickly as we can and see what comes,” he says. “The festival season has been a bit of a slog. I don’t ever want to be a musician just for the money. I would rather end the whole thing and get my CV out, as hard as that might be.

“In a way, a Mercury nomination might be a better way to go out, rather than plugging away and becoming more resentful about having to try to make money from music.”

R ’n’ B influences

David doesn’t see Plumb as Field Music’s crossover record. It still features the brothers’ mix of unusual time signatures, catchy harmonies and pop nuggets, but perhaps has more of a groove to it.

“We usually do the opposite of what we did before,” he says. “Measure [the band’s last double album] was quite rocky, so Plumb feels less rock. It wasn’t like we were aiming for mass radio play!”

The album differs in two ways. The first is that David hurt his arm while painting their new studio, meaning Peter did the majority of the drumming on the album.

And the second is the brothers’ increasing knowledge of production and recording techniques.

“When we did our first record [2005’s eponymous debut] we didn’t realise how little rock music there was in it until people compared the album to Belle And Sebastian,” says David. “We thought we were more like Led Zeppelin.

“We didn’t realise the album had a lack of groove until we started playing together a bit more.”

The influence of production duo The Neptunes joins with classic Stax and Atlantic soul in their latest recordings, with David rocking a falsetto vocal on some tracks.

“I’m not joking when I talk about the influence of early noughties R ’n’ B in what we do,” he says.

“We’re big fans of Justin Timberlake. The lyrics are terrible but the records sound amazing.”

More obvious influences are celebrated on Field Music Plays, which has been released to coincide with the tour. It rounds up the diverse covers the pair have recorded, including their takes on classic Pet Shop Boys, Robert Wyatt, Syd Barrett, live favourite John Cale’s Fear Is A Man’s Best Friend, and even Ringo Starr’s horrific contribution to The White Album, Don’t Pass Me By.

“We didn’t feel tied to the original arrangement because it’s kind of rubbish, so we could do whatever we wanted,” says David, talking about the song they were asked to do for a Mojo reimagining of the Fab Four’s classic double album.

“We had this idea of mashing up lots of different songs – there are bits of Don’t Let Me Down and Strawberry Fields Forever in there.”

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