Field Music defend decision to form The Doors tribute band: “We need other income streams”
Field Music have defended their decision to start playing shows as a tribute band to The Doors, citing the challenging financial nature of the music industry.
Since forming in 2004, the Sunderland natives have released ten studio albums, and their most recent release, Limits of Language, arrived last October. Their fourth album, 2012’s Plumb, was nominated for the prestigious Mercury Prize.
However, the current musical landscape is difficult to navigate, even for bands such as Field Music, who have been around for a significant amount of time.
The group, comprised of David Brewis and Peter Brewis, had begun secretly playing shows as The Fire Doors, which they explained on Facebook on July 11th.
After a fan asked them, “Why would you do this?”, David shared a lengthy response, stating, “Why are we doing this? Making a living from making our own music has become increasingly difficult. We need other income streams. We have a lot of musical skill. We love The Doors. We became musicians by learning how to play this stuff when we were kids.”
He continued: “Lots of venues put on tribute acts. Lots of people go to see tribute acts. We think that we could be really, really bloody good at doing this one. By doing maybe one show a month we can fill a hole in our dire finances.”
David then highlighted how streaming has impacted in the music industry, asking readers, “How many of you spent a tenner on a CD back in the 90s and only ever listened to it once? — we now have a streaming culture where casual listeners get the same experience but without wasting that cash (which inadvertently subsided thousands of smaller artists).”
The musician stated that Field Music don’t have “an indie dancefloor hit”, meaning “we can’t do the heritage circuit”. He also highlighted how the current way that fans consume music has left them “without fitting into any playlistable genre” which has led to Field Music entering “contemporary irrelevance, despite writing new songs and making new records which are, no false modesty here, as good as, or better than anything we’ve made before”.
While David believes they are “really, really skilled” musicians, he noted that “in the current climate, those skills are basically worthless”, and also claimed, “The grassroots music industry is so on-its-arse, that no one has any money to pay us to employ those skills.”
The Field Music frontman then said that “any embarrassment I might have felt about doing this has dissolved” before proudly saying he is “devoting a chunk of time to music that I love” and “playing it with people I love”.
Field Music are still active, despite the Brewis brothers’ activities as The Fire Doors, and later this year, they will play three headline dates in Leeds, London and Sunderland to celebrate the band’s 20th anniversary.
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