Tell you what – we love hearing from artists when things go right. We equally love hearing from artists when things go dreadfully wrong. A song that was a piece of piss, written in 20 minutes? Or years in the making and a bastard to write?
Whether it’s a song that came together through great duress or one that was smashed out in a short amount of time, we’re getting the lowdown from some of our favourites on the one song that they can’t stop thinking about – in their own words.
In the run up to the release of their tremendous new album ‘Flat White Moon‘, we had the pleasure of having a long chat with Peter Brewis of Field Music. In the process, Peter went into great detail about one of our favourite tracks, ‘Not When You’re In Love’ (“You’ve got great taste”). We’re pretty chuffed on this one. Take it away, Peter…
“It had initially been a piano part. So what I’ll do is, I’ll sit down on my laptop with the keyboard there and I’ll try and record using MIDI… Quite often I’ll just sort of use MIDI… I used to do that quite a lot – I probably still should really, just mess around on the piano – because I’ll come up with riffs that I wouldn’t normally do on guitar. So if I do a guitar riff, I’ve got to be really careful not to just revert back to type and just do ‘Sunshine Of Your Love’ backwards, if you know what I mean. Which I did anyway with ‘Meant To Be’ on this record, but there you go.
So yeah, I had that piano part kicking around for ages and I don’t even think I really liked it that much… I probably had the drum beat there as well on MIDI. I think me and David quite often do this thing where if we’ve got a drumbeat, the way to stop it from being too boring or exactly knowing how it’s gonna go, is to say just put the snare on the 1. Instead of putting the bass drum on the 1 *makes bass drum sounds*, put the snare on the 1 *makes snare drum sounds*. We quite often do that…
Sometimes it reminds me of that bit in ‘Some Kind of Monster’ – I don’t know whether you’ve seen it – but Lars Ulrich is trying to come up with a new drum beat and it’s kind of a bit like that, the Lars bad drum beat. That’s what I think of it as – Lars trying to do something different and it being kind of rubbish. How could you do that Lars bad drum beat? Hetfield wouldn’t have liked it, but maybe we can do something with it *laughs*
So musically, that was it really… The music is just one thing all the way through. I think I would’ve had these other lyrics knocking about, they wouldn’t have even been lyrics, I think I just started writing down thoughts and scenes – each verse is a scene. I can’t remember how I thought of it, but it was just… It’s essentially along the same lines as songs like ‘What Is Love’. It’s a question – how do you know what being in love is? How do you know whether you are or whether you’re not or whether you have been? When do these moments and scenes matter when you think you might be in love or you think you might not be? Essentially the song’s just a bunch of scenes – you’re in that scene and this is the situation and you’re asking yourself – am I in love or was I in love? Every verse is different. Am I in love? Was I in love? What does even ‘in love’ mean?
It’s in that sort of fine tradition of Haddaway’s ‘What Is Love’ or ‘I Wanna Know What Love Is’, Foreigner. It is a bit of a joke song, really – I wanted it to be – but it’s also a joke in desperation, in a way, like I really would like to know what I’m doing, what this is all about. I suppose I was also thinking of it being like a Joni Mitchell sort of style, where you almost like… I dunno, where the phrasing’s kind of talk-sung almost. The phrasing fits – there’s not necessarily a melody to it, there’s a few notes that I use – whatever the words are, that’s the phrasing you use.
I had the verses and the piano riff probably quite a while ago really, longer than a year ago. I’d done a demo of it actually and I basically just kind of shouted the lyrics on the demo and I actually just thought – you know what, I can’t recapture this feeling that I got from the demo – so the lyrics on there are actually just from the demo. The singing. It can be a little bit pitch-y at times, but I think maybe that’s the sort of thing I should think about doing more. Just be a bit more off the cuff sometimes. Stop trying to be in tune, stop trying to sing it right and just sing it cool or sing it with a bit of gusto, not really caring that it’s for consumption.
Then I thought – it doesn’t really have a chorus. I thought – right, what can I do. Again, I just kind of fell back on that sort of Beatles thing – just repeat… just do some kind of George Harrison sort of thing, then punctuate it with that sort of really low voice that we’ve done occasionally, ‘cus Dave can sing very high and I generally sing very low.
Then me and Dave just peppered the song with various little bits and bobs, some kind of Morse code synths on there and a Richard Thompson-esque sort of guitar solo, I think that’s what I was trying to do. Dusting off the Strat, got as trebly as I can. Dave kept saying “Turn it up, turn it up in the mix. Turn it up – it needs to be, sort of, almost offensive in the mix.” Then there was a sort of ‘Tango In The Night’ style Fleetwood Mac ohhs and ahhs, which Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks and Christine McVie had done on ‘Everywhere’ and ‘Big Love’, things like that. It’s just very simple, It’s essentially just one thing all the way through. I think the other thing, I was listening to sort of hip-hop records at the time and kind of got back into ‘Odelay’ by Beck and listening to De La Soul – one riff quite often all the way through. That’s ok, you can do that, as long as little things come in and out, to stop it from being too monotonous.
We just need to figure out how to play it live now. Poor Dave – he has to do some serious drumming on that one. He’s basically gotta play the drums and the percussion part at the same time and it’s… I dunno, I’m asking a lot of him really. But he’s done it you know, I don’t know how he’s done it. I always thought I was the better drummer, but I don’t think I am you know. It’s annoying.”
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