Field Day 2016 is nearing, so the Quietus has rounded up interviews, articles and Baker’s Dozens featuring artists to look forward to this year. The festival comes to Victoria Park once again this weekend, June 11 and 12, so keep an eye out for more features until then. Tickets are still available here, and the full line-up can be found here.
Anna Meredith – Saturday, June 11 – 14.25, Moth
Photograph courtesy of Kate Bones
"And when I’ve done everything, start to finish, I think it’s important to point that out. Hopefully it’s also a good role model for younger girls, to feel that they can do it. Whenever I’m teaching teenage girl composers, the one thing I always say is don’t be too daunted by stuff you don’t know how to do. Because, having dipped my toe into this whole world, I’ve realised that there are as many factions and preconceptions and problems and rules [in pop] as there are in classical music. Someone, somewhere will always tell you what they think you should be doing. But all you should really be doing is working out what you want to do, and what you can do for yourself."
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Brian Jonestown Massacre – Sunday, June 12 – 17.30, Eat Your Own Ears
Anton Newcombe: "Music’s been my personal salvation; it’s like my church or something that I go to. There’s a refuge that I seek and that’s what I identify with the music and that’s something that I can’t really share with people, and it kind of annoys me when other people get into it, although I do a little bit with people. It all depends on my mood."
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Deerhunter – Saturday, June 11 – 17.20, Eat Your Own Ears
Photograph courtesy of Ryan Stang
Bradford Cox: "When you play a 12-year-old Hex Enduction Hour, what do you think they’re gonna think? It’s just a bunch of noise! ‘These people don’t sound like they’re trying very hard’ or: ‘This isn’t as good as Nirvana.’ The best music in the world is encoded, encoded with an emotional lock. And I don’t mean ‘sad’ or ‘happy’. There are these emotions that are grey, and feelings like loss, or disillusionment with society, these abstract emotions that unlock doors."
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Dilly Dally – Saturday, June 11 – 17.55, Shacklewell Arms
Katie Monks: "Our music happens naturally. It is unspoken and it isn’t strategised. The fact that we are able to make music together and not speak is pretty special. If there is a shared vision, we don’t know how to put it into words, because we don’t even say it to each other. One thing we have always had an understanding about is that we have always loved simple music and we really love honest music. We never force it and there is never any trick to our songs."
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Fat White Family – Sunday, June 12 – 16.00, Shacklewell Arms
Photograph courtesy of Lou Smith
"The Fat White Family’s second album, Songs For Our Mothers, is rich and fascinating, lyrically and musically. At live shows, they are wild, livid, smutty, loud – just the right side of terrifying; on record the terror accumulates almost without you noticing, under cover of lascivious melodies, taboo-tickling lyrics and creepy sing-along choruses." Anna Wood
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Girl Band – Saturday, June 11 – 18.55, Shacklewell Arms
Dara Kiely: "We never sat down and said, lets make techno. We did that Blawan cover and that was a proper eye-opener. We needed to do a cover and our friends’ band Peaks were like, you should do this. I purposely didn’t listen to the track because I didn’t want to be influenced by it. I listened to it afterward and was like, ‘I see what you did there’. But there was definitely a shift when we did that. It was really fun to just keep doing the same thing over and over again. So for a song like ‘You’re A Dog’, we were like, let’s not have a chorus, let’s just keep repeating the same thing, the monotony of that. That kind of tied into techno."
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Gold Panda – Saturday, June 11 – 19.30, Crack
Photograph courtesy of Laura Lewis
"I love albums and I don’t have to be a particular fan of the artist. It’s more about an album referencing a point in your life at that time. For me, it is almost [that] if I find a perfect album, I don’t want to ruin it by knowing much about the artist or by exploring their other work; I have never been that interested in the artists. I am much more interested in the songs and an album as a whole."
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Holly Herndon – Saturday, June 11 – 20.30, Resident Advisor
Photograph courtesy of Al Overdrive
On her relationship to technology: "I think our society likes to talk about technology in really black and white terms, so things are simply defined as positive or negative. That doesn’t solve any problems and I think it can be anti-intellectual. So with my work, I like to ‘complexify’ issues a little bit and show that certain concepts are not just simply good or bad. With a track like ‘Home’ it’s obviously very critical of the NSA and aspects of technology in my life and people have been like, ‘So, does that mean you don’t like your laptop anymore?’ My response is always, ‘No, that’s not what that means.’ It means that I can still have a love and appreciation of that as a tool but you can always still be critical of it."
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Let’s Eat Grandman – Saturday, June 11 – 13.30, Moth
Jenny Hollingworth: "I think it can be useful [to explore characters], not only in songwriting but in everyday life, because it makes you understand people and be more open-minded. I think we do it sometimes for songs, but it’s not so much that we find a person that exists to make a character… but it can be useful to have a character, like a stage persona."
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Mbongwana Star – Sunday, June 12 – 18.00, Verity
"Mbongwana Star brings two generations together, fusing music from their youth, like Congolese rumba and Cuban soukous with Afrobeat, funk, reggae and dub, to contemporary influences like post-punk with electronic sounds. With the involvement of producer Doctor L, the broad palette of these influences blends the cohesive structure of the rhythms and melodies with an experimental playfulness, making the album an Afrofuturist banger, where the sound is just as powerful as the term suggests and quite unlike anything else." Richie Troughton
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Metz – Saturday, June 11 – 22.15, Shacklewell Arms
Photograph courtesy of Colin Medley
Alex Edkins: "I’ve always enjoyed music that was maybe disconnected from what the older generation was doing. Something that always spoke to me was stuff that was not accepted when it was new. And when you think back to stuff like – and not to put us into direct comparison at all – The Kinks, or even Bob Dylan, it was considered noisy and ugly to the older generation."
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Molly Nilsson – Sunday, June 12 – 15.10, Moth
"It’s not shoved down anyone’s throat, everyone will find my music by themselves, and then everyone feels like they’ve found something secret. Anyone who finds my music does so because of some weird coincidence."
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Real Lies – Saturday, June 11 – 15.00, Fader
"Real Lies are a pop band who have feet planted firmly in the traditions of love-lorn synth pop, Madchester-era rave influenced anthems and big room house music. After releasing a string of singles, such as the swaggering ‘Dab Housing’ and the hypnotic ‘North Circular’, they have just released their excellent debut album Real Life on Marathon Artists." John Doran
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Roots Manuva – Saturday, June 11 – 17.00, Crack
Photograph courtesy of Shamil Tanna
On early creative limitations: "I set out to copy Studio One, to try and copy Happy Mondays, to have a hip-hop record that would have some kind of sensibility that was going to land somewhere between Oasis, Stone Roses and Linton Kwesi Johnson. It was a whole bunch of mimicking, which I didn’t do that well. That’s what I say, my career’s based on mistakes, but that’s not a negative thing. I didn’t set out to be original, but it accidentally become quite original."
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Sleaford Mods – Saturday, June 11 – 21.00, Crack
Photograph courtesy of Duncan Stafford
"Under cover of all those ‘fucks’ and ‘cunts’, Jason Williamson has developed into a writer of bewildering skill and originality. Sure, the new album’s loaded with those tart one-liners so beloved of hacks from the dailies, who’d have you believe that’s all there is to Sleaford Mods (they’re hilarious, too: ‘Throwback’s all right if you’re doing something decent/ But I put your CD on – it’s fuckin’ Shakin’ Stevens!’). But that’s only a tease. When he really gets going – which these days is most of the time – his use of language is extraordinary. Each song is a cascade of contorted syntax, images, insights, curses, gags, grotesqueries." Taylor Parkes
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Steve Mason – Sunday, June 12 – 14.30, Return Of The Rural
Photograph courtesy of Brian David Stevens
"The uplifting mood prevalent on Meet The Humans is in stark contrast to his previous solo album, 2013’s Monkey Minds In The Devil Time, which was, in his own words, a ‘political concept double album’. A sprawling, confrontational, eclectic record that was broken up by cryptic interludes, but contained a handful of tracks that would comfortably make a Mason best-of. It was rightly acclaimed, though it’s not necessarily the easiest record to sit down and consume in one sitting." Joe Clay
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Tangerines – Sunday, June 12 – 13.15, Moth
Miles Prestia on rock & roll in 2016: "I think that today it is considered as entertainment, as background music and it’s sold as ‘content’. But the way we do it is different. For us, it’s an emotional discharge. And it’s art. Look, if you’re being honest about your music then it’s art. That’s what we try to do. When we record a song, we know that it’s going to be incorporated into these huge content-suckers, but we do it because we feel like doing it."
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Thurston Moore – Sunday, June 12 – 16.00, Eat Your Own Ears
Photograph courtesy of Chiara Meattelli
"Coming up in New York in the late ’70s, had this attitude which was like, it’s not very cool to be a commercial success because the commercial music scene was so corny and overblown and geared towards money. Our whole thing was that there was a certain glory in our poverty and establishing ourselves away from that ambition to make money, or to be popular."
Click here to read the piece, a conversation with Mark Stewart of The Pop Group, in full
