The Field Mouse Conspiracy

Freedom & the Dream Penguin

A record by The Field Mouse Conspiracy

Some words about it (abridged from a rather copious sleeve note)

In the beginning, there was Judy Collins singing 'Send In The Clowns' on The Muppet Show. There was 'Are Friends Electric?' by Gary Numan, mesmerising otherworldly angst on 7 inch vinyl, with the talky bit in the middle that no-one could make out; collecting second-hand singles by The Who; an advert for wool with an ambling sheep and the glorious sound of Pachelbel’s ‘Canon’ (ushering in years of misguided Bach purchases trying to find it); the elegant regret and faux-sophistication of Roxy Music on Top Of The Pops; The Lord Of Rings in library-battered paperback with the Pauline Baynes cover; the Mahavishnu Orchestra's coruscating, heaven-hailing Birds Of Fire on re-pressed Columbia 12 inch; an already then obsolete 8-track cartridge machine, inherited from an uncle, with Arlo Guthrie's Last Of The Brooklyn Cowboys, Neil Diamond's 12 Greatest Hits and The Best Of Bread Volume 2; home-taped cassettes (of the kind that were, they said, 'killing music') of Jethro Tull and Focus from another uncle, the music only a few years old but seemingly, even then, stuff that came from a distant, unknowable past and which was all the more intoxicating as a result.

Thirty years later all of these things, crammed into a couple of years at the end of the '70s when I was 10 or 11 or 12, are the root cause of this album. Yes, it's all down to Stephen Sondheim and Kermit the Frog… Of course, I could list a hundred and one deftly chosen interests and ‘influences’ acquired since, but they can never hold the same grip as the things that sparked my imagination in that period of haphazard enlightenment, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. As time goes on, trying to find things that bring that sense of excitement and delight becomes harder but, in a way, the process of creating music of my own and then carving it into the stone of a professional recording before it slips away - generally with a lot of help from my friends - is what comes closest to recreating, for me, that rush of youthful discovery. And sharing a discovery was always the greatest fun of all.

So is The Field Mouse Conspiracy a band, then? Or is it one slightly whimsical individual hiding behind a cabal of hired guns? Well, ‘Sort of,’ and, ‘No, not exactly,’ would be the answers. There are several examples in the history of popular music of acts with non-performing members who wrote material over a sustained period. There are notable acts which have been, either literally or essentially, one individual operating behind a collective name. Likewise, acts who record but never perform live, and, finally, the well-worn concept of various-artist retrospectives or new, specially-recorded collections of one writer’s work. And, occupying a space somewhere in between those four or five positions, is The Field Mouse Conspiracy: one non-performing writer (with a few co-writers), a clutch of great artists 'fronting' the work and a load of musical talent lining up behind them to paint in the background.

If the concept still seems too baffling, look at it, in the language of yore, as a double LP with a free bonus EP: tracks 1-8 are the album proper, recorded between July 2007 - January 2008; tracks 9-7 are a kind of ‘best of’, spanning 1996 - 2007; and tracks 18-21 are pieces for string quartet recorded between 2006-2007.

Having made music ’in the shadows’ for the past 13 years or so - being a little queasy about reconciling my living, for much of that time, as a writer about music with the moonlighting in studios actually making the stuff - I’m now, being blissfully retired as a writer, completely relaxed about it. There is no longer, on my part, any coyness, nor any reason for it: in today's Alice Through The Looking Glass world, where 'celebrities' are now almost entirely non-entities with no demonstrable talent whatsoever, there can no longer be any question mark over anyone from any background pursuing any artistic project they desire. The 'rules' have changed: the music industry, as was, is all but dead; there is no longer any orthodoxy of presentation (genre, personnel, age, lifestyle) that matters a jot; there is complete freedom to create music, to share it with whomever and distribute it wherever you like; there are no longer any mountains to be climbed, only a vast and flattened landscape with no horizon.

The sadness now is only in the very value of music itself, plummeting in direct proportion to its ubiquity in modern life. There is still, perhaps, a narrow window in which a kid from the ‘70s - unashamedly framed by that legacy, inclined to live in his imagination perhaps but, hey, in no way living in the past - can have a last hurrah with his musical pals and hope to create something that may yet provide pleasure as a ‘body of work’ in a pleasingly packaged physical artefact before the very notion of such things becomes as ludicrous as a wax cylinder.

I still believe, to this day, that there are few things as beautiful and affecting as Judy Collins performing ‘Send In The Clowns’ on The Muppet Show in 1978. The idea that it just might be possible to create something else that sublime, yet that simple, is a constant dream - it’s not rocket science, only alchemy. And for all I know it’s now available as a podcast to your mobile phone. But I hope to God I’m mistaken.

Colin Harper,

Belfast, April 2008