SUNDERLAND band Field Music is set for a full film experience this weekend - and they'll be on edge throughout.

The group will be providing a live musical accompaniment to a screening of John Grierson's 1929 silent documentary Drifters this Sunday at the GFT.

They'd previously composed a score for the film in 2013 at the Berwick Film Festival, and keeping in time to the onscreen footage is a tricky challenge.

"When you're a bit on edge and performing it's exhilarating," says the band's Peter Brewis.

"That's one of the things about watching live performances of things like this, you're wondering if they'll make it.

"One of the worst things in the world is to see a band play live that know exactly what they're doing and they won't make a mistake, so it's like a replica of the record, just with people standing onstage.

"Especially when you're doing gigs like this, you really hear where the instruments are coming from and see us sweating whether we'll get this right.

"We have to watch each other or the film constantly and there's a lot of communication going on, like raised eyebrows if something goes differently from what we're expecting... "

The project goes back a couple of years, when they were approached by the Berwick Film Festival, and asked if they fancied providing a musical accompaniment to one of a selection of films.

They picked Drifters in the end, Grierson's film focused around Britain's North Sea herring fishery, having been impressed at how dynamic the documentary was.

They've since revisited the music they recorded for a studio album that was released as an exclusive for this year's Record Store Day, and decided to play a series of special gigs alongside the film, including this Sunday's GFT show as part of the iconic Glasgow cinema's Sound & Vision strand of events.

Peter believes the film suited the band's own music, rather than forcing them to awkwardly change styles.

"We thought we should really try and do something that was musically representative of us," he recalls.

"It would have been pointless to do some of the more obvious things that you could have done, like a folky thing or a more obviously cinematic thing - we didn't want strings and an orchestra on there, or to be self-consciously experimental.

"Me, Dave and Andy (Moore, keyboardist) grew up listening to those semi-improvised rock groups like Led Zeppelin or the Doors, and then started getting into Miles Davies or John Coltrane, so all that is in there.

"Maybe it's not appropriate for the film, but we didn't know want to just put some sea shanties together.

"I don't know whether Grierson would have wanted that, either - I think he saw it as a very hyper modern look at the world at the time."

Although Peter wasn't aware of Grierson's work when first approached about the project, he was soon impressed by the documentary when he watched it.

"The whole film is quite pulsating to watch and has different kinds of tempos, whether showing the engine room or the waves crashing against the rocks, or the fish drifting out together," he says.

"There's loads of tempo in it, and we thought, 'oh, we could do that' and use the tempo as a rock band."

Field Music has now been on the go since 2004, focused around the core of Peter and his brother David, who both play several instruments in the group.

Its alternative art-rock hasn't quite earned the mainstream success of their Tyne & Wear brethren Maximo Park and the Futureheads, but they remain critical darlings.

It's now been three years since their last album, Plumb, with time taken up by various side-projects like rock outfit Slug and Peter's team-up with Maximo Park singer Paul Smith, Frozen By Sight. Another Field Music record is starting to stir, however.

"Me and David are thinking about a new Field Music album, a proper one with songs. It's over three years since the last one and that's a long time.

"We've both had children since then and that's taken up a lot of our time, but we've been reasonably productive, anyway, doing little things here and there.

"As long as the ideas are good enough then hopefully we'll put something out there in the future.

"We have our own little studio so we're always there, just trying our best to write decent songs of reasonable quality.

"I don't think we'll know until we've done the songs and we're totally finished whether it'll be a Field Music album or something else, but we are working."

Field Music, GFT, Sunday, £10, 8pm