The Welsh Farm Where Rock Legends Frolic
HOW DO YOU KEEP A RECORDING STUDIO in a remote location running for six decades? For Rockfield Studios in Monmouthshire, Wales, the secret is animal magnetism. Literally.
“Cows, sheep and horses!” exclaims lead Pixies guitarist
Joey Santiago of why the alt-rock forefathers always return to a facility located outside a village that’s home to fewer than 200 people. “The laid-back, countryside feel of the studio enables you all to concentrate on the work.”
That bucolic quality has attracted icons such as Queen,
Rush, Black Sabbath, The Cure, Robert Plant and Coldplay to the recording studio, which brothers Kingsley and Charles Ward opened in the early 1960s — and to this day functions as a working farm. (Yes, cows are milked each morning.) And, over the years, the simple setting has inspired some classic compositions.
“One night [in 1999], the tape machine broke down at 12 o’clock, and [the members of Coldplay] all stepped outside the door,” recalls Kingsley, now 82. “There’s all yellow lights around the yard here. The stars were shining, the moon was shining, and the producer, Ken Nelson, looked up and said, ‘Look at all the stars — they’re shining for you.’ In other words, your luck is going to change. Chris Martin went, ‘God, that’s a good line.’ And within an hour, he had written ‘Yellow.’ ”
Kingsley also recalls watching Freddie Mercury putting the finishing touches on “Bohemian Rhapsody” in 1975 while seated at a piano near “where we used to keep the saddles for horses.” The ivories faced a window with a view of a weather vane, and, he says, “my brother wondered if he wrote [the lyric] ‘any way the wind blows’ looking at it.”
Rockfield’s setting — saddles, chicken feed, milk buckets and all — is not a savvy promotional gimmick. When Kingsley bought an acoustic guitar in 1959 (“I wanted to look like Elvis”), Charles (who died at age 85 in July) began writing songs while the two worked the family farm. Given the substantial distance to the nearest recording facility, they crafted a DIY setup in their mother’s attic with a tape recorder and a mixer. Over the next decade, the duo refined and expanded the studio using fees from local bands who would pop in to record.
By 1970, Rockfield Studios had produced its first major hit, Dave Edmunds’ “I Hear You Knocking,” which topped the U.K. Singles Chart and hit No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100; that same year, Black Sabbath rehearsed its breakthrough hit, “Paranoid,” at Rockfield. Since then, the rural Welsh studio has lassoed artists from Robert Plant and The Stone Roses to Oasis and The Cure (which began working on new material there in 2019) to the Pixies, whom Kingsley calls “the nicest band we’ve met.” He fondly remembers watching the band’s drummer, David Lovering, wowing members of The Proclaimers with card tricks during downtime. “[The Pixies] appreciate that we’ve had a bit of a struggle over the years to keep this going, and it’s a team effort,” he says, noting that Rockfield has upgraded over the years to include resources from Pro Tools to three natural echo chambers.
While Santiago says the “legendary” history of Rockfield put it on the Pixies’ radar a decade ago when the band trekked there to record its trio of reunion EPs, it’s the pastoral surroundings that brought them back earlier this year. “The working farm provides great sounds and smells,” he says. “We take daily walks along the river to the town.”
“If we didn’t have the cows and the farm, if we were a studio in London or Manchester or Birmingham [England], perhaps they wouldn’t be interested in us,” says Kingsley. “What throws them is that we did some of the greatest records in the world, and people can’t believe it’s still a working farm. Every television crew wants to film the cows first, then the rock stars.”