Rockfield: The Studio on the Farm is a feature-length music documentary telling the tale of how two Welsh farming brothers turned their dairy farm into one of the most successful residential recording studios of all time, producing four decades of legendary rock music.
As the film contained music by artists who recorded there, Hannah Berryman (director) and I intended for my score to represent a voice of the studio itself and at its heart, the warmth of the family who built and manage it to this day.
Hannah’s starting point for discussion was that the score should feel handmade – as if it were being played by a band noodling away in the corner of a pub. As we needed to cover a range of emotions and different decades of recording, the music needed to develop too, whilst at the same time conveying a studio that stayed stuck in time, insisting on recording directly to tape and with original and outdated (as some might consider) equipment.
I used a selection of old synthesisers and battered old tape machines to create the score, which at times voiced the humour of the tales of drugs and debauchery in the studio, but also brought out the deeper emotional stories in the film, including a theme for the death of Charlatans drummer Rob, who died in a car crash at Rockfield in the 90s.