Robert Plant, Black Sabbath, Oasis, Coldplay will appear in Rockfield: The Studio on the Farm, a documentary chronicling the legendary residential Welsh recording studio. The film will be released digitally on May 14 and feature decades of behind-the-scenes archival footage of artists including Queen, Simple Minds, The Stone Roses, Manic Street Preachers and many more laying down tracks in the beloved studio founded in 1963 by a pair of farmer siblings.
Directed by Hannah Berryman (Miss World 1970: Beauty Queens and Bedlam), the movie will be available here as a Watch Now @ Home direct-to-consumer release before hitting other platforms. According to a release announcing the doc, it chronicles a dream hatched by brothers Kingsley and Charles Ward half a century ago to build a recording studio in a farmhouse attic on their family farm deep in the Welch countryside. “Animals were kicked out of barns and musicians were moved into Nan’s spare bedroom. Inadvertently, they’d launched the world’s first independent residential recording studio: Rockfield,” reads the release.
Among the iconic bands who recorded at Rockfield were Queen, who laid down “Bohemian Rhapsody” there, as well as a year-long stint by The Stone Roses to work on their mind-bending self-titled debut album and Rush, Adam and the Ants, Bauhaus, Iggy Pop, The Pogues and George Michael, among many others.
“In a way the film was about group dynamics, the intensity and ‘make or break’ nature of residential recording, something that with technology is on the wane,” said director Berryman in a statement. “That intensity almost broke some bands, but it also produced tracks that have stood the test of time, and maybe you can hear everything that went on this isolated farm in that music, the pleasure and the pain.”
Check out the trailer below.
