Rockfield: The Studio on the Farm

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• 2020
• 1 hr 30 mins
• Documentary, Music

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• Watchlist

How a lost farmhouse in the Welsh countryside became one of Britain's biggest recording studios and helped write rock legend. The incredible adventure began in 1961, in Wales, when Charles and Kingsley Ward, two rock-loving farming brothers, designed a recording studio in the attic of their parents' house to create their models. With word of mouth helping, local groups soon rented their services for a handful of books. In 1965, microphones and mixing desks moved to an outbuilding, the equipment expanded and the Rockfield farm, specializing in pig and cattle breeding, became the first independent recording studio outside London, then the first in the world, where rockers from all over Great Britain also find room and board. For more than half a century, aspiring or already established celebrities have flocked there: Black Sabbath, Queen, Robert Plant, Iggy Pop, The Charlatans, Simple Minds, Oasis, The Stone Roses, Coldplay, etc. From Queen to Oasis Kingsley Ward and his wife Ann, now in their eighties, and their daughter, Lisa, who has taken over, tell the decibel-heavy fairy tale from Rockfield studio. Through amateur films shot during the sessions and rare testimonies, with Ozzy Osbourne from Black Sabbath, Robert Plant from Led Zeppelin, Jim Kerr from Simple Minds, Liam Gallagher from Oasis and Chris Martin from Coldplay, this documentary retraces this extraordinary epic rural and musical. Everyone who shared it evokes the magic of the places where songs that marked the history of rock were created and recorded, from "Bohemian Rhapsody" by Queen to "Wonderwall" by Oasis. A little-known side of the greatest albums.