How the night sky in South Wales created a festival banger
Walking into Rockfield Studios is a strange feeling. It’s just a farm in South Wales, and yet legends, young and old, such as Queen and Black Sabbath, all the way to Billie Eilish and Olivia Rodrigo, have traipsed through this mud.
The studio was originally opened in 1961 by two brothers, Kingsley and Charles Ward, who opted to turn their farm into a studio because they were big fans of music and had the space to do it. It was a passion project, and was never supposed to become the cultural milestone that it is today.
When you walk through the car park, you can feel the chill in the air, smell that standard farm smell, and feel incredibly removed from the glitz and glamour that the artists who record here are used to, and yet, despite it not being the most glamorous place, people choose to use it. Every decade, no matter how much music seems to change, the thing that remains constant is Rockfield Studios and it being the place to go if you want to make some great new music.
When I visited, I spoke to a number of musicians, organisers and producers working with the songwriting camp Pro7ect (pronounced Project 7), and everyone had their own theories about why people choose the place. The first put forward was that people are drawn to the lack of pretention; you can truly connect with your music when you strip back all the usual bells and whistles that other studios might force in your face.
“I always say to people, ‘It’s not the Ritz, it’s Rockfield’, you know?” said Lisa Fitzgibbon, the founder of Pro7ect, “The fact that it is what it is. It’s very unpretentious. I mean, Kingsley [Ward, the studio’s co-founder] walked in with his jacket covered in cow shit, and Ann [Ward] is just as down to earth […]. It’s a family-run business, and people come here, and they get touched by the magic of it. And I know magic sounds like a cliché word, on paper, and when you say it, it sounds cliché, but there is magic. I mean, can you feel it?”
Another option is the fact that the studio has accommodation built into it. Those who are recording there are usually sleeping there as well, which means breakfast, lunch and dinner, while they are living the music that they make. This creates an otherworldly connection that lifts the end product to another level.
And then, finally, you have the history attached to the studios. No matter who you are, if you turn up to Rockfield and know that it’s where bands like Black Sabbath recorded ‘Paranoid’ and artists like Queen put together ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, there’s no escaping the fact that you’re going to up your game. Bands from all the genres under the sun have made some of their best music in these South Wales studios, and they used the environment as a deep inspiration. Everything from the seclusion, to the history, to the night sky.
The latter is what Chris Martin was inspired by when he wrote the song ‘Yellow’. It might be one of the biggest festival bangers ever recorded, as crowds from all over the world have flocked to sing those lyrics word for word. The entire world can be united in how they reel off the iconic opening lyrics, “Look at the stars, look how they shine for you,” but they originated at Rockfield Studios.
The story goes that after hitting a creative wall, Chris Martin decided to go for a walk in the South Wales night. In doing so, he looked up, and given there was no light pollution in the middle of nowhere, he could see the night sky full of stars in all its glory. He turned this sight into the opening line of what would become one of the most famous love songs, indie ballads and festival bangers of all time. From South Wales to around the globe, the night sky can be a wonderful muse.
