Motorhead memories of Rockfield
12pm - Work on my book has come to a standstill. I'm using a Mac to write the book and I'm still learning the intricacies of this machine. It's a wonderful laptop and the Macs are so much faster than PC's that I wish I'm discovered them sooner. But this morning the simple act of inserting consecutive page numbers has beaten me. Hours of scrolling through 'Pages' (the Mac version of Word) have proved fruitless. The frustration. Its always the simple things that prove your undoing. Like when your football team manages to beat the world's best one week, and then somehow slips up against lowly Mottlespur United the next.
Arggghhh!
12.30pm -- Decide to put some of the photographs I've gathered on Rockfield on a CD and send them to Nicky at University of Wales Press. She'll be dealing with the books illustrations. This proves an easier task and my faith in cyber world is restored. Well partly.
1pm -- I type up and Send off a thank you to former Motorhead producer Fritz Fryer. After a brief chat he asked me to email him some questions regarding his time at Rockfield with Lemmy (PICTURED top left in Cardiff 2004) and the guys. He sent me a four page essay packed with hilarious stories about the making of the band's album there. In one he describes how the band decided to help him get through the marathon recording sessions as only Motorhead know how:
"I had an absolute ban on myself taking stimulants…. but thirty-two hours of non-stop concentration had taken its toll. I had been turning up the volume more and more in an attempt to rivet my attention, the volume control was now at eleven and I was seriously tired.
One of Motorhead breezed into the control room and said ‘You need a line or we ain’t going to make it’.
He could be very persuasive, taking out the mirror glass, razor and white powder. The band seemed to prescribe one every twenty minutes. Whilst resisting the frequency, I did succumb to his medication, which saw me through the next sleepless forty hours”.
with guitarist
2pm - The room is getting smaller and I can hear beer calling me. I try to resist. I've not done nearly enough work today though. But the call of alchol is growing louder. This has been a very disrupted week. Next week will be better, I promise myself.
Next week I must start work on my Robert Plant chapter. That was a very good day. I managed to persuade Robert Plant and his first solo band to reunite at Rockfield (PICTURED bottom left -- Guitarist Robbie Blunt, former Black Sabbath keyboard player Jezz Woodroffe and Plant himself ). They recorded two albums at Rockfield: Pictures at Eleven and The Principle of Moments. It was a great afternoon. Robert explained how working at the studio was a rebirth for him after the demise of Led Zeppelin the year earlier. He even moved to Monmouth afterwards he liked it so much. Anyway more on that next week.
(ROCK LEGENDS AT ROCKFIELD will be published by The University of Wales Press in 2007)
