Psychologist - Writer - MUSICIAN - Steve Bonham
Wide brimmed hat. Long dark coat. Guitar slung on back.
21 years on the road.
A 100,000 miles and half a thousand hotel rooms.
From the Berlin Wall to Atlas Mountains.
From Sahara Desert to the streets of Hong Kong:
A memory brewed in the long simmering soup of people and place.
A man who has learned to watch and to listen
to walk and talk in the ebb and flow of meeting and parting.
He is a chronicler of the human spirit in words. and music.
Where the Woodworms Go.
I am sitting in a place I might think of as a sometime spiritual home. In an old leather chair in the multi coloured control of an old Baptist chapel turned into a studio. On the speakers whilst I write we are mixing down a track called Midnight Radio to a track which is about Elvis and his impact on a scrawny teenager from a Midland town. Stuart is just smoothing out the wonderful sound of an old Hammond Organ which is adding a bit of down-on-the- levee.
This is Woodworm Studios down in deepest Oxfordshire. I have recorded six albums here – the first in 1982. I know these days much work is recorded on PC and Apples in people’s backrooms, bathrooms and barn, something I have indeed done myself, but to me there is something missing in such arrangements, the something that is soulful, transcendent almost mystical in making music on this ‘common ground.’ It is common ground because people come together here to make music and it works best as a place of conversation, of equals, of respect and inspiration. This is what the ‘right’ studio gives you that your backroom can’t.
There are echoes and spirit of the all the great musicians who have recorded here: Jethro Tull, Fairport Convention. Richard Thompson, Bernie Marsden, Rob Halford, Tim Renwick and Radiohead. When I first recorded the vocal mic carried a label saying something like ‘look after me I belonged to Sandy’ (Sandy Denny)
The studio was established by Fairport Convention bass player Dave Pegg in sandy-stoned chapel which sat in the garden of his house just outside Banbury. Recording there in those days was a lot more rock n roll than would probably be acceptable today. On top of the 8 track mixing desk rested a fine porcelain chamber pot, a receptacle for an endless supply of cigarette and cigarillo butts; lunch was long and lengthy and probably at the George up the main street; we would record until the early hours and we slept on the floor of the studio, Peggy recognising the impoverished hustlers that we were.
These days, now in the brilliant hands of Stuart Jones, Woodworm’s is much more disciplined and sober place. But the magic still remains. This is a special, where people collect to conjure up great music. Your presence here is because you have something to say or play which is at once intimate and personal and at the same time intended to be generous and gifted to others.
Steve Bonham and The Long Road’s American Wilderness EP was recorded at
Woodworm Studios 2019 beginning of an ongoing project with the scheduled
release in March 2020 of ‘Moonshine Elegy’; in June/July of ‘Out of the Darkness’;
and in Sept/Oct of ‘Looking for Gold’ – all 4 track Eps.
See www.artisan-creative.com for more information.
More information about Woodworms - www.woodwormstudios.co.uk