When you drive up the long lane to Rockfield Studios there is a moment, just as the trees open and the farmhouse appears, when the air changes. You can feel the history before you see a single microphone stand. For producer and engineer Nick Brine, that feeling has never gone away.
Rockfield has been running for over sixty years. Nick has been there for more than half of that. He arrived as a sixteen year old kid in 1993 and ended up right in the middle of some of the most important British records of the last few decades.
This is the story of how Rockfield shaped Nick, and how Nick helped shape the sound of modern rock and Britpop.
A sixteen year old and the strangest job interview
Nick’s Rockfield journey started with a very Rockfield kind of interview.
At sixteen, fresh out of school, he came for a meeting with studio founder Kingsley Ward. He walked in, sat down and waited for the usual questions about experience, ambitions, favourite records.
Instead, Kingsley spent an hour telling him how terrible the music business was.
“You don’t want to work in the music business. Go to university, become an architect.”
No CV, no questions, just an older studio owner gently trying to talk a teenager out of a life in studios. At the end Kingsley simply said, “If you decide you want to do it, give me a ring.”
By the time Nick got home he had decided. He called, and that was that.
He sat his last school exam on the Friday, did the interview that same day, and started work at Rockfield on the Monday morning. He had no idea what his job would be or what was waiting for him in the control room.
Baptism of fire: Sepultura and Andy Wallace
On his first day Nick walked into the Quadrangle studio and found himself face to face with Andy Wallace.
Wallace calmly welcomed him to the team, told him he would be producing the session and to ask anything he liked. The record was Sepultura’s Chaos A.D.. For a sixteen year old metal fan, it was the definition of a baptism of fire.
Nevermind was still fresh in everyone’s minds. Wallace was already a legend. Rockfield was buzzing. Nick, who barely knew what his role was meant to be, found himself thrown into a full scale major rock album.
He did well. The in-house engineer Simon Dawson noticed, and promised to get him onto the next session.
The “next session” turned out to be The Stone Roses.
Fourteen months with The Stone Roses
The Stone Roses had booked six weeks at Rockfield.
They stayed fourteen months.
The band were making what eventually became Second Coming. Nick, still a teenager, was tape-opping and logging reels for an album that already had five years of material behind it. There were 50 or 60 reels of tape, with endless takes and versions.
Sessions on that scale simply do not exist in the same way now. There was no internet, very little distraction, just a band, a studio and a lot of time.
For Nick, it was the greatest education you could ask for. He watched producer credits shift from John Leckie to Paul Schroeder and eventually to Simon Dawson himself. As Simon moved from engineer to producer, Nick moved up into more engineering responsibility, especially towards the end of the project.
Most importantly, there was downtime. At weekends the band would go home, and Kingsley told Nick to bring his own band in. The Stone Roses’ gear was all set up. Simon stayed on as a one to one tutor. Every weekend Nick was tracking his band, learning the desk and the room inside out.
After twelve months of that, he was no longer just a tape-op. He was an engineer.
Learning on tape at the tail end of an era
Rockfield stayed firmly tape-based right into the mid 2000s. There were no in-house Pro Tools rigs. If a band wanted digital, they hired it in.
That meant Nick learned his craft entirely on tape. Tape editing, drop-ins, razor blades, the lot. Even now he still tracks to tape when he can, using classic Studer A80s and an 827 for album projects before editing a little in Pro Tools and then going back to tape for mix.
He treasures what that era demanded from bands and producers: performances, commitment and creativity.
“When you are on tape you have to get performances out of people. You cannot fix everything later. You have to capture something real.”
Britpop arrives: Ash, Boo Radleys, Blue Tones, Supergrass and more
Once The Stone Roses finally left, Rockfield exploded again. Every indie band of the nineties seemed to be queued up at the gate.
The Charlatans, The Boo Radleys, The Bluetones, Supergrass, Teenage Fanclub, Super Furry Animals and countless others came through. The success of those records meant Rockfield was booked solid.
Nick met Ash when producer Owen Morris came in to make their album 1977, including the hit “Girl From Mars”. Ash were about the same age as him, finishing their A-levels while he was working full time at the studio.
At that point, he was still only seventeen or eighteen and already picking up engineering credits on The Stone Roses and Ash records.
A cassette from Mono Valley: Oasis enters the picture
During the long Stone Roses sessions, two lads from a band down the road at Mono Valley walked up the drive at Rockfield with a demo cassette. They were huge Roses fans and asked Nick if he could give their tape to Ian Brown.
The band was Oasis. The lads were Liam Gallagher and Tony McCarroll.
Nick handed the tape over to the Roses, saw Liam and the band popping back to check whether it had been heard yet, and then started bumping into them down the pub. At that point they were just another Manchester band trying to get noticed.
Producer Owen Morris ended up finishing Definitely Maybe and, after that album exploded, he told Nick he was taking him on as his engineer.
Nick had one thought: I hope he gets the next Oasis record.
He did.
What’s The Story, Morning Glory and Be Here Now
Oasis wanted to record at Rockfield because they were huge Stone Roses fans and knew the Roses had made their record there. They specifically asked for Nick, but he would have been there anyway, working with Owen.
Nick engineered on What’s The Story, Morning Glory? and Be Here Now, the second and third Oasis albums. Morning Glory was recorded at Rockfield. Be Here Now sprawled across several major studios, including Abbey Road, Air, Master Rock and Ridge Farm.
For a nineteen year old engineer, the scale of the sessions was surreal. Months at Abbey Road and Air, string sections in big London rooms, press intrusion, fans at the gates, and nights that ended with his hotel room designated as the unofficial party suite.
“Everyone else could go to bed, except me. I was the lowest rung on the ladder, so my room was the party room. You could only go to bed when the last person left.”
Alongside the madness, there was work, and there were moments that would become folklore.
The Wonderwall on the wall
One of the most famous stories from Morning Glory is the recording of “Wonderwall” outside at Rockfield.
The idea came from Owen. No one could quite explain what the song was “about”, so Owen decided they needed an actual wall.
Rather than simply putting Noel Gallagher on a low boundary, they found an old stone wall on the Rockfield grounds. Noel was hoisted up onto a stool, given a step ladder to climb, and handed a guitar. An Neumann U87 and another mic were set up, carefully covered because it was drizzling with rain.
Kingsley wandered round the corner to find a world famous guitarist sitting on his wall in the Welsh drizzle, birds and crows all around, microphones exposed to the elements.
Those birds you hear at the start of the album are from the outtakes of that outside recording, flown onto the front of the record. That take became the guide track for Wonderwall. The wall, quite literally, became the Wonderwall.
The smashed Fender and the Takamine with a story
If you Google Nick Brine, one of the first things you will find is a story about a Takamine acoustic.
During the Be Here Now sessions at Abbey Road studio two, after a particularly heavy night, Nick was downstairs setting up drums while a commotion erupted upstairs. Guitars were being smashed in an argument. One of them was clearly his.
He kept his head down, patching and preparing the next song. When Noel arrived and saw the damage he went straight to the point. One guitar was his, the other turned out to be Nick’s budget Fender acoustic, a present from his mum.
Liam insisted he should take Nick to Denmark Street to buy a replacement. Noel argued that he knew more about guitars and should be the one to choose. In the middle of all this, Noel suddenly led Nick down to his guitar rack, pulled out a Takamine and said:
“You remember this guitar from Rockfield, right?”
It was the Takamine Noel had used all through the Morning Glory sessions. He had taken it up to his bedroom at Rockfield, written songs on it, taken it to Mustique for the Be Here Now demos, and used it on the recordings where Johnny Depp played.
Noel handed it over. Jason the tech fetched the case. Just like that, a modest Fender bought by Nick’s mum had turned into a guitar that carried a piece of Britpop history.
Nick still has it. His mum still claims it as hers.
Rockfield, Sabbath and the birthplace of heavy metal
Rockfield’s story is not only indie and Britpop. Long before the nineties, Black Sabbath came as teenagers, with a young Ozzy Osbourne working with Kingsley in the early days of the studio downstairs and up in the attic rooms. Iggy Pop, Hawkwind, Motörhead and many others came through in the seventies.
Google “most famous heavy metal studio in the world” and you will find a quote from Ozzy:
“Heavy metal was born at Rockfield.”
Nick has spent evenings with Lemmy at the Rainbow in LA, talking about nothing but Rockfield. He has seen how deep the studio’s reputation runs in the rock and metal world. It is woven into those early Sabbath sessions, into Lemmy’s memories, into the way musicians talk about the place everywhere he goes.
Tractors, courtyards and creativity without sample packs
Part of Rockfield’s magic is the space itself. The Coach House and Quadrangle live rooms, the famous drum corridor, the courtyard, the fields and barns, even Kingsley’s old tractor, all became sound design tools in the days before sample libraries.
Nick talks about the drum corridor as the secret weapon on many nineties records. That long, reflective space, miked up at the far end, gave those explosive snare sounds you hear on records from bands like The Verve.
The courtyard became a drum room too, with kits set up facing each other and microphones in the four corners, capturing reflections off the stone walls. With no neighbours to disturb, bands like The Beta Band could play outside for hours.
If a producer wanted a sound “like a thousand slaves dragging a rock”, they did not reach for a plug-in. They dragged out Kingsley’s plough, recorded birds, rain, chains, whatever the song needed.
There were other hidden spaces too. Kingsley’s brother had a house up on the hill with a barn full of old Rockfield gear, including an early Trident console and tape machines. Nick’s band rehearsed there. He cut demos for Rockfield label artists. Even Robbie Williams ended up down there, writing with Liam and working with Owen in total isolation at the very start of his solo career.
From £29 a week to freelance producer
Nick started at Rockfield on £29 a week. Working around a hundred hours, cycling home at four in the morning if there was no room to sleep at the studio, he was effectively earning about 29 pence an hour. Ten pounds of that went straight to his parents for digs.
He would have done it for free.
As the nineties rolled on and he began working more with Owen in other studios, he had to go freelance. The label world was changing, budgets were shifting, and bands often wanted him to produce their records in their usual studios when Rockfield was fully booked.
By nineteen or twenty he was a freelance engineer and producer, still very much an in-house guy at Rockfield but also travelling to American studios, learning different consoles, workflows and studio cultures.
He also had his own band, The Dragonflies, with deals in London and eventually a shot at Atlantic Records in America. Producers on the table included David Kahne and Tom Dowd, two opposite ends of the production spectrum. That album did not quite happen, but the experience pulled him further into songwriting and co-writing.
Tape to Pro Tools, and what has been lost and gained
The arrival of Pro Tools at Rockfield was typically unceremonious. One day Nick walked into the control room to find boxes stacked up.
“What is that?” “That is Pro Tools.” “What are we going to do with it?” “I do not know.”
They set it up and started cutting and copying tracks, realising quickly that this was a new world. It made some things easier. It certainly allowed for more “excess”, as Nick politely puts it, on some of the wilder sessions.
However something was lost as well. The patience you need to wait for a tape to rewind. The focus that comes from knowing you cannot endlessly fix everything later. The creativity of having to invent sounds instead of reaching for a sample pack.
Nick still misses some of that.
Why Rockfield still matters
Today Nick has his own studios in Spain and a room half an hour from Rockfield. He works in many different places, across many styles. Yet Rockfield remains his first choice when he can get in.
He loves the feeling as you drive up the lane after thirty two years and still get that same buzz. He loves showing new bands around and watching their faces as the history hits them. He loves pushing up the faders in the Coach House or the Quadrangle and hearing a band play live in a room that has held everyone from Sabbath and Queen to The Stone Roses and Oasis.
“When those faders go up and there is a band in that room, that is the buzz. That is walking out at Wembley. That is the cup final for me.”
In an era of laptop rigs and short sessions, Rockfield is a reminder that places matter. Rooms matter. Stories matter. And people like Nick Brine, who gave their entire youth to learning how to capture performances in those rooms, are the threads that connect one generation of records to the next.
Rockfield is not just the past. It is still the present. It is still where bands go to chase that feeling.
And if you are lucky, you might still find Nick there, walking up the drive, ready to make the next piece of history.
