Real World Studios

What do you do?
Real World Studios is a facility for making great records. Real World, as a whole, is a group of companies that operates in all aspects of the music and entertainment industry. These days we do quite a diverse range of things from this site: we have the recording studios, the record label, the music publishing and the WOMAD festival organisation. The vision was always to have a group of creative people doing more stuff.  

Why do you do it?
Because it’s a good thing to do – we enjoy making good stuff. It grew out of Peter’s desire to have a new studio. He loved the idea of having more studios and more creative people around; creating a settlement of creativity, if you like. In the ’80s there was a lot more money around for the making of records and videos, so it seemed like a good idea to get a group of facilities together to make it happen.

Inspiration?
It’s not like any other UK residential studio; it is quite different. The reason we chose this location was because of the water. The place still inspires, the music still inspires and probably the most inspirational thing is other people. We get an influx of visiting artists. We have a great team here of young sound engineers who are all very musical and people in the record label. They’re a good bunch and they feed off each other. 

Challenges?
The music industry is a challenging place at the moment. It’s changing very fast and the jury is out on whether it’s changing in a way that enhances creativity. One challenge is that more people’s income is driven by Spotify or streaming services. Your income from streaming services is determined by where you are on playlists and where you are on playlists is usually determined by the first 30 seconds of your track – because if someone skips before 30 seconds is up, you don’t get paid. 

So now anyone who is recording anything has to make sure that the first 30 seconds is completely captivating. The long classic introductions – for example, Shine On You Crazy Diamond on Wish You Were Here by Pink Floyd – may no longer exist. The whole revenue model is starting to change the way music is written.

Pleasure or pain projects?
The answer for both is the same: Real World Recording Weeks. We’ve done them on a few occasions but not for a while because of the pain. It’s really this place at its best. After the WOMAD Festival, we brought all the musicians here. We created a huge amount of collaborative work between all these artists from all these different countries. It’s utterly fantastic when it happens. You’d get a note stuck up saying ‘I need a saxophonist at four o’clock in the morning’ and someone would turn up because we had 150 musicians on site. It was brilliant, extremely tiring, expensive but ultimately worth it. 

It grew out of Peter’s desire to have a new studio. He loved the idea of having more studios and more creative people around; creating a settlement of creativity if you like.

What does quality look like?
Technical quality is easy – it’s easily measurable, it’s understandable. Getting the hairs on the back of your neck to stand up is what quality actually sounds like. When music makes you cry then, you know you’ve cracked it. That’s down to all sorts of things. Ultimately, it’s down to the performance and the songwriting. Once you’ve got a good song, a great performance will get the hairs standing up on the back of your neck. That’s what quality looks (and sounds) like.

Do you ever break the rules?
In music, if there was a rule it’s that you break the rules. The Beatles broke all the rules. But there are lots of technical rules; technical standards that music needs to be made and delivered to, otherwise you can’t distribute it. Obviously, we don’t break those. But 30 years ago, putting the musicians in the same control room as the producer was a huge rule breaker. The control rooms we built were designed to sound very different to normal control rooms. They should sound and feel more like a big living room than a dead control room. If there are rules, I think music survives almost by breaking them.

What makes you different?
We’re fairly unique. Nearly all of the UK’s residential facilities closed but we’ve done well. When people come here, there are other people recording and lots of stuff going on. It’s a different feeling. A key differentiator is that when you’re working here, you’re part of a creative community. There are other things that are very different. All the rooms we work in have lots of daylight. Also, we have all the people in the same room; we don’t separate the technical from the creative side – it’s all part of the performance and everyone is in it together. 

How do you keep it fresh?
Two things keep it fresh: one is that we have a lot of young people working here on the creative side – young engineers and assistant engineers. The other is the owner, because Peter has a very youthful mind. So that helps. We make our own records because we have our own record label – and having visiting musicians keeps it fresh as well. It’s like being a visual artist but also working in an art school. There are always people around wanting to try new things; there are always different musicians, different instruments flowing through. Running our own music festival helps as well because we’ve got continual access to a huge creative pool.

How does Bath influence your work?
The area is a bit of a magnet for creative people. I think some of that is practical: you’re close enough that you can get into London when you need to. Peter moved to the area in about 1975 so that he could focus on his work. The environment is as perfect as it could be. The city has progressively more going on. 

Dreams for the future? 
We own some buildings just across the river and we want to develop those. The aim is to build quite a sizeable co-working tech hub for about 100 people – to expand the dream of a community of creative businesses. Obviously, we want to make more records, publish more songs, do more film soundtracks and all that, but the aim is to get more creative people doing more stuff here. 

Photographs by York Tillyer

Interview taken from the Made in Bath book.
To discover more makers and read their stories, get a free download of the book here.