You may know that the focus of my songwriting over the past few years has been Goldfinches (formerly Shozzo) a Bristol trio featuring the gentlemen seated in the photograph above (from L-R: double-bassist James Anderson; singer-songwriter Shaun McCrindle; and guitarist John Slattery). Standing behind us are four musicians who helped us record fifteen songs for our debut album, in a large country house in Devon, in July 2024. From L-R they are: sound engineer Paul Bateman; fiddle player Paul Meager; drummer Tony Plato; and vocalist Freddie Bullough.

The story of how this unique project arose is an interesting one. Tony and his partner Gina were unexpectedly given Trobridge House after years of loyal service as landscape gardeners and care-givers to the previous owner. (The exact details of how this happened would make a story only they are qualified to tell!) When Tony suggested to me that we have a jam at his house sometime, I came up with the idea of recording an album there with Goldfinches, featuring Tony on drums.

During the early Noughties, Tony and I played in the John Matthias band, with Paul Bateman. We all attended Exeter University, alongside Thom Yorke and John Matthias. In fact, Paul committed one of Yorke’s earliest performances to vinyl when he recorded him, John Matthias, and the rest of the Exeter University band Headless Chickens on the Hometown Atrocities EP track, ‘I Don’t Want To Go To Woodstock’.

Fast forward to July 2024, and Goldfinches arrive at Trobridge House, on a lovely summer’s day, for four intensive days of recording. Paul and Tony have begun work on converting several of the ground floor rooms into temporary studio spaces. In the main recording room there are large mattresses providing sound buffers between the different areas where the musicians will be playing. Paul has set up his recording consul in the lounge. Our guitar amps go in the library whilst James will record all his bass parts in the entrance hallway. We will be eating and sleeping at the house so there are no distractions from working on the album. We have a lot to do!

We record fifteen songs in a variety of genres onto Paul’s KORG hard disk recorder. However, as the grounds at Trobridge House are supremely peaceful, Paul records ‘The Salt Path’ entirely live and acoustic outside on the lawn, using a single ‘Zoom’ recorder. We record some other songs live in the house too, reflecting our intention to create a spontaneous folk-rock sound like the Waterboys’ achieved on their album, ‘Fisherman’s Blues’, another record recorded in a large country house and one of the inspirations for ‘Shanti Time’ (an influence acknowledged in the album artwork).

We return at a later date to retrieve all the projects from Paul and and transfer them to our own hard drives. The intention is to continue working on the album with Jay Auborn, a composer and producer at dBs Pro in Bristol, with whom I have collaborated previously on two Rock n Roll Angels albums. Jay is a specialist in working in unusual acoustic spaces and is the perfect collaborator to recreate the acoustics of Trobridge House during mixdown (if we can meet our funding deadline!).

This brings us up to date with where we are now. James Anderson has organised a gofundme page to help raise money to pay for the time we need with Jay to turn our Trobridge House recordings into a fully-fledged album (as he did so well on Rock n Roll Angels’ ‘Peaceful’). Click on the Buddha image above to go to Goldfinches’ gofundme page. Any help you can give would be greatly appreciated. To watch a short video about our four wonderful days of recording at Trobridge House just click here. Keep up to date with Goldfinches by following them on Facebook, @UKGoldfinches.

Om Shanti. Peace.