Musical sheds

Do you remember Thomas Dolby – the electronic music genius who composed the infuriatingly catchy pop hit, Hyperactive. Well guess where he makes music? That’s right, in a shed.

This is how he describes it, ‘I work and make music in a garden shed. It’s small but cosy, with windows on all sides, and a gorgeous view of the Pacific Ocean. My daily commute is 15 feet. Some days I’m still in my pyjamas at 2pm. When it rains hard like it is today, it’s deafening. Afterwards you can hear the frogs under the floorboards, and there’s a scent of wild garlic from the empty lot next door. I love my shed!’

Dolby wrote his earliest songs in the corner of a £12/week bedsitter in South London and admits that in those early days it was his dream to own a private studio. It’s not surprising, as the newspapers were full of articles about Ronnie Wood’s 450-acre estate in Hertfordshire, a Georgian manor house with the deer park and recording studio attached, none of which he’d ever been in as he was perpetually on a tour of Japan or South America. It wasn’t just a dream of avarice, but also an understanding of the hard realities of the music business. Studio time was like gold dust. To get your music heard by the planet he had to have a record, and the only place to make a record was in a recording studio. Trouble was, they cost hundreds of pounds an hour.

Then Dolby found himself with a Top 5 single in the USA, a couple of gold albums, and a huge following in urban dance clubs. So what did he do? He built a recording studio in a prime location in West London. But then the story goes sour. He claims he failed to record a decent piece of music there in the five years he owned it. The equipment lost 50% of its value the day it was installed and the landlord immediately doubled the rent, meaning Dolby had to rent it out for commercial projects to offset the loss. And that’s why he ended up in his garden shed. It’s got everything he needs, and no guilt attached.

But sheds and music have a long history - Nick Drake, seminal musician, who committed suicide in 1974, wrote a song called Man in a shed. And do you remember Shed Seven the 1990s Britpop band from York - with five UK Top 40 entries in 1996, Shed Seven had more hit singles than any other act that year, the high point coming with the release of their seventh single, Going For Gold, which gave the band their biggest ever hit when it entered the UK chart at number eight.

Shed photograph by cleverswine, used under a creative commons attribution licence

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