Blackwing Studios - Background

Background

The Blackwing Studios complex was housed inside a deconsecrated church in South-East London. All Hallows church was partly destroyed during The Blitz in 1941. After the war Southwark Cathedral retained the north aisle and carried on using it as a temporary church. The destroyed south aisle was later turned into gardens and maintained by local residents from 1968. Blackwing was started by Eric Radcliffe, who worked on most of the early Mute Records recordings alongside Daniel Miller. Daniel Miller had discovered Blackwing when recording the Silicon Teens album. He required a studio with a big control room where he could set up all his synthesisers. At the rear of the church building was a bell tower that was used for storing master tapes. Daniel Miller carried on using Blackwing to record other new Mute Records artists. The first Depeche Mode album, Speak and Spell, was recorded at Blackwing using a TEAC eight track recorder. The album was engineered by John Fryer. Yazoo named one of their albums after the studio, Upstairs at Eric's due to the main Blackwing studio being above Splendid Studios located downstairs. When Clarke initially came to Blackwing to record with Yazoo he found that the studio was fully booked, Depeche Mode were recording their new album. He had the choice of recording at 4am during studio downtime, or building another studio. This is how Splendid Studios came about. It was a private studio below the commercial Blackwing studios upstairs. After the split of the band Yazoo, Vince Clarke decided he wanted to remain in the music industry. His initial enterprise after Yazoo was the formation of his own record label called Reset Records. The enterprise was a joint effort with Eric Radcliffe, the idea being to sign and produce new acts from their independent Splendid Studios, underneath the Blackwing complex. The recordings were then licensed to RCA Records for release. Blackwing Studios closed down in September 2001 and the building has been empty ever since, but the church building and gardens are still there. Although this may soon not be the case as Southwark Council have been submitting plans since 2005 to redevelop the site with a four storey development of private flats.