Wedding Band at Ridge Farm, Surrey

The room your guests dance in is a swimming pool. The pool house is the site’s leisure building, and the floor goes over the water for the reception and the party, then comes back off - the venue has it restored to a pool by 11am on the Sunday. The gold discs are up in the farmhouse where the wedding party stays: an Ampex Golden Reel for Ozzy Osbourne’s Blizzard of Ozz, a sales award with six copies of Be Here Now behind glass. Ridge Farm was one of the first residential recording studios in the country, running from 1975 until it closed in early 2003.

Ridge Farm at a glance

A 16th century farmhouse on Rusper Road at Capel, eight miles south of Dorking and six north of Horsham, on the edge of the Surrey Hills. You get the house, the bridal cottage, the pool house and the grounds for the whole weekend, up to 150 day guests, with no compulsory extras and no corkage. Catering is brought in - they keep a list of caterers they rate rather than tying you to one - and the drink is yours to supply, with the reception bar staffed by the venue. The farmhouse sleeps up to 24 across three nights with the bridal cottage separate, and there’s a camping area on power and water. Civil ceremonies are licensed in the farmhouse and the woodland, the pool house is converted for the reception and the party, and there are fourteen acres of orchard, ponds and gardens around it. Winter dates from October to April run to a smaller cap of 50. Frank Andrews, a lighting technician off the road, started the studio here with his brother Billy in 1975.

The house PA

The pool house is a big double-glazed structure, more greenhouse than function room, with one long wall of glazing onto the lawn. The ceiling is draped end to end in gathered ivory fabric with fairy lights run through it and a bar of spots above, and it’s the best-dressed room of its kind we’ve played. The foliage, flowers and chair dressing change with every wedding; the drapes and the lighting are the venue’s own and are there whatever you bring in. All that fabric is also why the room doesn’t ring the way the glass suggests it would.

The house PA is Funktion One - four R1s in the corners, all four aimed into the middle of the room. You hand it XLRs, and a DJ gets phono. There’s a Bluetooth receiver on it too, which is what the couple’s own playlist runs off. The subwoofer had to come out, so the rig is honest from about 65Hz up and nothing below. We bring a bass cab onto the stage to cover for that, and we work the kick around 60Hz for chest rather than chasing sub-bass the room can no longer produce. Everything else is our normal: in-ears rather than wedges, and one desk feeding the house.

Funktion One is a local firm, based under three miles up the road at Beare Green, and its own account puts the beginning of co-founder Tony Andrews’ work in sound right here at Ridge Farm.

The get-in is easy. Drive through the car park, down the track and round to the back of the building by the catering marquees, then in through the bar to the small area behind the performance corner where the audio panel is. Nothing crosses guest space and nothing goes up a step. The load-in door itself is what3words melt.rents.habit.

Which lineup suits the pool house

We’d put a 5-piece in here - two vocals, guitar, bass and drums, with keys in the fifth chair - and a 6 goes in comfortably if you want the extra voice or the sax. We’re feeding a fixed rig rather than building our own coverage, and with no sub under it there’s a finite amount of bottom end to share out, so a tighter arrangement through four well-aimed boxes carries further here than a bigger one would.

The 11pm cut-off

Live music stops at 11pm here, for the neighbours, and it’s the number the whole evening is built around. Our usual wedding shape is a thirty-minute chilled set carrying the first dance and then two fifty-minute sets, which with turnarounds wants the best part of three hours, so if the wedding breakfast runs long something has to move. You can bring the first dance forward, or we can merge the chilled set and the first dance into one long opener and play two sets rather than three.

The music carries on after we stop. A DJ goes into the same Funktion One system on phono, or the couple’s playlist picks up over Bluetooth. Meg and Rich run the site and are as accommodating as anyone we deal with, which counts for a lot at a venue where you’re bringing in your own caterers.

The postcode

Don’t trust the postcode. Their own directions say so - RH5 5HG drops you at Lyne Lodge, 400 yards up the lane towards Capel. Send suppliers the full address, or the what3words for the car park entrance, tags.salads.faces.

Records made at Ridge Farm

Guests find the history on their own and then want to talk about it. Queen spent most of July and some of August 1975 at Ridge Farm rehearsing, Bohemian Rhapsody among it, then drove to Rockfield in Monmouth on 24 August to record A Night at the Opera. Twenty years on, Oasis cut Morning Glory at Rockfield and part of Be Here Now here. We make that run in reverse from Newport - M4, round the M25 to Leatherhead, then down the A24 through Dorking.

Rehearsals leave no paper trail, but sessions do. Discogs carries a Ridge Farm studio credit on 267 records between 1975 and 2003, and the credit says what the studio actually did: recorded means the sessions happened here, mixed means the record was tracked somewhere else and finished here. The bigger sellers, by decade.

1975 to 1979

The 1980s

The 1990s

2000 to 2003

We’ll play anything on that list, though whether all of it belongs at a wedding is another matter.

The Brotherhood are South Wales’ premier wedding band and Surrey is a run we make for the right date. More on how we work as a London and Home Counties wedding band, or check our availability for your date at Ridge Farm.