Tony Cummings spoke at length to SOUTHVILLE's worship pastor, Tim Williams

Tim: They're lose friends of mine from London. Before us they actually tended to work more with an R&B, pop sort of feel. Enoch John has been a close friend of mine for a long time now. He's an incredible keys player; he played at my wedding, he's a great friend. So when we started the process he was always someone that I thought I'd like to get his expertise in. He toured with Jesus Culture, playing keys for them last year. He's an incredibly gifted worship musician but he also does a lot of production as well. But for these guys, this was their first big project. We'd organised to record everything at a cottage in Yeovil. Some people at our church have a lovely house and in the garden they've got a cottage. It's completely isolated, up on Ham Hill, set in the countryside, free from any external noise. And Enoch and Jonathan, who are used to making sort of bedroom records, were perfectly happy to record there. They went and checked out the room, decided it would be fine to record, all of the different things that we needed to do there and that was all planned out and sorted. We were excited about that and then four days before we were due to record drums, we had the musician booked in, we had the space booked, we were all geared up, I was very excited by this point and I got a phone call and there had been a problem with the booking. There'd been a double booking on the cottage which meant there were going to be some tree surgeons in the area at the time we were due to record. It was out of their control; it was nothing they could change. They'd only just realised that was going to happen so, as I'm sure you understand, recording drums with all those microphones. . . and chainsaws in the background!

Tony: So what did you do?

Tim: I went into panic mode. I was scared; I wasn't sure what to do and as we quite often do, in that moment I lost my reliance on God and tried to sort it in my own strength. I rang round every studio in the local area, well aware that I was going to have to spend some money that I didn't have in order to get this booked in just so that we could keep the project on track. It was the Monday and Tuesday we needed booked. I rang just over 10 studios that were all within an hour of where we are, right from the very basic to the more professional. Everybody was booked out. In four days' time, that was going to be the case. I'd heard of Real World, of course. They're one of the top studios in the world. Their clients have included Beyonce, Amy Winehouse, Take That, Arctic Monkeys, Alicia Keys, Rag'n'Bone Man and on and on. For some reason I just felt I had to give them a ring because the stage we were at then, the recording wasn't going to happen.

I rang them up, said, "I know this is really last minute, I'm sure this is not going to be possible but we've got to record drums for our album in three days' time and we have nowhere to record it as our space has fallen through. Do you have a room available? Anything, just a room in a corner somewhere where we can do some recording?" She said, "Let me have a look." She went off to check the diary or whatever then came back and said, "It's really funny that you should say that but we do have a room available. It's only available Monday and Tuesday for the next few months." She went on to say, "Funnily enough that's the room where we normally advise people they should record drums." It was incredible! I said, "How much is it? Can we book it in?" She told me the price and I thought maybe this isn't God after all, because it was a lot of money. I was gutted and I said, "I'm really sorry." She could tell I was gutted so she asked, "Is that out of your price range?" I said, "Well, JUST a little bit."

Inside Real World

Then she said, "I shouldn't really tell you this but if you ring back tomorrow, because it's not been booked yet, it goes at a downtime rate which basically cuts the price in half." That was still too much but obviously was a big improvement. So I said, "OK, I'll have to go and chat with my pastor about that, see what we can do". She asked, "Who are the guys you're coming with? Do they know how to use the equipment?" I said, "Yeah, they're brilliant; they know how to use it all." So she said, "OK, we can take off the price of having an engineer in the room if you like and just give you an assistant instead, that will bring the price down again by another 300 pounds." And I'm like this is getting better all the time. Then it worked out that normally they book the rooms with accommodation included in the price for two evenings but we said if we only had the accommodation for the one evening they'd have to bring the price down even more and they were able to do that as well. I was getting very excited at this point by all of this so I said I'd ring her back, I needed to check with the producers.

I went and spoke to them and obviously they were very pleased at the opportunity to be able to record at Real World and I asked was there any way we could save any more money to make this work? They said if we're recording at Real World we wouldn't need to hire the mics we were going to hire to use at the cottage. They worked out the cost that was going to come off and it meant that suddenly to record in these world class studios we were going to have to pay only a couple of hundred pounds more than we'd ever intended to in the first place. And I was like this is just a God thing. The real way I'll know if this is a God thing is if I ring up tomorrow and it's still available, because obviously I still had to wait the 24 hours before I could actually book at that price. So I went into prayer mode. I rang up the next day and it was still available and we booked it in and were recording drums for two days at Real World Studios.

Tony: Recording at one of the best, and indeed the most expensive, studios in the world must have been quite an experience.

Tim: It was surreal. We got there and found that the "assistant" who had been assigned to our group turned out to be the head engineer for Real World. He got on really well with us and ended up engineering the full two days without us being charged for the cost. Everything was piecing together, everything working out. It was a real God thing. Because of the quality of the studio we managed to record all of the drums in a day, so we had a spare day to record some other stuff. We'd booked it, done all the drums; we thought we're here with the best and most expensive microphones in the world, why don't we record some vocals? So we recorded five vocals that day, just over the guide tracks with the drums. The title track on the album, "Freedom's Tree", was recorded on a 10,000 pound microphone! God's hand was over the project.

Tony: You do the vocals on three tracks, "Strong", "Every Call" and "Always". Who are the other singers?

Tim: Well, it's Lisa Chapman singing on "Creator God". "Your Love" is sung by Karen Felix and she is only 16 years old. She is phenomenal and has a good future ahead of her. Gaurav Ball sings "Freedom's Tree" and "Boundless", he's only 18. And "God Has Spoken" is sung by Ashleigh Kleinhan, she's only 16 years old too.

And so Tim concluded his staggering tale of how a smallish (150 members. . . but growing) church in Somerset with 16 year old singers and a songwriting team with an age range of 86 years have come to make one of the best worship albums of the year recorded, in part at least, in one of the best studios in the world. As Tim himself said, "Some things only God can do."