ABOUT PAUL FORRESTER & GEOFF BROWNE
We started out as house players in the late 1960s and went on to work for Island Records as session musicians, recording tracks at the legendary Sawmills Studio. During this time, we also recorded our own songs as Forrester Browne.
As session musicians in the 70s and 80s, we worked with artists including Zoot Money, Neil Innes (Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, The Rutles), Andy Roberts (The Scaffold, Plainsong), and Dave Mattacks (pretty much everyone in the world including Fairport Convention, Nick Drake, and at least two of The Beatles.)
After that, we parted ways for a while: Paul ran music shops while Geoff pursued his own projects. Reconnecting 40 years later, we realised three things:
We love working together
We love supporting new talent
We have a LOT of unrecorded songs
THE IDEA FOR CHERRY STREET RECORDS WAS BORN
We asked our friend Bob Burnell, a former sound engineer at the Royal Shakespeare Company, to kit us out with a state-of-the-art(ish) recording studio.
OK, it’s fairly homebrew right now, but we have a lot of experience and some great equipment – and we’ll be building on it!
All we need now is to find keen young musicians who want the time, space and support to work on their own songs in return for recording a few of ours, too.
ABOUT THE STUDIO
We’re just starting out as Cherry Street Records, so our studio space is still pretty informal.
You’ll find a friendly environment with everything you need: mixing desk, analogue tape as well as Logic, plenty of guitars and amps, decent mics and headphones and a few drum machines. Our session musicians include a mezzo soprano, a clarinettist, a pianist and a bassist: Craig Fenney of Slade fame. You can see the full equipment list here.
It’s our aim to build a friendly community of hard-working musicians. As a record label, we’re happy to represent artists on a per-record basis, too. And of course we’ll provide all the support we can in developing your career in the UK.