My Family and Other Rock Stars

Tiffany Murphy

Picture a farm in Wales. Vast fields, plenty of mud, pigs, horses, cows. Add a farmhouse, some outbuildings, and a slightly chaotic courtyard to the picture. Then insert recording booths into the heart of it. Welcome to Rockfield Studios.

In 1965, Rockfield became the world’s first residential recording studio. Bands didn’t just show up, plug in, and leave; they moved in. They slept in the house, practiced in the barn, and then wandered over to the studio to see if they could turn angsty, late-night feelings into something you could play on the radio.

When your hear ‘Bohemian Rhapsody,’ you are hearing the sound of Queen in rural Wales. ‘Wonderwall’ was recorded there, and ‘Yellow’ by Coldplay. The guest list is wild: Rush, Robert Plant, Black Sabbath, Motorhead, Echo & the Bunnymen, Iggy Pop, Annie Lennox, Joe Strummer, Julian Lennon. They have all wandered the muddy paths around Rockfield Studios.

Back in the 1970s, the studio needed someone to cook for all these bands. Enter Joan Murray, a graduate of Le Cordon Blue — the famous cooking school in Paris — and mom to Tiffany, her then-8-year-old daughter.

In this memoir, Tiffany explains what it was like to be a child on that farm: feeding animals, dodging rock stars, doing homework while world-famous bands argued over harmony in the next room, growing up in the sort of place where there was a non-zero chance that David Bowie might be at the breakfast table.

This is not, however, a ‘look at all the famous people I met’ book. It’s much better than that. It alternates between two narrators. There’s Tiff’s childhood voice: bright and funny and so observant, but often not quite understanding the adult chaos around her. And there are adult reflections from Joan. It’s easy to love Joan. She’s capable, independent, and strong, a delight on the page — and she’s here to be the voice of what really happened.

Joan’s bits also bring recipes. Paella, sticky pork ribs, lemonade, a recipe she calls ‘Show-Off Crêpes Suzette,’ and whole poached salmon that Bowie will never eat. They’re real recipes, but they’re mostly miniature portraits of Joan and the life they lived, how she improvised around a too-small oven or no money or rock stars who won’t eat fancy food.

Threaded through all of it is a story about trying to make something good in an imperfect world. There are absent or unreliable men, money worries, Tiff’s uncertainty of being the ‘extra’ child orbiting someone else’s family.

This is a very sensual book. Murray evokes details you might have forgotten from being that young: the way the Great Dane’s paws smell like biscuits, the feeling that you’re listening to the whole world at once, the time in your life when your vocabulary jumps by ten words a day. And then there’s the endless food and music, including playlists with banger after banger.

Reading this book feels like summer — as if you’ve spent a month at a slightly chaotic Welsh farmhouse that just happens to have Ozzy Osbourne wandering ‘round naked outside somewhere. Warning: It may give you crushing nostalgia for a place (and time) you’ve never been.

Mum said, ‘You’re not a particularly imaginative child, are you?’ when I called my acorn-coloured hamster ‘Hammy’ and my Nanny goat, ‘Nanny.’

‘For God’s sake, ‘Nanny’ is what you insist on calling your grandmother.’

She’s wrong about the imagination: I have lots. My bantam hen with a black comb is ‘Elvis;’ my uncatchable cockerel is ‘Road Runner’ but he follows me everywhere. At bedtime Mum asks, ‘Is that chicken in your bed, Tiff?’

‘No.’

She points at the red floppy comb sticking out from my blankets. ‘I can see him.’ Road Runner clucks and purrs. Mum laughs. — Tiffany Murray

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