Interview: Miloco’s Nick Young

Fast-and-Wide interviewed Miloco’s Nick Young on the reopening of The Church Studios and the history of Miloco’s recording studios.

While centre stage belongs to studio and mixing console, the story behind the refurbishment of London’s iconic Church has an all-star cast – from new owner Paul Epworth through studio designer John Storyk, and the Miloco group that handled the build and will manage bookings, to the specialist techs who lent unrivalled expertise to the many aspects of the project.

MD Nick Young offers an insight into Miloco and the path to The Church.

The company was established in 1984 by Queen bass player John Deacon and the band’s tour manager, Henry Crallan. A tour specialist who had “built stages all his life”, Crallan wanted to get into recording. He bought a building in Hoxton Square, when Hoxton was rather a remote suburb of north London, and opened Milo Music. The 1980s were generous to the recording industry, and Milo set its sights modestly.

“I would say that, back then, Milo was top of the Championship in recording studios, rather than in the Premiership,” Nick Young says. “It started off with an Amek Angela console and Studer tape machine.

“I don’t think John had much to do with running it, except being a financial partner at the beginning and then being slowly bought out. I arrived about five years later, making tea and wanting to be an engineer. I worked for a couple of years as an assistant, then became an engineer and ended up in the office because Henry was always away on tour.”

It is unlikely that anyone within the fledgling company, nor any observer, could have predicted the decimation of the traditional recording studio business that lay just below the horizon, or the almost prescient working model that Miloco was soon to establish. The company’s initial steps gave little indication of either, but that began to change quite quickly.

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