In those 1960s Phil Spector-produced teen melodramas there was almost always a line that went something like "they said we were too young... but they just don't understand".

It wouldn't be surprising if that was the very line Douglas and Gary Morris whistle on their way to the bank. You see, the two are well in the running for the Youngest Recording Studio Owners In Britain prize. Still in their very early twenties, they were lucky enough to have some people — notably a father — who did understand enough to give them the chance to take a defunct studio in New Cross, South London, and make it into a working and reasonably successful enterprise.

Of course, they've had help from others, too, with their super-experienced studio manager Chris Baker, monitoring whizzkid Roger Quested and local rock eminence grise Manfred Mann amongst them.

But let's start at the beginning — the beginning being, for the purposes of this article, a good few years ago. Then, the place was owned and run by a person of fairly limited audio expertise. He thought it was a great idea to have a studio so he took the premises (actually, it did used to be a chocolate factory) and installed some reasonable gear. However, the enthusiasm seemed to wane after that, and the client list degenerated to a shambles, with people coming in for one hour to record their aunties' favourite song to accordion accompaniment...

Then he went off the studio idea entirely and made the large live space next door to the recording area into a health club, with a multigym, jacuzzi, and the rest of the iron-pumping paraphernalia. Like the studio, it was a great idea in principle but his idea was better than his execution, so again the customers were infrequent and the place's collective pectoral count stayed in single figures.

Eventually, this took its toll, and the gentleman took his bank manager's advice and put the whole empire on the market.

And that was the time when the two young Morrises, with the backing of their father, were on the lookout for property to use as a studio. One, you see, was the proud owner of a business qualification and a fair amount of randomly acquired acumen. The other was a drummer and had acquired by similarly complex means a reasonable knowledge of what studios did and how. And Dad was a man whose property investments business was in the market to loan a fair lump of cash to a hopeful business venture.

There, you might think, would be the nucleus of a vastly successful and ever-growing enterprise. But things aren't as simple as that. The first few months were, for the two lads, an object lesson in the art of studio ownership. They soon found out that they didn't know everything and that they had several barriers to overcome before the Chocolate Factory was in the land of sweet success.

'Obviously', recalled Gary, 'the main problem was getting clients in. First, we had to convince people — notably record company A&R people — that New Cross wasn't the end of the earth. I mean, some people would say "New where?" and point-blank refuse to come here. Then eventually when we persuaded them to make the journey they'd say "Oh, I didn't realise it's only 15 minutes from town. Why didn't you tell us?"

'A great help at first was Manfred Mann, who owns Workhouse studio not far up the road. He used our spare room to rehearse in for his current tour, which at least paid some of the bills during the first stages.

'We used to worry a lot at first because things were very tight. I'd lie awake thinking "what if we don't get enough business in to pay the phone bill? Or the electricity bill?" And that was very close to reality a few times.

But gradually it built up. We started advertising a bit, and people heard about us by word of mouth and a trickle of steady business started to arrive. And we had a few breaks, too, like we got the Bradford Fire Disaster Appeal song recorded here, which helped the name get around.

'But eventually we realised that we couldn't do everything ourselves, we needed somebody who was good technically and who knew the business very well through experience. So we advertised and eventually we found the ideal man. He was experienced, good to work with, knew his stuff....'

'Unfortunately,' butted in Douglas, 'He couldn't do it. So we got Chris instead.'

'That's nearly true, actually,' replied Gary. 'What happened was, the bloke phoned up right at the last moment and said "I can't take the job — but I do know someone who would be good." So we called him and it turned out to be Chris. And he's been here ever since, and I think he's contributed more to the studio than anyone. We couldn't survive without him now, he's brilliant.'

The man being praised to high heaven is Chris Baker, who has worked on almost every side of the studio business, from engineering in some of the top studios, to playing, administrating and now co-directing. And after he had worked at the Chocolate Factory for a while, one of his tasks was to take a major part in the refit of the control room.

The live room at the place is excellent — a big, light and very, very live space which can be complemented with the gymnasium area if an even larger, liver room is needed (for those Ford Cortina overdubs possibly). The dead recording rooms, too, are multifarious and well varied acoustically, from the very large main room to a long, thin corridor, an irregular oblong room which is very dead indeed, and the piano room which leads on to a vocal one. No shortage of space at The Chocolate Factory obviously, whether you need a string section or full brass band recorded comfortably.

But the control room was proving a problem. The old JBL monitors' harsh, unflattering tones combined with the room's somewhat hard acoustics to produce a nasty series of rings, resonances and dead spots which made the monitoring unreliable, to say the least.

So the team got Roger Quested, the man whose soft-dome midrange speaker-equipped monitors are rapidly turning into the most hip piece of studio equipment since... well, the last one.

He, needless to say, started by installing a set of his own design units on top of the brick plinths in the control room. Next, he installed a selection of paddle wheels and umbrellas. Yes, paddle wheels and umbrellas. At least, these are what the odd-shaped acoustic baffles at the rear of the room have come to be known as due to their resemblance to the above-named articles. And a bass trap or two later, the room had been restored to a state of acoustic bliss, with the stereo image remarkably solid and the frequency response flattened out admirably. Even at high volume (and the Questeds do have an alarming capacity to dish out the watts) the gremlins of distortion and resonance seem to have been completely abolished.

In pride of place in the newly refurbished control room sits, of course, the desk. This is a Trident Series 80B custom console, which is certainly more than adequate for most recording purposes — and indeed has the renowned Trident equalisation to draw producers from far and wide. The Studer A80 multi track and Studer A810 mastering are standard enough, as indeed are the AMS 15-80S delay (with 1.6 second sampling) and the RMX16 reverb. However, one slightly unusual item is the rack that contains no less than 12 stereo Drawmer gates; one for each track, and combined with the 16 Rebis gates lurking in another corner, more than enough for all but the most gate-happy recordist.

But away from the recording end are more facilities that the brothers hope will attract the famous and the would-be famous; when the previous owner sold them the building he forgot to remove the jacuzzi and multigym. So any fitness-conscious clients will no doubt be delighted to get a chance to flex both their creative and their lateral muscles. And if that effort makes it impossible to get home after a hard, sweaty circuit of the effects rack, upstairs houses several bedrooms which make it quite possible for a band from faraway parts to use the place residentially.

Make no mistake, these facilities don't make the place into Comforts Place or the Manor. But that's not the idea, and the rates reflect that. If you took advantage of the quick payment discount and haggled a bit, you'd have no problem getting a week's lockout for well under £2,500 which is a bargain on anybody's terms. Ideal for high-quality demoing or a cheap single or album package, the Chocolate Factory is succeeding in carving itself a niche where the top end of the budget 24 tracks meet the bottom of the residential/SSL-equipped studios.

For the young owners, there are successes, hopefully, on the way. 'If we had just one hit to put us on the map properly, we'd be bulletproof,' says Douglas. But there's one big disadvantage in owning The Chocolate Factory.

'If I hear one more joke about Willy Wonka,' muttered Gary grimly, ' I think I'll scream....'