During her career as a renowned recording and mixing engineer, Olga FitzRoy has become accustomed to working with music royalty, including Hans Zimmer, Coldplay, Foo Fighters and Muse. Here, she reflects on assisting Sir George Martin on the last ever Beatles recording for the 2006 album, Love, working on the latest season of The Crown, and reveals the legendary Neve desks that shape the sound of her work.
From your perspective as an executive director of the Music Producer’s Guild (MPG), how much work has gone into the organisation’s recent push to increase diversity?
Everyone recognises that it's important. It's madness for a trade body that represents members to only represent a small subsection of its members. I think it actually puts people off if they think we're only there to represent older white men who've been established in a certain part of the industry.
We are here to represent everybody that works in recording, such as engineers, producers, people from all different backgrounds, people working in all different genres. It's really important that that goes all the way to board level – that we have all sorts of different people from different backgrounds running the MPG.
There definitely has been a perception that the MPG is an old white man's club; I hope that we've been able to change that over the past few years, and certainly all of the board really wants to increase diversity.
We know we still have a lot of work to do in increasing ethnic diversity, both in our membership and at board level, but again, it's something that we're aware of, and we're working on it.
We've appointed two new representatives to sit on the UK Music diversity task force – both women of colour who've been working in the music industry who are hugely respected. We're really glad that they're helping us on that mission.