Prelude:
In the early 2000’s, within an age of rapidly rising broadband internet adoption and digital formatting, EMI is steeped in debt, reeling from missed opportunities and dated obsessions. Despite this musical output has remained strong and its staff across EMI’s labels, dedicated, and some of the most respected in the industry.
With a rich legacy of over 70 years, EMI would no longer exist as a company within less than a decade from now.
Eventually EMI’s assets, label brand names, artist contracts, recording and publishing back catalogue would be divided up and liquidated by CitiBank due to insurmountable debt, sold to Universal, Sony and Warner (the three major label businesses remaining, down from six majors only five years prior to this memoir extract).
EMI Group, the last and only British major record label and music publisher, which brought the world; The Beatles, The Beach Boys, David Bowie, The Rolling Stones, Kraftwerk, Pink Floyd, The Sex Pistols, Talking Heads, Kate Bush, Iron Maiden, Pet Shop Boys, Blur, Radiohead, Coldplay, and countless others. Gone forever.
A&R is the engine room of any record label, finding talent, signing artists, developing, and producing the records.
As an A&R Manager at EMI, I now had my fourth boss in as many years. An outlier with my former A&R peers gone. The good times, the comradery across the label at EMI Records, formerly EMI Chrysalis, was fast disappearing. My new boss was hiring his chums into the A&R department. Distant, aloof, lukewarm at best.
I remained at EMI due to a persistent connection to new artists and music that had time and time again proven its potential, I was instrumental in the signing and development of a platinum act with long term career potential, and while all recognition had been taken by others and not shared at the time, it allowed me to gain more autonomy and ownership of acts to create further success in my own name, now noted on the credits list. I wanted to continue to work with my artists, but the tide was changing, and we were now in deep waters.
My first few years at EMI had been and remains my favourite job of all-time. My work at Ignition and Universal had got me there.
My new, and what would be final boss at EMI, arrived into his position of power via a grand promotion to a lofty new title through senior executive and boardroom desperation, a lack of trust in external executive talent, with power focussed now upon a small clique within the UK business itself, a clique our new President was at the centre of. EMI had never had Presidential titles in the UK before. Due to a culling of two levels of management, I now reported directly to the President of all EMI labels in the UK & Ireland, he was second only to our much-respected Chairman. At first, I welcomed the appointment, but I soon learnt I would never be treated like one of his own. His fractious style of rule grated against my own talents.
Now the ability to do my job was being sabotaged by a new agenda that did not serve my interests or indeed the interests of EMI’s business, and its long-term survival. On every front I now faced restrictions and bizarre excuses not to support me on signing acts ‘I don’t like Americans, leave it to the Americans’ (on The Killers). Similar for Bloc Party and countless others. Even before the lunacy days of Terra Firma, the only bidder for the debt laden business some years later and prior to Citibank calling in the multi-billion debt defaults, the label business was already eating itself from the inside.
A trait dating back to the pre internet days, a litany of drama, ego led fiefdoms and mistakes, including outlandish unimaginable executive behaviour at Virgin Records, the inability of Capitol Records in the US to produce hits or career artists. This is an inside story of ego and misrule. The story of EMI Group that remains untold. The gradual destruction of one of the greatest names in music history.
EMI RIP.
***
The A&R Meeting
Apple’s 3rd version of the iPod is now on sale. Meanwhile, EMI executives obsess about watermarked promo CD’s. EMI is in a state of flux, shaky business results mean more desperation.
EMI’s offices at Brook Green, West Kensington, London, are the epicentre of our global sales, as our US labels perpetually flounder to consistently produce their own successful artists, British repertoire keeps the good ship sailing. This is the reverse scenario for every other major record company. U.S repertoire dominants and sells globally. We are mighty, but vulnerable. We reside in six floors of red brick and glass on your immediate left as you turn in from the Hammersmith Road. Ground-floor windows darkened; the famous EMI Records letters sprawled in red across a disc floating over the main entrance. Pomp and proud history since 1931. Inside beyond the glass, platinum and gold discs floor to ceiling through from reception towards the bank of lifts. Last week I shared a lift with Kylie.
The usual hum of activity is underway. On the fourth floor he sits waiting in his large private office for the weekly A&R team meeting to start. The newly titled company President has had a troubled morning. His allotted presidential parking space was taken, and the offending car had to be removed from within the bowels of the building. His twin exhaust Jaguar is now resting peacefully. We resume business. At his request, our cancelled weekly A&R meeting will go ahead.
All four A&R Managers are sitting within the extended lounge room of The President’s giant playpen. Three of us are new. I’m the veteran. After a pause of contemplation, The President looks up from his desk. His reaction is we are purposely late for his meeting, which is actually our meeting. As president, he has now appointed himself Head of A&R of EMI Records too.
“This is great” he states. “John Cale’s new demos” holding up a CD. The ex-Velvet Underground legend is The President’s personal project opportunity.
“I think we’ll do something with him, but first things first”.
We need hits and career artists. I wonder to myself whether I’ll get to play him my Killers demo. A copy has sat in his in-tray, still waiting for his sole approval to pursue an offer. He’s a busy man. Lizard King, Warner and others now likely preparing an offer. I wonder whether anything I say today will be heard and considered.
I notice his decorative fruit bowl remains untouched again. Fresh fruit each morning, basking in the sunlight through the window.
The President always sets the agenda now. Those he has hired do not challenge him, still without viable ideas or signings, looking at each other for hope.
The President’s private luxury office is like no other on the floor. Frosted glass was never a thing here before. The President’s leather backed desk chair is out from its mooring behind his oak desk. He attempts to join the open space in front of us.
“I want to create a hippy atmosphere here,” he says smiling through his black beard.
I’m confused about what he means. Dope and free love? The endless long days of the Summer Of Love in the late 60s seemed to only happen to kids of privilege, as my Dad reminded me. Dad worked in the baking heat of summer tiling roofs because he had to earn a wage.
The President quips about “weed”, rattles on about acoustic guitars and mentions of “being green”. I imagine his V8 Jaguar and its two mighty exhausts coughing out clouds of toxic smoke all the way back to Hampstead. He’s full of shit, but let’s go with it for now. He continues.
“I want us to bring back the heritage feel of the label,” he tells us. “I want us to put the 1970s EMI logo design back on the records”.
He’s looking for our reactions. He meets faces in awe. I look down at his latest Gucci sports-casual trainers. My sole pair of Converse are battered. I imagine his walk-in wardrobe the size of an Egyptian tomb, lined with different colour shaded versions of the same shoe resting in his house in Hampstead. His dark devil eyes look at us, one by one, starting with his favourite, Posh-Boy-1. Finishing with me with the quickest of glances.
“Yeah, proper good” chirps Posh-Boy-1 in his best mockney. Pinky ring in full flight placing down his coffee mug.
“Jolly oh. Sounds marvellous, let’s big up the EMI heritage,” chimes Posh-Boy-2, son of a Dame, whose mother is a former Tory MP and Deputy Party Chairman. A&R journeyman within the EMI structure, with zero hits in aeons and a 1st class honours in corporate navigation.
“Classic” contributes Posh-Boy-3, more likable, the gentle giant. Son of British colonialist ruling class parentage.
I feel out of place on multiple levels.
“It would be good to get rid of that 80s looking logo we have, but have we considered other ideas?” I ask.
The President looks at me, “the current logo is 90s”.
The President makes it clear the decision is made. With not even a reinterpretation or edit, our ‘new’ label logo design for this new era dates from 1972.
Has he asked our Marketing Director or the rumoured incoming label MD from upstairs about the design before implementing it? He confirms he’ll mention it.
Posh-Boy-3 wants to play another mix of an “urban track” by a girl he has been demoing over and over in recent months. It goes nowhere.
Posh-Boy-2 clutches the Bloc Party demo he requested a copy of from me. Will he find his own act eventually?
“Did you do a deal with the devil? How do you spot all these bands at such an early stage” he bitched with a shit-eating smirk, while hanging around my office door.
“I saw them when they were called Union playing at Brixton Windmill on a wet Wednesday and just kept in touch. They had potential. It’s that simple. You either see it or you don’t,” I responded.
“I’ll let you know what I think,” he says, pottering over to his office to straighten his sole five-year-old silver disc on the wall. The Guardian parked on his sofa, untouched, remaining unread for days, until it’s removed by a cleaner. I always thought him a Telegraph kind of guy, in fitting with his waxed jacket and ‘high society’ background.
There is no presence of finder’s keeper’s respect amongst fellow label A&R here now.
Posh-Boy-1 wants to play the latest LCD Soundsystem demo. I love LCD. An act that I played to the President months ago to little joy or understanding, prior to these hires. The President is more interested in James Murphy’s LCD Soundsystem output now it comes via Posh-Boy-1. The President will later commit to an insane label deal structure with DFA Records, Murphy’s label, with EMI’s commitment to investing and releasing anything on the DFA label regardless of its potential. EMI is a business in the business of music. People’s livelihoods depend upon us. Carelessness is dangerous, a lack of acumen poisonous, especially with our present predicaments.
“It’s a grower” The President barks over the track.
I disagree. It’s great first time. You should get this first time. I reassure myself my ears are tuned. However, I am the outsider now. Week by week, I am disappearing into the background. The beginning of the end of my time here.
More broadly, the final chapters of EMI’s existence are being written all around me. It is soul destroying. The facts of failure are presenting themselves. I have no control. I cannot sign new acts I know stand significant chances of success. Within three years, I have gone from trusted autonomy and success to disrespect and alienation. I’m not welcome by this clique of privately educated white men who call each other ‘a good egg’ and, most notably of all, this new figurehead. I remain in this A&R department for my bands. I believe in them.
I am a fool.
The writing is on the wall and has been since the EMI ‘old boys’ failed merger and acquisition dealings with MCA in 1998 which they walked away from, MCA the label that later merged with PolyGram that same year to form Universal Music.
Universal Music, the largest and most powerful major label in the world, and still No.1 to the very day you are reading this.
While EMI remains only memories.