What do people talk about when they talk about EMI these days? According to Alan McGee, the sometime supremo of Creation Records: “They talk about debt, covenants and pension funds. What they never seem to talk about is the music. That’s the problem at the moment.”
And the solution? For a label that arouses the same feelings in music fans that Cadbury arouses in chocoholics, the worrying answer is that it may be too late for one. Even by the beleaguered imprint’s own recent standards, May was an extraordinary month. With Radiohead, the Rolling Stones and Paul McCartney long gone, one of EMI’s last remaining “legacy” brands, Queen — or what remains of them — decided to take their business elsewhere.
Admittedly, the label that Guy Hands’s private equity firm Terra Firma bought for far too much money in 2007 managed to secure another £105 million from his backers. However that didn’t even cover the £250 million that the pensions regulator ordered the company to cough up, in the same week, to correct a pension-fund shortfall (though EMI claimed that the shortfall was only £10 million). According to estimates, the label has enough operating funds to keep it trading until 2013.
