In an extraordinary article in the Times Online this week, Coldplay's Will Champion has been giving an insight into the pressures exerted on the band by EMI during the X&Y era. You can discuss this article at the Coldplay forum here onwards. The rest of the article is an interesting read as well...
Read enough reports about EMI's current tribulations and it’s all too easy to imagine that EMI’s problems began when Hands took over. But the recorded-music industry has been suffering for years from falling sales, widespread piracy and free downloads. And much of the label’s £1.75 billion debt was accrued long before Hands took over. If Coldplay’s 2005 album X&Y sounded like the work of a nervous band, who could blame them? They were a group attempting to make an album, knowing that high up above them EMI Group plc was issuing profit warnings citing “late delivery of albums by ... Coldplay and Gorillaz” as a reason for underperformance in the 2004-05 financial year...
“EMI didn’t handle it very well, as far as we were concerned,” Will Champion, the group’s drummer, remembers. “We really didn’t need [label executives] coming down to the studio and telling us what the singles should be. It got to the point where, on our website, we were going to put a little EMI share index, so you could watch it go up and down according to what we were doing.”
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.
When Terra Firma took the company into private ownership, the share price was no longer an issue. And if the only effect of Hands’s takeover had been to remove EMI from the stock market, industry insiders agree that this would have been preferable to what actually happened. “It takes years to build a roster that can attract new artists,” one long-serving label employee says, “but just a few months to undo it all — and that, effectively, is what happened.”
Quite how is a tale that has passed into music-industry folklore. One former head of department remembers a Powerpoint presentation in which Hands’s frosty reception was accentuated by the applause of “maybe four or five people at the front”. Another recalls discovering that John Birt — not known for his artist-friendliness during his time at the BBC — was being enlisted by Hands to “scope the creative strategy”. That EMI needed to make cuts was not at issue. What sent morale into freefall, however, were Hands’s press utterances, which seemed to single out the number of artists signed to the label as the source of its inefficiency. “One of the issues we will be addressing is the sheer size of our roster,” Hands said. He continued: “In the past we have followed the industry model of signing up as many artists as possible, while taking huge bets on a few.”
For onlookers at other labels, this was the moment that EMI signed its own death warrant. Between 1990 and 2000 Marc Marot was managing director at Island Records, bringing artists such as PJ Harvey, Pulp and Nine Inch Nails to the label. As the CEO of a management company, helping emerging acts to sign record deals, he says: “It’s crazy that EMI should not be top of my shopping list. But the fact is that there’s no sense that this is a label with an A&R strategy. The idea that you only sign the acts that are sure to succeed is naive. The bigger picture is vital. In the pharmaceutical industry millions of pounds are spent developing drugs that never get approved for manufacture.”
On first inspection, those loss-making minor bands might seem to be a drain on resources. As Marot points out though, more often than not they’re the groups that play a key role in attracting future Radioheads and Coldplays to any label. “When I was at Island, we were desperate to sign PJ Harvey. She was suspicious of signing to a major label, but one day when she came to see us, it just so happened that Julian Cope was due in to do some recording in the studio downstairs. From my window on the top floor I saw him approaching. He was wearing a stripy T-shirt and the bottom half of a dog outfit, complete with tail. I said to [Harvey]: ‘Go and talk to Julian about creative control.’ They went to a nearby café together, and when she came back she signed the deal.”
In other words, Harvey signed the deal because she thought Island was the sort of place where she might be allowed to exist as an artist without necessarily having to turn a huge profit. During his time on Island Julian Cope didn’t recoup his advance, but Harvey has. And more importantly, her continuing presence on the label sends out a signal to other artists trying to decide which stable they should choose.
“You need a maverick quality to run a label,” says Mike Batt, whose Dramatico imprint is currently home to Katie Melua, Carla Bruni and Marianne Faithfull. “You know you’ll lose on some acts, but it doesn’t matter as long as you have enough to gain with.”
According to McGee, all the best labels have a “dyed-in-the-wool music man” with whom they are associated. When he ran Creation, McGee saw himself in the vein of larger-than-life label presidents such as Berry Gordy at Motown and Ahmet Ertegun at Atlantic. And for a time he got the results to support that view. Creation releases by the likes of Oasis, My Bloody Valentine and Primal Scream — “albums that simply wouldn’t have come out on any other label” — remain among the most fêted of the 1990s. His contention that “for a time every young band wanted to sign to Creation because of those records” isn’t such an exaggeration.
When Hands arrived at EMI, the label had one executive who was regarded as a proved nurturer of talent. Described by Marot as an “awesome rival”, the label’s chairman Tony Wadsworth was a former musician himself, who helped to bring Radiohead, Coldplay, Blur, Gorillaz and, much later, Lily Allen to its Parlophone imprint. But no less important were signings such as John Cale, Dr John and Sigur Rós, whose presence on the label made it seem like an artistic community.
Both Marot and Batt cite his departure, less than a year into Hands’s tenure, as “disastrous” for the label. It was instructive to note that, at his leaving party early in 2008, Radiohead and Damon Albarn both registered their allegiance by showing up. “These days,” McGee says, “you identify [EMI] with
a guy who runs a f***ing hedge fund [sic]. It could find another Beatles and it wouldn’t make any difference because it wouldn’t want to sign to them.” Asked if he could turn the label around, the man who discovered Oasis says: “Pretty f***ing easily.”
Whether or not EMI’s salvation lies in the appointment of someone such as Alan McGee, his point is a sound one. The high-profile appointment of a known music fan would send a strong signal out to bands who might otherwise concur with McGee’s view that it’s a “toxic” brand. Hands might feel that the old way of running a label is obsolete, but Batt’s findings suggest otherwise. “Back in the late 1960s, when I was a 19-year-old A&R man for Liberty/United Artists, I signed the [stoically uncommercial blues rockers] Groundhogs, expecting to sell no more than 5,000 records. There was a sense that if you amassed a roster you liked, it would take care of itself commercially.”
Batt’s tastes may have changed, but he says that the same approach is true of Dramatico. “If you don’t like the music you’re putting out then you’re second-guessing people’s tastes. And that really does rip the soul out of what you’re doing.”
Under its guiding executive Jim Chancellor, one of Universal’s most successful imprints, Fiction, has achieved remarkable results by picking up groups that had yet to realise their potential on other labels. Elbow and Snow Patrol are its two biggest success stories. Having released three consistently excellent albums before parting ways with — yes, you guessed it — EMI, the Isle of Wight quintet the Bees seem likely to be a similarly shrewd investment for him.
Marot says that there’s a lesson to be learnt here. “EMI won’t be able to compete with other labels who also want to sign the same bands, but it can go back to grass roots and invest in groups that other labels don’t necessarily get. That’s what we did with Pulp. Just a two-single deal worth £15,000. But it was an act of faith that more than paid for itself.”
Indeed, since the 2008 appointment of Nick Gatfield as president of new music for North America, United Kingdom and Ireland, some green shoots of optimism have begun to poke through the dirt. Gatfield says that the last couple of years at EMI have been subject to “a roster regeneration process that every major label has to go through occasionally.” He likens his job at the label as that of a football manager who has to break down the existing squad to rebuild a stronger one. If an overall gameplan hasn’t seemed immediately apparent at times, Gatfield says that’s because “we don’t just sign things and throw them to market [without first developing them], but you’re just beginning to see some of that work come to fruition.” As their recent No 1 hit Good Times suggests, signing Roll Deep — the East London collective who number Tinchy Stryder and Dizzee Rascal among their former members — has been an inspired move. Tinie Tempah’s Pass Out and Professor Green’s I Need You Tonight, both huge hits, underscore the sense of a label gradually rediscovering its pop mojo.
Not surprisingly, Gatfield is keen to accentuate the positive. Spurred by the success of their hit single Need You Now, Lady Antebellum have made their eponymous album this year’s bestselling US disc. Just as importantly, its 2.1 million sales ought to ensure that the label shows healthy operating figures for the second consecutive year.
In the long term, however, it will take a new Radiohead, a new Rolling Stones or a new Queen to even begin denting that existing debt. Citing the likes of Lily Allen and Damon Albarn, even McGee concedes that some amazing artists remain on the label. “But,” he adds, “who’s going to succeed them? Unless it becomes a sexy brand again, that’s a tough question to answer.”
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