EMI continues to astound with its masterclass in cluelessness. First the Abbey Road studios are for sale, or at least the British music company allows the story (originally written in the FT) to run for days before choosing a Sunday (perhaps after the London newspapers have made it to Guy Hands’s tax retreat in Guernsey) to clarify the situation.
EMI is short of cash, and selling the studios, more of a museum piece than anything useful to a record business, could have raised £30 million or so to blow on the next Robbie Williams deal. Or at least that’s what everybody believed, until EMI said today it believes “that Abbey Road should remain in EMI’s ownership”.
So who believes they should be sold? Guy Hands, the shareholder, whose investment has practically been written off? EMI’s banker, those brutes at Citigroup, who only want to get off the hook from the American taxpayer? Or was it just a couple of property developers trying their luck to get their hands on a prime bit of St John’s Wood?
All that has been achieved by this fiasco is to reveal to the general public that EMI is in financial trouble (not all of us read the business pages sadly), and that the British music business is essentially up for sale to foreigner willing to take control. Yet, even if Abbey Road is sold, £30 million or so wouldn’t have done much to dent EMI’s £2.7 billion of debt.
In one sense, it is not obvious why so much of the media should be in a lather about whether Abbey Road goes under the hammer. It is only a recording studio (zebra crossing or no zebra crossing), and one suspects there are other recording studios in the country too for use by Lily Allen etc.
Nevertheless, there are people who seem to want Abbey Road bought by the National Trust because the site is supposedly so important. That would save the studios for the nation, maybe, but would also be an uncomfortable reminder that Britain’s musical brilliance of the sixties is fast being turned into a heritage theme park.
And if the over-indebted EMI sinks too, then maybe it is time that Britain packs up and goes under-water. If Britain can’t export music to the world, all that’s left to to generate overseas earnings is the City of London.
Mind you, fat of lot good the City did us last year though. And, come to think of it, it was the City, with its love of ‘leveraged finance’ that allowed Mr Hands to buy EMI with too much debt in the first place.
The Beatles may have sung Here Comes The Sun at Abbey Road; for the rest of us, it is Here Comes the Reckoning.
