Media coverage of Music, Money and Mayhem podcast

October 11th 2025

Double page feature in The Sun newspaper

The demise of record label EMI will surely, one day, make an excellent movie. It has already made for an excellent book – Eamonn Forde’s The Final Days of EMI: Selling the Pig – and now makes for an excellent podcast in Music, Money & Mayhem. However, the story is so lurid, so grotesque and so bizarre, it really needs the video-nasty treatment. Books and podcasts feel too tame for the craven dismemberment of one of the UK’s finest cultural institutions.

Chris Atkins does a fine job of corralling the weirdness and the philistinism of EMI’s final years over six punchy episodes, even if I did feel a little sleepy during the financial nitty-gritty of the finale, which charts the flurry of lawsuits and court cases that preceded the label’s death. Before that, however, is a gruesome tale of just how the record label that housed and nurtured the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, David Bowie, Kate Bush and Radiohead became nothing more than “a plaque on a wall in Hammersmith”. Like any good movie, it has an irresistible villain.