Pioneering British Engineer and Inventor of Stereo, Alan Dower Blumlein, to be Posthumously Honoured with the Recording Academy® Technical Grammy® Award, 2017. The ground-breaking work of British engineer Alan Dower Blumlein, inventor of stereo sound recording, is to be posthumously honoured by The Recording Academy® with the Technical Grammy® award at a special ceremony to be… Read more »
The EMI memorial, Cherry Lane Cemetery, which is both a grave marker and commemorative stone for 37 workers from The Gramophone Company, Blyth Road, Hayes killed when a V1 flying-bomb hit a factory surface air-raid shelter on 7 July 1944. Restored by EMI Archive Trust in 1994 by and again in 2009.
Unique is an overused word, but if there was a day that changed popular music forever, July 6, 1957, was that day! By David Hughes Not that anyone knew it at the time, or probably for the next five or six years. In the late 1950’s British music world, skiffle was King. Skiffle was a… Read more »
A “doyen” is defined as a senior member of an establishment, and if discography is – or discographers are – an establishment, then Alan Kelly, who died in December 2015, was certainly a doyen of discographers. Alan was born in Girvan on the Clyde in Scotland. He took his MA at Glasgow in 1948 and… Read more »
EMI are inviting former employees at the Old Vinyl Factory in Hayes to come back and share their memories of the iconic site. The original article was posted in June 2016 and amended in June 2026. The factory was a major employer for the town and produced records by some of the world’s best-known artists,… Read more »
I had that weird feeling when I came across this crowd shot whilst scanning Don McLean images for Universal (Music Group) I remembered going to this free concert at Hyde Park (though I didn’t remember that it was May 1975, or that I’d recently turned 17). I thought ‘wouldn’t it be funny if I could… Read more »
“Our famous, Jewish orchestra, you remember, four violins, a flute and a double bass” (Gayev in Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, 1904) Renair records are proud to announce the fourth of their series of issues exploring the story of Jewish recorded music. Produced by Julian Futter and with a 40 page booklet written by the… Read more »
In early 1940, Alan Blumlein and his team at the EMI Central Research Labs began work on the technology behind the Capacitance Altimeter. This device works by measuring the differences in charge between a low-lying aircraft and the charge at Earth’s surface, therefore enabling aircraft and other vehicles to fly at night and in cloudy… Read more »
The Trust would like to thank Ricky Ford for sending in his memory of EMI. Ricky was an EMI recording artist and has shared a little about his time with the label. It was 1961 in Bristol a truly daring and controversial musical called A MAN DIES was produced, it was the first RocknRoll religious musical.… Read more »
In 1924, The Gramophone Company was commissioned by the royal household on behalf of Princess Marie Louise to make a bespoke set of six miniature records and a miniature gramophone for Queen Mary’s Doll’s House. The Doll House was to be filled with an extensive collection of fully functioning miniature pieces carefully selected to showcase the… Read more »