Damon Albarn snubs EMI

Good and bad news for Guy Hands, the head of EMI. First the good: yesterday the company announced its music division had increased profits by a £100m. Now the bad: Damon Albarn (pictured), formerly the lead singer of Blur and the brains behind the massively successful cartoon concept band Gorillaz, is planning to release his next album through a small indie label.

The composer, considered one the most creative forces in English pop music, says he wants to release his latest effort, Monkey: Journey To The West, based on an opera project he produced for the Manchester music festival, through XL Recordings. Although Albarn, who is also behind the group The Good, The Bad and The Queen, remains under a long-term recording contract with EMI, he is free to take an album based on ‘Monkey’ elsewhere because he wrote its score and is not performing.

A spokesman for CMO, the management company for Albarn and his collaborator on the project Jamie Hewlett, said that they had "a great and long-standing relationship with EMI" but added that Monkey was "a different type of project and may mean we explore other avenues." However, it is believed that Albarn, like many other artists on the EMI label, is unhappy with the cost-cutting, artist-unfriendly approach taken by Hands, whose Terra Firma private equity group bought the record label a year ago. Among the many artists and bands who have quit or threatened to quit since Hands’s arrival are Paul McCartney, Radiohead, Robbie Williams and Coldplay.