One popular urban myth in the music industry is that Mushroom founder Michael Gudinski was once offered the job of running EMI.
Not true, says Gudinski in Christie Eliezer's new book 'High Voltage Rock and Roll'.The rumours surfaced around the time that Rupert Murdoch was looking at buying the English record company. Murdoch was a major shareholder in Gudinski's Mushroom.
"Murdoch talked to me a couple of times about EMI", he states in the book.à"He asked me what my own view of it was, because most of his experience in the music business hadn't been that successful. I don't think it ever got the point where he was going to get EMI. Maybe he made a lot of money by letting people think he was going to buy EMI, maybe he had a lot of shares, so when the price went up, he got out. He was very smart about that. But it never got to the point where he actually picked up the phone and said, "Will you run it?" I take it as a great compliment [that] there were those rumours, but I would not have thought that that would have been the case".
'High Voltage Rock and Roll' by Christie Eliezer is in book stores now.
