Bhaksar Menon, the record label boss who worked with The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, David Bowie and more, has died aged 86.
Menon died at his home in Beverly Hills, California on Thursday (March 4). A cause of death has not yet been revealed.
The founding chairman of EMI Music Worldwide who worked at the label for 34 years, Menon also ran Capitol Records for a time.
Recruited to EMI in 1956 directly after graduating from Oxford University, Menon went on to join the label’s Indian division, Gramophone Company of India, in 1957, before eventually being named chairman in 1969.
That same year, he was hired as the head of EMI International, before taking over at Capitol in 1971.
Tributes to Menon, who is widely credited with breaking Pink Floyd in the US, was Universal Music Group chairman Lucian Grainge, who wrote: “Determined to achieve excellence, Bhaskar Menon built EMI into a music powerhouse and one of our most iconic, global institutions.
“Music and the world have lost a special one. Our hearts go out to his loved ones.”
"Determined to achieve excellence, Bhaskar Menon built EMI into a music powerhouse and one of our most iconic, global institutions. Music and the world have lost a special one. Our hearts go out to his loved ones." – Sir Lucian Grainge, Chairman and CEO, Universal Music Group pic.twitter.com/22GLOqPF4M
— Universal Music Group (@UMG) March 5, 2021
In Pink Floyd’s 2003 documentary The Making of the Dark Side of the Moon, the band’s drummer Nick Mason credited Menon with a huge portion of the album’s overwhelming success.
“The story in America was a disaster, in that we really hadn’t sold records,” he said of the band’s success prior to that album. “And so they brought in a man called Bhaskar Menon who was absolutely terrific. He decided he was going to make this work, and make the American company sell [Dark Side of the Moon]. And he did.”
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