A day at Columbia EMI Athens factory

Nelly had been the administrative assistant to the British managing director. He also had a personal assistant.


Nelly is a great fan of music and likes the fine musical taste of Pink Floyd, the Queen, Andrew Lloyd Weber.


Nelly liked small and efficient cars. She would take on weekends her children and their aid down to the beach in a Citroën 2CV (deux cheveux). She would almost drawn the car into the sea when arriving at the beach. People would just lift the car and put it back on dry sand.


Then she got a Mini. She would almost climb the hill from the city of Psychico and then down to the city of Rizoupoli where the EMI Columbia factory was situated. It still exists but most buildings are now ruins. The building when she worked still survives. Part of it in ground level housed the vinyl disc pressing plant. Next to the building was a part of  land belonging to the public electricity supply. A substation full of huge power transformers so close apparently supplied with minimum cabling the factory.


She would park her Leyland Mini near the 3 EMI music recording studios. Mixing desks and other equipment made by EMI were being delivered in order to constantly upgrade.


She did not have to punch a time of arrival, exit card. She was free to decide but this actually involved greater responsibility.


One of the first things would be a comment from the PA on how the MD had been dressed today. She would reply "how did you have the time to look the color of his socks?". One of the fist things to be prepared was the correspondence.


Columbia had their own postman. He would go to Syntagma square to get all letters and telex with orders etc.


There was a Syrian bright employee at the factory who was anxious about the orders. He would glimpse the postman arriving and would get to Nelly's office to check out. Nelly would hide everything in her drawer just before his nosy arrival.


She would then register everything to protocol, photocopy and distribute to each department and give all originals to the managing director. Everything addressed to the company had to be read by him.


She highly regards the Hellenic shareholder Lambropoulos. She states that after he left the factory things went downhill until it had to close down.


Hellenic origin Nelly spent her school years in the city of Alexandria - Egypt. Her school was the Scottish school for girls. Nelly a admirer of the Wall - Pink Floyd says how this school was different from others. They were taught to question everything. To the point of asking why 2 plus 2 makes 4. She is fluent in English and French.


A position she had had before joining Columbia was at the United Nations program for pest control of olive trees. It even involved breading special insects that would eliminate olive tree parasites. The program generously funded by the Hellenic government at some point had been transferred for good to Spain.


Nelly mentions how important is the CFO (chief financial officer).


Also how royalies are so so important. (It may be a song on the movies, an advertisement, a cover version of a song etc). This is called music publishing. (Apparently the art of making money out of a composition). There was a dedicated computer. Ones numbers were known they were immediatly sent to EMI UK.


Nelly also dealt with internal communications. She would hand in all memos from the various departments to the managing director.


There were many departments. For example sleeve printing, vinyl pressing, royalties, recording studios...


Neely expresses her admiration for Takis Lambropoulos, co shareholder, an important figure in Hellenic music industry who had left the factory by the time she had arrived.