Losing My Virginity: How I Survived, Had Fun, and Made a Fortune Doing Business My Way

by Richard Branson

  At first, Virgin promoted its image as a place where people could come and spend time listening to and choosing their records, with a distinct emphasis on elitist, ‘hip’ taste. As well as the more mainstream records, we wanted to show teenagers more interesting ones. Our shops flatly refused to sell the mass-market teeny-bopper records such as the ones by The Osmonds and The Sweet that were storming the charts. Despite Simon’s persuasive arguments about style, our refusal to stock Gary Glitter and all the glam-rock stars always slightly worried me since I could see the short-term income we were turning away. However, Simon assured me that if we stuck to our image we would keep our integrity and build up more customers: ‘It’s the Andy Williams rule,’ he told me. ‘We’re not in that market.’

  The shop at 130 Notting Hill Gate became one of the best Virgin Records shops. Simon started working above it, and we laid our cushions on the floor in the shop so that people could lie around there all day. We knew that we were successful when people started coming up to London just to go to a Virgin Records shop. If we could have sold marijuana, we would have done. In fact, I suspect that some of the staff did. Selling records, chatting up the customers, recommending which music to buy, reaching under the counter for the latest bootleg, heading off to pubs and clubs to hear more bands play: it became a way of life.

  When we opened our Virgin Records shop in Bold Street, Liverpool, in March 1972, I proudly saw that we took £10,000 in the first week. A week later the figure was £7,000, and then the following week the takings were down to £3,000. By the middle of the summer they had dropped to £2,000 and I went up there to see what was going wrong. The shop was packed. There were rockers all jammed into one corner, mods in another, and hippies draped all over the floor near the till. All kinds of music were playing. But nobody was buying anything. Everyone was happily stoned and having a great time, but nobody could get to the till and they were keeping other shoppers out of the store. The policy of treating our shops like clubs was out of control. For the next month we had someone at the door who gently warned people as they went in that they were going into a shop, not a nightclub; we put in brighter lights and moved the counter and the till nearer the window. It was a narrow line between maintaining the shop’s atmosphere and keeping it profitable. The takings at last recovered.

  Throughout this expansion, one of our main difficulties was getting hold of the records to sell. Some record companies, including PolyGram, refused to supply us because we were discounting and therefore offending the main retailers. Other record companies refused to supply us since they doubted our ability to pay. Nik and Chris Stylianou (‘Chris the Greek’, who had joined as our sales manager) called around all the possible suppliers, and eventually found an extraordinary solution: a record shop in South Woodford called Pop In, run by Raymond Laren. Raymond was prepared to use his account to buy records on our behalf. It was good business for him since he would order all our records on top of his own orders, charge a 5 per cent margin and pass them on to us.

  When we first struck this deal with Raymond, we would give him the list of records to add on to his orders; Tony or Simon would drive round and pick them up, and we’d drive them to the three or four Virgin shops. Pop In was a tiny shop with matt black walls and peeling posters of Sergeant Pepper and Neil Young. It was difficult to squeeze in and out with the boxes of records, but we managed to cope. Over the next year, as we opened more and more shops, the number of records passing through Raymond’s shop grew. Soon Raymond was ordering thousands of records from the record labels and we were sending a lorry to collect them.

  We kept trying to deal with the record labels directly, but they continued to ignore us. Soon Virgin became one of the largest record chains in the country and the scenes at Raymond’s shop were farcical: a line of vans unloaded hundreds of cases of records at the front door, and people staggered through the shop to the back door, where they were loaded on to another line of vans to take them around the Virgin shops. Something had to give. We were still having to pay an extra 5 per cent to buy our records through Raymond. Finally, Nik and I went back to the record labels and pointed out what was happening. They agreed to sell records to us directly, and Raymond Laren’s Ealing-comedy earner was over. His shop reverted to selling a few dozen records each week, and his accountants were left to puzzle over what had gone wrong with his amazing shop.

  During 1972 Simon fell in love with a South American girl and told me that he was going to leave Virgin and go to live in Chile with her. The Manor was at last open for artists to record; there were twenty Virgin Records shops, and the mail-order business was doing well. Simon had been working with me for a year and, although neither of us had ever expected him to stay for more than a few months, I suddenly realised how vital he was to Virgin. His choice in music had established the Virgin Records shops as the place to go and buy records. It was ‘hip’ to go and spend an afternoon mooching around the Virgin Records shop, whereas no self-respecting teenager would go and spend an afternoon hanging around Woolies.

  The credibility which Simon had always talked about, and the sales of The Osmonds which we had foregone, had worked. The music press now discussed which artists Virgin was promoting. When we put an eclectic German band called Tangerine Dream in our shop windows, it became a talking point. Record labels started contacting us and asking whether the Virgin Records shops could run special promotions on their bands.

  I tried to persuade Simon to stay, but he was set on leaving. His girlfriend went to Chile first, with Simon poised to join her in a month’s time. During that month he suddenly received the ‘Dear Simon’ letter from her which called everything off. He was desperately disappointed, but at the same time it became clear that his future lay in London rather than either South America or even South Africa. Since Virgin now had the record shops and the recording studio, we started talking about the third part of the grandiose dream we had discussed over our first lunch at the Greek restaurant: the Virgin record label.

  If Virgin set up a record label, we could offer artists somewhere to record (for which we could charge them); we could publish and release their records (from which we could make profit), and we had a large and growing chain of shops where we could promote and sell their records (and make the retail profit margin). The three businesses were mutually compatible and would also benefit the bands we signed, since we could reduce prices at the Manor, the manufacturing end, and increase promotion at the shops, the retail end, while still making our own profit.

  Simon and I drew up an agreement whereby he would set up and run the new Virgin record label, Virgin Music. He would own 20 per cent of the company, which would henceforth be separate from the Virgin Records shops. And the first person Simon and I wanted to sign up was that third reserve guitarist from Hair: Mike Oldfield.

  Mike Oldfield had had a difficult childhood with an alcoholic mother. He had often locked himself up in his room in the attic and taught himself how to play all kinds of instruments. At the age of fourteen he had made his first recording with his sister Sally, singing folk music. He and his sister formed a folk duo called Sallyangie and signed to Transatlantic Records. By fifteen he had left home and become a guitarist alongside Dave Bedford with Kevin Ayers’ group The Whole World.

  For a couple of weeks in October 1971, Mike was signed as a session guitarist to a singer called Arthur Louis who was recording at the Manor. Mike soon started chatting to Tom Newman and one day finally screwed up the courage and gave him a tape of his own music. Mike had recorded this tape himself, laboriously overdubbing many different instruments on to the same tape. It lasted eighteen minutes, was untitled and had no vocals. Tom listened to it and described it as ‘hyper-romantic, sad, poignant and brilliant’. Tom then played it to Simon when he was next up at the Manor. Simon was astonished by it. He tried to help Mike approach some record companies, but they all turned him down.

  A year later, Simon and I were sitting on the houseboat when we finally decided to start a record
company. We called Mike up. To our delight he had still not signed up with anyone. He felt completely rejected by the record industry and was overwhelmed that we seriously wanted to release his music. He came straight over to the houseboat to see us. I suggested that Mike should go back to the Manor and live there, and then whenever the recording studio was free he and Tom Newman could get together and work on his record.

  ‘I’ll need to rent some instruments, though,’ Mike warned me.

  ‘Like what?’ I pulled out my diary and prepared a list.

  ‘A good acoustic guitar, a Spanish guitar, a Farfisa organ, a Fender precision bass, a good Fender amplifier, glockenspiel, a mandolin, a mellotron –’

  ‘What’s that?’ I drew a circle round it.

  ‘It’s not absolutely necessary,’ Mike conceded. ‘A triangle, a Gibson guitar … Oh, and some chimes, of course.’

  ‘What are chimes?’ I asked.

  ‘Tubular bells.’

  I wrote down ‘tubular bells’ and set about finding all these instruments in a music magazine. The guitar cost £35, the Spanish guitar £25, the Fender amplifier £45, the mandolin £15, and the triangle was a bargain at £1. The tubular bells cost £20.

  ‘£20 for tubular bells?’ I said. ‘They’d better be worth it.’

  7 ‘It’s called Tubular Bells. I’ve never heard anything like it.’

  1972–1973

  SINCE MIKE OLDFIELD WAS the first artist we signed, we had no idea what sort of a contract to offer him. Luckily, Sandy Denny, who originally sang with Fairport Convention but had now gone solo, had recently recorded at the Manor. She had become a friend of mine and I asked her for a copy of her contract with Island Records. This was apparently a standard Island Records deal, and we retyped it word for word, changing ‘Island Records’ to ‘Virgin Music’ and ‘Sandy Denny’ to ‘Mike Oldfield’. It set out that Mike would make ten albums for Virgin Music and receive a 5 per cent royalty on 90 per cent of the wholesale value of the record (10 per cent was kept by the record company to pay for packaging costs and breakages). Since Mike had no money, we put him on the standard Virgin salary which we all received, £20 a week. We would then deduct it from any future royalties, if they ever materialised. Although Simon and I loved Mike’s music, we never thought that we’d make any money from it.

  It took Mike well into 1973 to record what became known as Tubular Bells. It was a fantastically complicated sequence of recordings to make, and he and Tom Newman went over it again and again in the recording studio, mixing, dubbing, and fine-tuning all the different layers of music. Mike played over twenty different instruments and made over 2,300 different recordings until he was happy. In the meantime we were still trying to rent out the Manor to any band we could find, so Mike was often interrupted and had to clear his kit out of the recording studio to make way for The Rolling Stones or Adam Faith.

  Frank Zappa had made his reputation as one of the most original, innovative and irreverent performers in rock music. His albums, like We’re Only In It For The Money and Weasels Ripped My Flesh, were filled with biting satire, and when he came up to the Manor to investigate the possibilities of recording there I felt sure he would appreciate a joke.

  I drove Frank up from London myself, enthusing about the wonderful manor house in which the studio was situated. But, instead of taking the road to Shipton-on-Cherwell, I made a detour to nearby Woodstock. I turned off the road, under a majestic arch, and drove down a long, gravel driveway to the door of a magnificent house.

  ‘I’ll park the car,’ I told Frank. ‘Just knock on the door and tell them who you are.’

  The door was opened by a uniformed footman. Funnily enough, he didn’t recognise Frank Zappa and was not amused to be told the long-haired musician had come to stay. Did Zappa know, the footman asked, that he was knocking at the door of Blenheim Palace, the ancestral seat of the Dukes of Marlborough?

  Frank got back into the car, swearing that he could see the funny side of it. But he never did record at the Manor.

  On 22 July 1972, Kristen and I were married at the tiny church at Shipton-on-Cherwell. I had just turned 22, and Kristen was still 20. We had known each other only since May of the previous year. I still have a copy of the invitation we sent out for the party before the wedding. It reads: ‘Kristen and I have decided to get married, and we thought that this would be a good excuse for a party. There will be a pig on a spit, so please come since the pig will not last. The Scaffold will be playing.’ One of the best things about the Manor was that it lent itself to having wonderful parties. We had bands who were happy to play, a river to swim in, huge rooms with ancient fireplaces, and a cloistered courtyard which caught the sun.

  Our wedding barbecue was a great feast, with all the villagers from Shipton-on-Cherwell mixing with the Virgin staff and a great many of the rock bands around at the time. The wedding day was extraordinary throughout. As we were waiting at the church for Kristen to arrive, a huge articulated lorry started to squeeze its way down the narrow lane towards us. Nobody could understand what it was doing, until a tiny old lady in a blue suit with a blue hat jammed on to her head climbed out.

  ‘I’m not too late, am I?’ Granny called out.

  The lorry had crashed into her car coming through Oxford, and she had insisted that the driver take her to our wedding.

  My parents gave us a beautiful old Bentley with red leather seats and a walnut dashboard as a wedding present. Although it tended to break down as much as my Morris Minor, it was supremely comfortable to sit in while we were towed along.

  One of Kristen’s bridesmaids was her sister Meryll, and Nik was my best man. At the reception afterward it became clear that there was a certain chemistry between them, and late that night they headed off towards a room in the Manor. By the time Kristen and I returned from honeymoon, Nik and Meryll had announced that they too were getting married.

  Nik and Meryll were married even faster than Kristen and I: their wedding was in the winter of 1972, just five months after they had met. Kristen and I found this marriage a little claustrophobic: I would spend all day with Nik at South Wharf Road, and then I would also see him and Meryll together in the evenings. Unfortunately, one of the reasons why Kristen had come to England was to escape from her family, and now she found that she and her sister had married two men who practically lived in each other’s pocket. Incestuous wasn’t the word for it. On top of that, Nik and I, who had run Virgin very much as a singles company, suddenly found ourselves both married: it was something of a culture shock.

  Throughout the winter of 1972 and the spring of 1973, Mike Oldfield was living at the Manor and recording Tubular Bells. I think this was the happiest time of his life. He was there with Tom Newman, who was obsessed by the technology of recording, and they could endlessly refine the recordings together. Mundy was still living there. When Kristen and I drove up to the Manor on a Friday night, we would find Mike, Tom and Mundy sitting on cushions on the floor, stoking up the vast fire and listening to the latest tapes. They were oblivious to the outside world. Tubular Bells was finally ready for release in May 1973.

  We knew that we had something extraordinary on our hands when we started selling Tubular Bells into the trade. Simon took the recording along to the sales conference at Island Records, who were going to distribute the album. They were all in a large conference room at a hotel near Birmingham. They had already had to listen to hours of music. These men had heard it all before – literally. Simon put on Tubular Bells and they listened to the first side in its entirety. When it finished there was an outburst of applause. This was Simon’s first sales conference and so he had no idea that it was unprecedented. He never again heard a roomful of world-weary salesmen applauding a new record.

  On 25 May 1973 Virgin Music released its first four albums: Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells; Flying Teapot by Gong; Manor Live, a jam session from the Manor led by Elkie Brooks; and The Faust Tapes by Faust, a German band.

  1973 was an extraordinary
year for rock and pop music. That summer saw the singles chart dominated by the glam rock of Suzi Quatro, Wizzard, Gary Glitter, and The Sweet. But there was also a large Motown contingent, with Stevie Wonder, Gladys Knight and the Pips, the Jackson Five and Barry White. At the other end of the spectrum from these singers were Lou Reed with ‘Take A Walk On The Wild Side’ and 10cc with ‘Rubber Bullets’.

  The album charts were headed by David Bowie at number one with Aladdin Sane, the first proof of how he could reinvent himself to stay at the top. Below him were The Beatles with their 1962–1966 and 1967–1970 double albums, Pink Floyd with Dark Side Of The Moon, Lou Reed’s Transformer, and Roxy Music’s For Your Pleasure.

  In the face of this competition, we had to fight hard to attract attention for Virgin’s first four releases. But it was Tubular Bells that really captured people’s imagination: it was completely original and immediately spellbinding. People found it addictive and played it again and again, both to listen to the music and to marvel at how Mike had woven it all together. I remember a review in NME that I had to reread several times before I realised that, although I would never understand what the critic was actually saying, he was clearly raving about it. NME was the single most influential music paper. With it praising Tubular Bells, everyone would look out for it.

  Aside from the reviews, I knew that, as soon as we could get people to listen to Tubular Bells once, it would take off. As one critic correctly said, ‘One hearing should provide sufficient proof.’ The problem was getting that hearing. I called up every radio producer I could, trying to persuade them to play Tubular Bells. But at that time 3-minute singles dominated radio music: there was no room for a 45-minute piece of music without words. Radio 3 turned it down because it wasn’t Mozart and Radio 1 turned it down because it wasn’t Gary Glitter.