Virgin King (Text Only). Tim Jackson
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was still selling so well that Newman’s one per cent brought in almost £10,000 a year. Had Oldfield dared to demand a higher royalty earlier on, however, he might have been well over £1m richer.
BY 1975, when Mike Oldfield’s third album reached number four in the charts, Virgin Records had become the hottest company to work for in the music business. In common with other small and avant-garde record labels, Virgin could claim to have ‘integrity’ in its choice of artists for its roster; like those of the giants of the industry, its choices seemed always to make money. There was only one other company that could make a similar claim: Island Records, the label founded by the Jamaican-born public schoolboy Chris Blackwell, which brought to stardom many of the world’s most famous Caribbean artists, most notably Bob Marley in 1972.
‘I was doctrinaire,’ remembered Simon Draper. ‘I wanted to sign original and worthwhile talent.’ His philosophy was that Virgin should be trying to produce great records that happened also to be commercially successful. This brought him into occasional conflict with Richard Branson, who was keen to sign musicians who would make money for him, but less interested in the sort of music they played. When faced with a potentially profitable addition to the roster that he knew would be unacceptable to the trend-setters of the industry and the music press, Draper had to explain to Branson why an act that might make money could nevertheless not be the sort of act that Virgin Records should sign.
Uncommercial it may have seemed; but this attitude helped to attract to Virgin, and to keep in its ranks, a group of young and fashionably talented employees. An extraordinary number of the company’s staff of the time recall that period as the most exciting of their working lives. One reason for this was that Virgin was willing to hire people who had enthusiasm and a love for music, but no formal experience in other record companies. Once inside, they would find themselves given important jobs to do – and left to get on with them. Unsupervised, they would put in long hours and great effort, and in the end would achieve far more than they had believed themselves capable of.
The days of equal pay for all at Virgin had long gone. Yet it was routine for members of the record company’s staff to turn down offers of double their current salaries or even more from other companies. There were few complaints about the cramped and unpleasant working conditions in the Vernon Yard offices to which the company had by now moved. Perhaps this was because life at Virgin was fun. Everyone seemed to be friends. And although people took their jobs seriously, they did so as they would take seriously a game of tennis that they passionately wanted to win, rather than as a career. Pensions were not a matter that was often discussed.
John Varnom served for a while as the public face of the company – writing its press releases, drafting its advertisements in Melody Maker, and answering questions from journalists. He set the tone by telling a series of whoppers to anyone who telephoned that were so outrageous that they were impossible to believe. Branson, meanwhile, indulged his love of practical jokes to the full; he had a brilliant knack for mimicking voices, and would often call his colleagues at the office and engage them in long, increasingly implausible conversations before they realized who was speaking.
But it was the company’s weekends abroad that did most to cement its team spirit. Starting on a Friday and ending on a Sunday night, the entire staff of the record company, publishing company and studio management team would decamp to a country house hotel. Attendance was in theory optional, but those who did not come were told jokingly that they were expected to spend the weekend working in the office. At the hotel, other record companies might fill the days with talk of sales targets or new products. At Virgin, business was banned. Instead, the guests would spend the weekend playing tennis or golf, swimming and sunning themselves, eating and drinking with great gusto, and taking a few drugs and sleeping with each other in the evenings.
Men who worked at Virgin looked back on those weekends as idyllic. The corporate women – who certainly had better opportunities to do well at Virgin than they would have had in other record companies – were a little more cynical. ‘Open marriages were fashionable,’ said one. ‘You were uncool if you didn’t have lots of partners. Men were getting what they’d always wanted, to get to screw lots of women apart from their wives. Women were getting screwed by lots of men, and were not very happy about it.’ But even those who disapproved of the weekend atmosphere conceded that they had thought of Virgin almost as a feminist company in the early days. It was only later that the cynical thought crossed their minds that Branson might actually have been so keen to employ women because they were cheaper than men and worked twice as hard. ‘It was manipulative, but with Richard it was instinctive,’ said another ex-employee of Branson’s uncanny ability to motivate people to work hard for him. ‘He had an instinctive way of handling people that got this reaction from them.’
The core element in Virgin’s successful mixture was the talent of Simon Draper. As an ‘A&R’ man, a specialist in artists and repertoire who decided which new acts the record company ought to sign, he was beyond compare. Draper seemed to have an uncanny touch for artists who were not yet famous but would soon become so; and it was on this touch that the Virgin Records empire was built. Branson never claimed to have any musical discernment; when he tried to hide his ignorance, the results were apt to be embarrassing. On one occasion, when Simon Draper was trying to sign Elvis Costello and the Attractions, Branson opened the conversation over a negotiating lunch on his boat by saying how much he had loved their last album. The band’s manager, who was intensely suspicious of Branson and was trying to persuade the band that it would be better to sign with a record company which made no pretence of being young and fashionable, saw his chance.
‘Name me your two favourite tracks,’ he said.
Branson was embarrassed to have his ignorance exposed, and stayed silent. Dessert was not served.
But there was more to Virgin’s success than Simon Draper’s ears. Only slightly less important was the quiet talent of Ken Berry, the clerk whom Branson had plucked from the accounts department above the Notting Hill Gate shop to sit in an office next to him at Vernon Yard. ‘Kenny’, as Draper and Branson called him, had won his promotion because Branson noticed that whenever he or Nik Powell telephoned the department for a piece of information, it was always Berry who provided the answer – and Berry’s answers were always right. A pattern soon emerged in which Draper would make the artistic decisions about which acts to sign, Branson would knock out the broad agreement in his office up a flight of spiral stairs from Draper; and then Berry would be left to tie up the details in a formal contract. Later on, as Branson was to withdraw from daily involvement in the label, it would be Berry himself who carried out the negotiations in all but the biggest deals.
In the mid-1970s, Virgin was just one of a number of fashionable independent labels that had succeeded in reaching the general record-buying public. It was still smaller than Island Records, and roughly the same size as companies such as Chrysalis and Charisma. Branson’s talent, without which Virgin might have stayed a small but politically correct name under the leadership of Simon Draper, was to put in place the policies that would turn Virgin into one of the ‘majors’.
His approach had two prongs. One was to take breathtaking risks that others shrank from. When Draper told him that the rock group 10cc were going to be big, for instance, Branson was willing to bet a huge sum on a group that would have sunk Virgin if its next record had not been a hit. The group had already had a couple of light but successful pop singles when Simon Draper was played a tape of The Original Soundtrack, their latest album. Branson flew to New York and struck a provision deal on American rights to the record with Ahmet Ertegun at Atlantic (who had bought the Tubular Bells package for $750,000).
In the event, the £350,000 offer that Branson then made for the group was insufficient; their manager, Harvey Lisberg, signed the group to a rival label while the two members who were most keen to sign with Virgin were on their way to a holiday in the Caribbean. But the story got around the British music business, and demonstrated just how serious a