at home on a battered Akai tape-recorder that Ayers had lent him.
Oldfield arrived at the Manor at Draper’s instigation, and spent a week in the recording studio there without even having a written agreement with the Virgin record label. In the event, there was no hurry; it was to take months of work before the album was ready. Oldfield played more than twenty different instruments, laying each performance down on the tape on top of the mixture that was already there. This procedure, known as ‘overdubbing’, allowed him to build up a full-length instrumental album with only incidental help from others. It was a challenging use of the state-of-the-art recording equipment that Branson and Newman had agreed to buy. The machinery stood up to the punishment, but the tape did not. After being passed across the heads thousands of times, the master tape of Tubular Bells came dangerously close to wearing out. For Oldfield was not content to remake what was already on his demo tape, and to finish off the as yet uncomposed second half of the record. He wanted to polish and repolish; hence the weeks of work.
Richard Branson had been to a trade fair in the meantime, and had been warned that it would be commercial suicide to publish a record without any lyrics. Once persuaded, however, he set to work with gusto. By the time the album was complete, Branson had managed to learn a little about music industry contracts. He had asked Rob Gold, his houseboat neighbour, to explain to him how record companies worked – and the obliging Gold had put down the basics on a single sheet of yellow foolscap paper. ‘He hardly knew what a record was,’ Gold recalled. ‘I told him that you go to a distributor to distribute your records, and that you get more if you’re a production company that makes its own records. Your percentage is higher if you do your own marketing.’ Crucially, Gold also told Branson what sort of figures he should be aiming at.
The deal that Branson struck with Oldfield was a standard record industry contract of the time. In fact, it was copied directly from an Island Records contract that Branson was given a copy of. Oldfield would give Virgin worldwide rights to Tubular Bells and to a fixed number of albums that he would make after that. In return, he would be paid a flat-rate royalty of five per cent of sales (but not on samples or records returned by retailers). He would also receive the equivalent of an annual salary of £1,000 a year, though this would be deducted from any future royalties he might earn.
This deal was no less attractive than the deals which hundreds of other aspiring rock stars had received; in fact it was more attractive, since Oldfield had failed to find a recording contract with a number of other labels before coming back to Virgin. But the seeds of ill-will were laid in that agreement. Oldfield had signed at the kitchen table of the Manor, negotiating directly with Branson. More important, the albums he was contracted to produce could easily be ten years’ work; they would certainly tie him to Virgin for a period of time that was longer than the entire creative career of most rock musicians. And Richard Branson, the man with whom he would have to negotiate future changes to these arrangements, had become Oldfield’s manager.
Branson’s next job was to find a way of distributing Tubular Bells. Island Records, Britain’s leading independent record label at the time, offered to license it from Virgin in return for a royalty. Branson refused: remembering the advice he had received from Rob Gold, he suggested instead that Island should do no more than press and distribute (P&D) the record on Virgin’s behalf. David Betteridge, Island’s managing director, told Branson he was mad. If it accepted a straightforward licensing deal, Virgin would be able to hand Tubular Bells over to Island and forget about it, but still pocket the difference between the royalty it was paying Oldfield and the much higher royalty it received from Island. By insisting on a P&D deal, Virgin would miss out on an advance from Island, and would itself have to carry the risk of financial failure. In any case, said Betteridge, Island did not do P&D deals; the other small companies for whom it distributed records were signed up on a full licensee basis. But Branson was adamant. In the end he got what he wanted.
Tubular Bells was released in May 1973 along with the three other albums that made up the beginning of the Virgin Records list. But it was on Oldfield’s work that Virgin concentrated its attention, and where Branson’s salesmanship came into its own. Having had the nerve to telephone businessmen he had never met before to ask them for advertising for a student magazine, the young entrepreneur had no hesitation in making a nuisance of himself in the offices of radio stations and music papers and magazines, trying to get air time or publicity for his new Oldfield album.
At first, the job of selling the record seemed daunting: albums were supposed to be made up of a dozen or so three-minute songs, not of two long continuous instrumental compositions. But once the record had received the honour of being broadcast in its entirety on BBC Radio One by John Peel – a disc jockey of undisputed authority and street credibility – its future was assured. Within a matter of weeks, it was the number one selling album in the British pop charts. Within a few weeks more, Branson had flown to the United States, and sold a package of the four inaugural Virgin albums to Atlantic Records for three-quarters of a million dollars. Ahmet Ertegun, Atlantic’s chief executive, sold Oldfield’s record in turn to the makers of a new film who were looking for a soundtrack. The Exorcist, as the film was called, became a hit in America; so did Tubular Bells. It reached third place in the US charts.
That single album, and to a lesser extent the Tangerine Dream LP Phaedra released the following year, put Virgin on the map. It also unleashed a torrent of money into the company’s bank accounts. The £38,000 that Branson had to finish paying to the Customs, and the continuing dribble of losses from the shops and the mail-order business, suddenly came to seem insignificant. Virgin Records was in business as an independent label; and Simon Draper now had enough money to sign the bands that he wanted.
In July 1972, four days after his twenty-second birthday and while Virgin Records was preparing its first albums for release, Richard Branson married. His bride was Kristen Tomassi, a tall, slim blonde New Yorker who had come to the Manor a year earlier on the arm of an Australian boyfriend. Branson, struck instantly by her high-cheeked, almost Scandinavian good looks and by his discovery that her sense of fun matched his, decided instantly to make her his own. Like him, Kristen loved friends, practical jokes, convivial evenings with a bottle of wine and a joint or two, and sports. But she was still a student when she visited the Manor, and had been intending to go back to the university architecture course from which she had been taking a summer break.
Branson won her with the same impulsive daring that had already helped him to start a magazine and a mail-order business. On the day that her two-week holiday in England was over, Kristen received a telegram, A BOAT IS SINKING, it said, and asked her to ring a telephone number. Kristen rang him from a call box to thank him for the telegram, but insisted that she was going to leave all the same. When she went back to her packing, she was met by a friend of Branson’s who had come around, on his orders, to take her baggage around to the houseboat. She followed in a taxi, to find Branson and Powell deep in a business discussion. Branson opened her case, upended it on the floor, and confined talking to Nik Powell as if this were the most natural thing in the world.
After a few weeks, Kristen began to fret about her half-finished architecture course, and (though she did not tell him this) the live-in boyfriend that she had left in America.
‘You don’t need to go to architecture school,’ said Branson, with the unshakeable confidence of someone who knew that university could not have taught him anything he did not already know. ‘You can do the architectural work on the Manor.’ Before the summer was out, Kristen therefore found herself making regular visits to the Phillips auction rooms in nearby Bayswater, buying up huge pieces of cheap antique furniture for the Manor. Her best find was a second-hand billiard table, which cost £50 and required six people to manoeuvre it into position in the old house.
She soon found her own individuality being subsumed into a set of shared concerns about the business. Every aspect of Branson’s life – from his dealings with colleagues at Virgin to his negotiations with the Inland Revenue – became part
