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 of hers. Kristen also found that she got on very well with Eve Branson, Richard’s mother. Like her own mother, the head of the Branson household would tolerate no laziness or newspaper reading on Sunday mornings. Instead, guests at the Surrey farmhouse were required to swim, play croquet or feed the pigeons. When Richard and Kristen went to stay at the family house before they were married, they were invited to join his parents in their bed in the morning for sausage and eggs and strong tea.
The wedding took place at the village church of Shipton, and the party followed immediately afterwards at the Manor. It was an odd occasion; Branson’s friends and colleagues dressed up in morning dress and grey top hats, their long hair splaying oddly from the sides. Branson’s bank manager from Coutts, a guest of special importance given the cash-flow requirements of the business, was first on the receiving line. Kristen’s father paid for the party.
When they returned to London after a suitably energetic holiday on a Greek island, Kristen began to prepare for the couple to move from the houseboat on the canal to a small terraced house in Denbigh Terrace, near Portobello Road. The bank manager justified his invitation to the wedding by providing them with a mortgage that allowed Branson to offer £80,000 for the house; in keeping with the gap between their means and aspirations, Kristen then devoted herself to decorating it in style on a shoestring, making the curtains herself and imbuing the house with a sense of style and proportion befitting a former architecture student. Their one extravagance was a huge, lavish sofa in which Branson would slump as he made endless telephone calls. Meanwhile, Kristen would cook – brilliantly, her friends told her – for the dinner parties whose frequency was matched only by the short notice at which she had to prepare them. In quieter moments, the two would stroll down to Holland Park and talk about their ambitions to live one day in one of the huge stucco houses there that were now so far beyond their financial reach.
As they settled into Denbigh Terrace, Kristen became used to seeing her husband deep in conversation at all hours with Nik Powell, Simon Draper and Ken Berry, a clerk whom Branson had plucked from the accounts department to become his personal assistant. It did not take her long to realize how important his work was to the man she had married. Any doubt that there might have been was dispelled by Branson’s impulsive decision to give Mike Oldfield the Bentley that he and Kristen had received as a wedding present from Ted and Eve. The splendid car was given to Oldfield as a reward for agreeing to perform Tubular Bells at a concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall. Kristen was given strict orders not to tell her mother-in-law, for fear of hurting her feelings – and it was in fact long, long afterwards that Eve discovered what had happened.
Kristen’s first response to Branson’s devotion to business was to try to behave like him: to throw herself into design decisions about the Manor, or to rush to and from the Virgin Rags clothes shops that were opening up inside the record stores, trying to make some order of the chaos that was the mark of Virgin’s first and last venture into clothes retailing. She also worked hard as Branson’s back-up in mollycoddling Virgin artists – spending a number of days, for instance, cheering up Mike Oldfield at an isolated country cottage, and at one point arranging to return a