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

by Richard Branson

  I was in trouble myself. Our plans for the special issue had put Student on the brink of bankruptcy. I was getting desperate. For the first time in my life, I contacted a lawyer, Charles Levison, who wrote to Derek, threatening to sue Apple and the Lennons for breach of promise.

  A few days later, I received a telephone call from Derek. ‘Come round to Apple, Richard,’ he said. ‘We’ve got something for you.’

  That afternoon I sat in the basement studio at Apple, with Charles, Derek, John and Yoko, listening to the recording they’d provided. The hiss of the tape recorder was followed by a steady, metronomic beat – like the sound of a human heart.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s the heartbeat of our baby,’ said John.

  No sooner had he spoken than the sound stopped. Yoko burst into floods of tears and hugged John. I didn’t understand what was going on, but before I could speak John looked over Yoko’s shoulder straight into my eyes.

  ‘The baby died,’ he told me. ‘That’s the silence of our dead baby.’

  I went back to Student with no idea what I should do. I felt unable to release this private moment as a record. Perhaps I was wrong because, as Derek said, it was ‘conceptual art’ and would have become a collector’s piece. We had to scrap the covers and redesign the magazine. It cost a lot of money, but somehow we managed to scrape it together. I considered taking legal action against the Lennons, but they’d had enough problems and, anyway, they’d honoured the agreement in their own particular way, even if I couldn’t see the value of it at the time. After our dispute over the recording, Derek wrote a note apologising for all the trouble I’d been caused. His sign-off was a phrase he put on all his correspondence: ‘All you need is love …’

  Jonny read extensively. I hardly read at all. I never seemed to have the time. I would spend the days on the telephone, trying to sell advertising space, persuading people to write for Student for nothing, or to be interviewed. Throughout my life, I’ve always needed somebody as a counterbalance, to compensate for my weaknesses, and work off my strengths. Jonny and I were a good team. He knew who we should interview, and why. I had the ability to persuade them to say yes, and the obstinacy never to accept no for an answer.

  In many of the interviews I conducted for Student I just turned the tape recorder on and let the interviewee say whatever they wanted. Before meeting the Scottish psychiatrist RD Laing, I had tried to read his bestseller, The Politics of Experience. Like most people, I suspect, I had understood hardly a word of it. I aimed the microphone at him and he spoke without stopping for an hour and a half, staring at a corner of the ceiling behind my head. I had no idea what he was rabbiting on about; I was just grateful that there wasn’t any room for me to ask him a single question. At the end, when it became apparent that he had finished, I thanked him profusely, went back to the office and transcribed it. It turned out that he had just quoted pages from The Politics of Experience, almost verbatim.

  After a few issues, the number of people involved with Student began to grow. Jonny and I would sometimes go to nightclubs and chat up girls. Sometimes we could even persuade them to come back to the flat, ‘for coffee’. If they stayed the night, the next morning we would try to persuade them to help out. For some reason, they often seemed to take pity on us. Word of mouth spread: old friends turned up from school; friends of friends, or people who had read the magazine, wanted to be involved. Increasingly, the basement resembled a squat. We all worked for no money, living off whatever was in the fridge and going out for cheap curries.

  All sorts of people helped to distribute the magazine. The basic idea was that they would take away bundles of magazines and sell them for 2/6d a copy, and then come back and give us half the proceeds, 1/3d for each copy sold. They were meant to pay us in advance, but it rarely seemed to work like that. But I never really worried about how much profit Student made: I was just determined to have enough cash in the kitty to produce the next issue and pay our bills. I thought that, the more copies we sold, the more word of mouth would spread and ultimately the more advertising we would be able to attract.

  Although I hardly realised it at the time, my ambition to be a journalist was beginning to be pushed to one side by the imperatives of keeping the magazine afloat. Jonny ran the editorial side while I ran the business and sold advertising space and argued with the printers. I was becoming an entrepreneur almost by default, although if anybody had mentioned the word to me then I would probably have had to ask Jonny what it meant. I certainly didn’t regard myself as a businessman. Businessmen were middle-aged men in the City obsessed with making money. They wore pinstripe suits and had wives and 2.4 children in the suburbs. Of course, we wanted to make money on Student too – we needed money to survive. But we saw it much more as a creative enterprise than a money-making one.

  Later, it became apparent to me that business could be a creative enterprise in itself. If you publish a magazine, you’re trying to create something that is original, that stands out from the crowd, that will last and, hopefully, serve some useful purpose. Above all, you want to create something you are proud of. That has always been my philosophy of business. I can honestly say that I have never gone into any business purely to make money. If that is the sole motive then I believe you are better off not doing it. A business has to be involving; it has to be fun, and it has to exercise your creative instincts.

  Running Student was certainly fun. Each day unfolded to the deafening strains of Bob Dylan, The Beatles or The Stones blaring out of the hi-fi system, shaking the walls of the basement. When Jonny and I went out to sell copies of the magazine, we would celebrate a single sale of the magazine for 2/6d by going and buying two hamburgers for 1/3d each. Every now and then I would look out of the grimy basement window and see that it was a beautiful day. I would turn off the music and tell everyone we had to go out for a walk. We would wander across Hyde Park and then somehow someone would end up in the Serpentine and we’d all have a swim.

  Tony Mellor was one of the main assistant editors, and we all respected him because he had been a trade-union official. Tony was rather older than the rest of us, and was extremely articulate about socialism. As everyone argued over the exact wording of some of the more political pronouncements in the magazine, I was beginning to be aware of a wider picture: the politics of survival. In some ways I became an outsider on the magazine. While the others would be talking about the ‘LSD guru’ Timothy Leary, Pink Floyd and the latest convolutions of student politics, I would be worrying about paying the printers and telephone bills. As well as spending time on the telephone trying to persuade leading figures of the day to write for Student, just for the love of it, I also had to spend hours calling up companies such as British Leyland or Lloyds Bank, trying to convince them to buy advertising space. Without their money, Student would collapse.

  The responsibility made me grow up fast. You might almost say that I was old before my time. While the others might happily sit around in the evening getting stoned, unconcerned about waking up late the next morning with a hangover, I was always aware of the need to keep a clear head.

  My parents and Lindi came up to help us sell copies of the magazine. Mum took a bundle to Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park and pushed them into the unsuspecting hands of tourists. Lindi and I walked up and down Oxford Street selling copies of Student to anybody we could stop. I was once with Lindi when a tramp came up and asked for money. We had no money – that’s exactly what we were looking for too – but in a histrionic fit of idealism I stripped off most of my clothes and gave them to him. I spent the rest of the day walking around in a blanket.

  ‘Poor old tramp!’ Dad chuckled when he heard the story. ‘That’ll teach him. All he wanted was some loose change, and he got a set of infested clothes from you!’

  Student began to attract a high profile, and one day a German television channel asked me whether I would make a speech at University College, London, along with the activist Tariq Ali and the
German student leader Danny Cohn-Bendit. The brief was to talk about people’s rights. A vast crowd welcomed these two firebrand revolutionaries. I stood and listened as Danny Cohn-Bendit made a brilliant speech full of intellectual depth and passion. Everyone around him was cheering and roaring their approval. Then Tariq Ali stood up, and he too made a passionate speech. The crowd stamped and shouted at the tops of their voices as if they were about to descend upon the Bastille. I began to feel a little queasy.

  At Stowe there had been a very cruel tradition. Each boy had to learn a long poem and stand up in front of the entire school and recite it. If you made the slightest mistake or paused for a moment, the master hit a gong, and you had to leave the stage accompanied by great boos and jeers all round: you were ‘gonged’ off. Since I was mildly dyslexic I found it extremely difficult to learn anything by heart, and for several years was gonged off with relentless regularity. As I watched Danny Cohn-Bendit and Tariq Ali making their inspiring speeches, surfing on the goodwill of the crowd and milking the television camera for all it was worth, I felt the same sickening feeling in my stomach as I had felt when I was waiting to recite my Tennyson piece in the sure knowledge that I would be ‘gonged’ off stage and loudly booed.

  Finally Tariq Ali finished his speech. There was pandemonium. Everyone cheered; somebody hoisted him on their shoulders; pretty girls waved admiringly up at him and the camera swivelled in his direction. Then somebody beckoned to me: it was my turn. I hopped up to the podium and nervously took the microphone. I had barely spoken in public, let alone made a speech before, and I felt chronically nervous. I had absolutely no idea what to say. I had prepared a speech but, under the scrutiny of a thousand expectant faces turned towards me like sunflowers, my mind had gone completely blank. Dry-mouthed, I mumbled a few words, gave a sick smile, and realised with a mounting feeling of panic that I could not do it. There was nowhere to hide. I gave a final inarticulate mumble, somewhere between a cough and a vomit, dropped the microphone, leapt off the podium and disappeared back into the safety of the crowd. It had been the most embarrassing moment of my life.

  Even now, whenever I am interviewed or have to give a speech, I feel the same trepidation and I have to overcome the same sense of shyness. If I’m talking on a subject that I know a little about, or that I feel passionately about, then I can be reasonably fluent. But, when I’m asked to talk about something I know very little about, I become extremely uncomfortable – and it shows. I have come to accept that I will never have all the smooth instant answers that a politician would have. I try not to fight my stutters or inability to leap to a perfect answer. Instead, I just try to give the truthful answer, and, if it takes a little time to work out that answer, I hope that people will trust a slow, hesitant response more than a rapid, glib one.

  The wars in Vietnam and Biafra were the two leading issues of the late 1960s. If Student was to be a credible publication we had to have our own reporters in both countries. We had no money to send any reporters out there, let alone pay for them to stay in hotels and telex back articles, so we had to think laterally. We finally came up with the idea that if we chose very young reporters then they might be a story in themselves. So I called up the Daily Mirror and asked whether they would be interested in running an exclusive story about a seventeen-year-old reporter going to Vietnam. They bought the story and paid for Julian Manyon, who was working with us at Student, to go to Vietnam. Julian went there, filed some great articles about the Vietnam War, and subsequently went on to become a famous ITN reporter. We managed to make the same arrangement with sending a sixteen-year-old reporter to Biafra. These two ventures were my first experience of leveraging up the Student name: we put in the name and the people, and the other side put up the money to fund it.

  I felt very passionately about the campaign to end American involvement in Vietnam. In October 1968 all the Student staff joined Vanessa Redgrave on the student march to Grosvenor Square, to protest outside the American embassy. I marched alongside Vanessa and Tariq Ali. It was tremendously exciting to be marching for something I believed in, along with tens of thousands of others. The mood of the crowd was exhilarating, but at the same time slightly frightening. You felt at any moment that things could get out of control. And they did. When the police charged the crowd, I ran like hell. A photograph of the demonstration later appeared in Paris Match. It shows me, back arched, an inch away from the outstretched hand of a policeman who was trying to catch me as I sprinted across the square.

  While I opposed Vietnam, I didn’t feel as passionately left-wing on other issues as most of my fellow demonstrators.

  ‘I suppose I am left-wing,’ I told a reporter from the Guardian. ‘Well, only to the extent that I think left-wing views are sane and rational.’

  Student was not a radical magazine in the political sense. Nor were we an ‘underground’ magazine, like Oz and IT. We weren’t advocating putting LSD in the water supply, as they might have done from time to time – although I think there was just as much free love in our offices as there was in theirs.

  I tried to maintain a balance between the views of the left and the right, but what I hoped was balance some people saw as prevarication. The writer and poet Robert Graves wrote to me from Deià, Majorca, where he lived:

  Your hands seem tied tighter than students deserve. In the Biafra story, for instance, you don’t once mention what the war is really about in the international context. But that is because you have to keep pals with the ‘overthirties’ and the Big Business Boys, or the journal couldn’t survive. Yes, you do your best.

  In fact, the ‘Big Business Boys’ weren’t being as friendly as I’d hoped. The struggle to secure advertising had always been much more difficult than finding contributors. We were pleased to be able to interview the actor Bryan Forbes or publish Gavin Maxwell’s article, but they didn’t bring in money to help us run the magazine and distribute it. We charged £250 for a whole-page advertisement, down to £40 for an eighth of a page. For example, after countless calls I had managed to get nine companies to take out full-page ads in the first edition: J Walter Thompson, Metal Box, the Sunday Times, the Daily Telegraph, The Gas Council (the forerunner to British Gas), The Economist, Lloyds Bank, Rank Organisation, and John Laing Builders. These nine advertisements had brought in £2,250 and had been wrung out of a list that started off with over 300 possible companies. But it had been enough to cover the cost of printing the 30,000 copies of the first issue. With these funds I had opened an account at Coutts, where my family had always banked, as our clearing bank. I must have been their only customer who walked in barefoot and asked for a £1,000 overdraft. Throughout the life of Student, selling advertising space was always an uphill struggle.

  For all our efforts, it was clear that Student wasn’t making money. I began to think of ways to develop the magazine, and the Student name, in other directions: a Student conference, a Student travel company, a Student accommodation agency. I didn’t just see Student as an end in itself, a noun. I saw it as the beginning of a whole range of services, an adjective, a word that people would recognise as having certain key values. In 1970s language, Student magazine and everything Student promoted should be ‘hip’. Student was a flexible concept and I wanted to explore this flexibility to see how far I could push it and where it would lead. In this way I was a little removed from the rest of my friends, who concentrated exclusively on the magazine and the student politics they wanted to cover.

  It seems Peter Blake was right in saying that student revolution would go out of fashion – and students with it. However, looking at the early editions of Student thirty years later, I’m amazed by how little has changed. Student then had cartoons of Ted Heath by Nicholas Garland; he was still being caricatured right up until his death by Nicholas Garland. David Hockney, Dudley Moore and John Le Carré still make good copy, and Bryan Forbes and Vanessa Redgrave, or at least their daughters, are still in the news.

  Life in the basement was the kind of all-embr
acing, glorious chaos in which I thrived and have thrived ever since. We never had any money; we were incredibly busy; but we were a close-knit team. We worked together because it was fun, because we felt that what we were doing was important, and because we had great lives together.

  Soon a number of journalists from the national papers came to interview me to see what all the buzz was about. We developed a foolproof way of impressing them. I sat at my desk, the telephone at my elbow.

  ‘Great to meet you. Take a seat,’ I would say, waving the journalist down into the beanbag opposite me. As they shuffled around trying to retain their dignity, get comfortable, and remove the drips of houmous and piles of cigarette ash from the folds, the telephone would ring.

  ‘Can someone take that, please?’ I would ask. ‘Now –’ I turned my attention to the journalist ‘– what do you want to know about Student?’

  ‘It’s Ted Heath for you, Richard,’ Tony would call across.

  ‘I’ll call him back,’ I’d say over my shoulder. ‘Now, what did you want to know about Student?’

  By this time the journalist was craning round to watch Tony tell Ted Heath that he was sorry but Richard was in a meeting and he’d call him back. Then the telephone would ring again, and Tony would pick it up.

  ‘David Bailey for you, Richard.’

  ‘I’ll call him back, but will you ask if he can change that lunch date? I’ve got to be in Paris. OK –’ I’d flash an apologetic grin at the journalist ‘– now, how are we doing?’