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

by Richard Branson

  12 ‘Success can take off without warning.’

  1980–1982

  AS WELL AS PARTING from Nik, I came dangerously close to splitting up with Joan in 1980. I was working frantically to keep Virgin afloat and I knew that Joan was growing increasingly frustrated. No matter how late I got home, the telephone rang. Every time we woke up on a Saturday morning it rang again. One night I returned home to the houseboat to find it empty. Joan had gone and left me a note: ‘I am pregnant. I am afraid to tell you. I have run away from home. If you miss me, call me at Rose’s.’

  As I looked at the note, I realised that my life had changed. I sat down and thought about what to do. After Kristen had left me, I had had a number of affairs. I loved the variety and the freedom. Ever since she had moved in with me, I feared I had taken Joan too much for granted. My marriage to Kristen had made me sceptical about long-term relationships, and at that time I had not made the same commitment as Joan. I was also under pressure from my parents to get back together with Kristen or, if not, then to marry some kind of university-educated, tennis-playing girl from Surrey – which Joan emphatically was not.

  I remember telling my parents that Joan had moved in with me. Dad was fishing on the shore of a lake, and Mum was pointing out a rising trout.

  In the ensuing silence Dad flunked his cast, which landed in a tangle.

  ‘That’s torn it,’ he said.

  But when I sat in the houseboat holding Joan’s scribbled note and thinking about our unborn baby, I realised that I really loved her. Until that moment I had been guilty of wanting to have my cake and eat it: having a great relationship without making a commitment to it. I had enjoyed a number of different relationships, and had never thought about the consequences. I think lots of men would happily drift through life without having children unless their partners forced the issue. I called Rose, Joan’s sister, and dashed round to be with Joan.

  About six months into Joan’s pregnancy I was in France while Joan was on holiday in Scotland. She had an attack of appendicitis in Fort William. I flew to Scotland to be with her while she was having the operation. In fact, she did not have appendicitis but an ovarian cyst which had burst, but the doctors decided to go ahead and remove her appendix as well – a dangerous operation at the best of times but more so on a six-months-pregnant woman. The operation triggered Joan into labour. She was put on a drip to try to reduce the contractions, and we immediately set off in an ambulance to try to reach a more modern hospital at Inverness. The drive across Scotland in the snow was a nightmare. Every jolt of the road set Joan into further contractions. By the time we arrived she was in agony with the pain of the operation, the pain of the contractions, and desperately trying to keep the baby in.

  At Inverness Hospital it became clear that Joan would have to give birth to the baby. There was going to be little chance of the baby surviving as it was three months premature. A baby girl was born who weighed just four pounds, and we called her Clare after my aunt. Clare could scarcely feed and the hospital did not have the necessary equipment to keep her alive.

  Although Clare did open her lovely, deep milky-blue eyes, she died after four days. All I can remember of her now is her tiny size. Neither of us was allowed to hold or touch her. Her brief home was in an incubator. She was so small she would have fitted into the palm of my hand. We pored over her face, and marvelled at her tiny hands and the determined set to her face as she slept. But now that memory has faded. When I try to remember Clare, my mind is cluttered by the antiseptic smell of the hospital, the metal chairs in our room scraping over the lino, and the look on the nurse’s face as she came to tell us that Clare had died.

  Clare inhabited a world of her own, and came in and out of our lives leaving only despair and emptiness and love behind her. She was so small and lived for so little time that she was almost never here at all, but in that heartbreaking time she brought Joan and me intensely close together. Until I had seen Clare’s tiny fragile body, dwarfed by the tiniest nappy, and seen how beautiful she was, and known that she was our baby, I had never thought I would want to have a child.

  After Clare’s death, Joan and I were determined to have another baby, and to our delight Joan became pregnant again within a year.

  Once again Joan went into labour early, this time by six weeks. Both of us were taken by surprise. I was at a party at The Venue and arrived home at three in the morning, roaring drunk. I fell into a deep sleep, and only reluctantly woke when I felt Joan slapping me about the face and shouting that she was having contractions. I fell out of bed and managed to drive her to hospital. The doctors examined Joan and led her to the maternity ward. ‘You look fine,’ they reassured her.

  Then they looked at me.

  ‘You look terrible. You’d better take these aspirins and go to bed.’

  Some time later that morning, I was woken up to find four doctors peering at me through their masks. I assumed that I had had a terrible accident and was in a casualty ward somewhere.

  ‘Joan is well into labour,’ they said. ‘You’d better come with us.’

  Holly was born, under six pounds in weight. It was the most incredible experience I had ever been through. By the end of it (I believe!) I was even more exhausted than Joan. I pledged to myself that I’d never miss the birth of one of our children. However, after what had happened to Clare, our immediate concern was keeping Holly alive.

  We drove back to the houseboat on a freezing-cold November morning in 1981, and Joan wrapped Holly up with her in bed. For the rest of the winter they stayed more or less in the bedroom the whole time while I worked in the room next door. Penni used to walk through the bedroom to her desk, which was tucked between the bilge pump and the stairs.

  In 1981 Virgin Music finally began to earn some money. Japan had had hit albums with Gentlemen Take Polaroids and Tin Drum. Some of our recent hit singles were XTC’s ‘Generals And Majors’ and ‘Sgt Rock’, and Ian Gillan’s ‘Trouble’ and ‘New Orleans’. The Professionals and The Skids were also successes. We still didn’t know what Phil Collins would come up with, and – twenty-fourth in my list of things to do that month – I arranged to go up to Scotland to a concert by one of our new bands, Simple Minds. Simple Minds’ album, New Gold Dream, was a bestseller.

  The best news of 1981 was that Simon’s prediction about The Human League was proved right. Their first two albums were quite experimental and built up a loyal cult following. When we noticed that their sales kept steadily rising we knew that we had every chance of breaking through. Their third album, Dare, powered into the top ten and then went to number one. Dare sold over 1 million copies in Britain and 3 million around the world. The hit single ‘Don’t You Want Me, Baby?’ was played over and over again and became ingrained on everyone’s mind.

  Almost as quickly as they had run out, Virgin’s cash balances were now restored. Whenever Virgin has money I always renew my search for new opportunities. I am continually trying to broaden the Group so we are not dependent on a narrow source of income, but I suspect this is more down to inquisitiveness and restlessness than sound financial sense. This time I thought I saw a perfect opportunity. Since Virgin was an entertainment company, I thought we could publish our own listings magazine called Event. Unfortunately, it was launched at the same time as the highly successful Time Out, and Event lost the battle.

  It is always difficult to admit to a failure, but the one positive thing about the Event episode was that I realised how important it was to separate the various Virgin companies so that, if one failed, it would not threaten the rest of the Virgin Group. Event was a disaster, but it was a contained disaster. Every successful businessman has failed at some ventures, and most entrepreneurs who run their own companies have been declared bankrupt at least once. Rather than defaulting on our debts, we paid them up and shut down the magazine.

  The money that Event magazine lost Virgin was rapidly repaid to us by The Human League, Simple Minds, Phil Collins’ enormously successful debut solo
album, Face Value, and then, most spectacularly, by a young singer who called himself Boy George.

  I first heard of Boy George and Culture Club after Simon went to see them perform at a recording studio in Stoke Newington in 1981. The music publishing rights had already been signed by Virgin, and Simon was intrigued by the startling appearance of their lead singer, a beautiful young drag queen, and the soft, easy-going white reggae they played. Simon invited the band back to Vernon Yard, where they agreed a recording contract.

  When Simon introduced me to George O’Dowd, I found myself shaking hands with somebody who looked utterly unlike anyone I had ever met before. His long hair was braided like a Rastafarian; he had a pale white face, huge arched eyebrows, and wore the ornate robes of a geisha girl.

  Although we knew that Culture Club was an extraordinary creation, their first single, ‘White Boy’, was stillborn. Virgin released it on 30 April 1982 but nothing much happened: it sold around 8,000 copies and reached 114 in the charts. We didn’t mind. We really felt that, as soon as Boy George was properly photographed or if we could get him on to Top of the Pops, his records would take off. People just had to see Boy George and they would want to buy his music. Teenagers would go mad for him. As well as looking astonishing, George had a fabulous voice and was very witty and charming: he was a rebel in a totally different way from The Sex Pistols or James Dean, but a rebel nonetheless. Virgin brought out Culture Club’s second single, ‘I’m Afraid Of Me’, in June, and although it sold better than ‘White Boy’ it still only reached 100 in the charts. Culture Club carried on recording their album, Kissing To Be Clever, which they had largely written before they signed with us.

  When we released Culture Club’s third single, ‘Do You Really Want To Hurt Me?’, on 3 September 1982 it was our final attempt to launch the band. Funnily enough, Radio 2 played the song before Radio 1, and general reviews of the single were poor: ‘Watered-down fourth-division reggae,’ wrote Smash Hits. ‘Awful.’ But with the Radio 2 exposure it crept up the charts, up to number 85 in its first week, and number 38 in its second week. We plugged him as hard as we could, but the BBC refused to interview Boy George, calling him a ‘transvestite’. Then we heard about a cancellation on Top of the Pops. We did everything we could to get Boy George into that slot, and when Top of the Pops finally agreed, we suspected we had a sensation in the making.

  With his white face, his swaying robes, his felt hat and impossible arched eyebrows, Boy George beat every other sophisticated romantic band, such as Spandau Ballet, at their own game. He appealed to all teenagers, both male and female, as well as to children as young as eight or nine and their grandmothers to boot. It was impossible to define why he was so popular: parents wanted to mother him; girls wanted to be as beautiful; boys wanted their girlfriends to be as beautiful; it’s impossible to quantify. The next day the telephones rang off the desks and the orders for the single came pouring in. ‘Do You Really Want To Hurt Me?’ rose to number three. George then appeared on Noel Edmonds’ Late Late Breakfast Show and Noel asked him whether he was a great fan of Liberace. ‘Not any more,’ George said, implying that the roles had now been reversed. The single reached number one. When George announced that he preferred a cup of tea to sex, he became an international icon.

  For Christmas 1982, we released Culture Club’s first album, Kissing To Be Clever, which sold 4 million copies around the world. And then came another amazing breakthrough: their sixth single, ‘Karma Chameleon’, was the top-selling single of 1983, selling over 1.4 million copies in the UK and reaching number one in every country around the world that had a chart, over thirty countries to our knowledge. Culture Club was a worldwide pop phenomenon, and their second album, Colour By Numbers, sold almost 10 million copies.

  Virgin’s finances were thrown upside down: from the £900,000 loss in 1980, we made a profit of £2 million in 1982 on sales of £50 million. In 1983 our sales shot up to £94 million and our profits soared to £11 million. Once we had started the Boy George fan club, it was impossible to control it, and in 1983 40 per cent of our profits came from Boy George. For the first two years the Culture Club story was the perfect model. The extraordinary thing about the record industry is how success can take off without warning. One minute nobody had heard of Boy George; the next minute every person around the world from Ireland to Korea and Japan to Ghana was humming ‘Karma Chameleon’. Boy George’s success was measured literally by the speed of sound. Many people find such a vertical run frightening, and they would be right in thinking it creates havoc in a company. Happily, I have always thrived on havoc and adrenaline, and so I felt perfectly at home as we fanned the flames of Culture Club’s success.

  13 ‘You go ahead with this over my dead body.’

  1983–1984

  IT IS ALWAYS EASIER to live with the benefit of hindsight. People often point out that Nik sold his 40 per cent stake in Virgin at the wrong time. But when Nik and I split up he was as aware of the sales figures and profit forecast as I was and things were in bad shape. At the time Nik and I were both happy: Nik was happy to leave a company that looked as if it was heading into trouble, and I was happy to have virtually full control of my destiny, even if I knew that Virgin was on a knife edge. Soon after Nik left, two things happened that could not have been foreseen. Firstly, compact discs became widespread and so we were able to resell our back catalogue on CD. Many people replicated their entire record collection on compact disc, and certainly an artist like Mike Oldfield sold tremendously well on CD; The Sex Pistols less so.

  The second change was that Virgin itself became the undisputed leading independent record label. Simon’s taste in music finally triumphed: Virgin Music started to dominate the top-ten singles and albums charts. From being seen as a one-band record label that had made an incongruous leap from Mike Oldfield to The Sex Pistols, Virgin Music was now the envy of the record industry. All Simon’s signings of the last couple of years took off at once: we had The Human League as well as their spin-off, Heaven 17; Simple Minds; Boy George; Phil Collins; China Crisis and Japan. The wonderful thing about these artists was that we had broken them all ourselves. I was still determined to sign a classic act of the calibre of Bryan Ferry or The Rolling Stones, but the beauty of our roster was that it was all home-grown, and was finally beginning to sell well overseas.

  As I watched the money pouring into the bank, I began to think of other ways to use it. Although I was closely involved in signing bands, I felt that I knew as much as I wanted to about negotiating record contracts. I needed another challenge. I had the opportunity to use our cash to set up more Virgin companies and widen the basis of the Group so that all our eggs would not be in one basket if we were hit by another recession. I also wanted to expand the Virgin name to stand for more than a record label, and become more involved in all kinds of media. It was only three years since Virgin had almost gone bust, and two years since Nik had left. From having had very little money with which to play over the last three years, I now had cash mounting up in the bank and I wanted to reinvest it as fast as possible.

  When I began looking for other businesses to start up, I thought about expanding our tiny book-publishing business. I knew that the music-publishing side of Virgin Music made a very good living from publishing the music and collecting royalties, and I wondered whether a properly managed book-publishing division would be as successful. At the back of my mind was the thought that, if a rock star is famous, there should be all sorts of other activities that they could explore, including books and videos, appearances in films, and soundtracks.

  Vanessa, my younger sister, had been going out with Robert Devereux since he was at Cambridge University. Robert had become part of the family. Although Virgin is not a family company in the traditional sense, in that it has not been passed down vertically from generation to generation, it is a family company in a horizontal sense, in that I always involve my wider family in whatever I do, and I listen to their opinions as closely as anyone else’s. I kn
ow that a number of businessmen shut their families off from their work: they hardly ever invite their children into their office, and when they are at home they never discuss what they do at work. It is a British characteristic not to discuss money over a meal, but when this boils over into never discussing business then I think it represents a lost opportunity. Business is a way of life. It is small wonder that there are so few business entrepreneurs when business is excluded from the family circle.

  When I was wondering what to do about Virgin Books, Vanessa suggested that I talk to Robert, who had been working at Macmillan Publishers for three years. Robert came around to Duende with his boss Rob Shreeve, and I asked them whether they would come and work at Virgin Books. I had no clear idea what Virgin Books should do, apart from somehow exploit the growing success of the Virgin rock stars. Robert suggested that books and videos could be sold through the same outlets, and he had the idea that Virgin Books could form part of a wider Virgin interest in the media, which could involve television, radio, films and videos as well as books. Undaunted by the reality that he was actually joining a tiny little publisher, Robert left his job and came to join us at Virgin. Rob Shreeve decided to stay at Macmillan for the time being.

  When Robert arrived at Virgin Books he immediately put a stop to the line of novels we were selling. He recast Virgin Books as a nonfiction specialist in books about rock music and sport. A few years later he decided to buy another publishing house, WH Allen, which he put together with Virgin Books. With hindsight, this was a mistake: we tried to do too much, and in 1989 the publishing business ran into difficulties and had to be radically cut back. It was one of our early acquisitions, and it gave us first-hand experience of all the pain that comes with laying off staff in order to turn a company round. It also demonstrated the benefits of growing a company from scratch, when you employ exactly those people you want, and really establish the kind of atmosphere you want.