Virgin itself was named when Branson was a teenager. It was 1970 and he’d started a mail-order record company with his friend Nik Powell. “I was sitting in a basement with a bunch of girls. We were all about 15, 16 years old. And we were trying to think of a name for a record mail order company,” he told “The Brave Ones.”
“And Slip Disc Records was one that was quite popular amongst us all. Because the old black vinyls, when you put a needle on them, they would slip sometimes.
“If we had gone with Slip Disc Records, Slip Disc Airlines wouldn`t have worked so well. And then one of the girls said: ‘We`re all virgins. Why don`t you call it Virgin?’” Branson told “The Brave Ones.” The name worked for every industry the company went into, because it was new to each.
Branson had dropped out of high school around the age of 15, having rowed with his headmaster over the publication of a magazine he’d set up, called Student. Together with Powell, he knew they needed some big names to make it work, and managed to get an interview with the writer James Baldwin, turning up unannounced at his London hotel room. Others included journalist James Cameron, who wrote directly from North Vietnam during the war, and Vanessa Redgrave, with whom Branson protested against it.
But his attention was soon to switch to launching Virgin Records, his and Powell’s first proper company. “I knew nothing about the record industry. But I`d heard a tape of a 15-year-old who was a year younger than I was. And I loved it. And I thought somebody must put this out. He didn`t have any vocals on it. I took it to eight record companies and all of them said they liked it. But they wouldn`t put it out without singing on it,” he told “The Brave Ones.”
So Branson’s company released it. The musician was Mike Oldfield and the album “Tubular Bells,” which became one of the U.’s best-selling albums of the 1970s, after it was featured on the soundtrack of the 1973 movie “The Exorcist.” It got to number three on the U.
But it was also the hip vibe the Virgin brand had that attracted young people, recalls Peter Williams, a non-executive director at multiple companies including fashion website Boohoo.com and Domino’s Pizza franchisee DP Eurasia. Williams went to Virgin’s first makeshift record store in west London, after seeing ads for its albums in music magazine Melody Maker.
“You went up some rickety stairs and there were a bunch of hippies, with thousands of brand new albums sprayed out about the room. The first interaction was, here was somebody who in an innovative way for that era, 40-odd years-ago, was challenging a very staid way of selling records. The new generation were buying records in unbelievable quantities,” he told CNBC by phone.
“(Branson) had challenged the status quo and he struck a chord with me as a consumer, albeit it was all around price, being a fellow hippie at the time, there was (also) something hippieish cool about it all.”
That “cool” was about to be applied to Virgin’s next venture, which was nothing to do with the record industry: an airline.
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