“Name any record you want,” his ad read, “and we’ll sell it to you 10% to 25% cheaper than anyone else.” A business was born. Seizing the sword of opportunity, he quickly took to the back pages of his paper to be the first to offer a good bargain. Twenty and lordly, then-helming his small but pop-savvy lifestyle magazine, Student, he noticed the UK’s Retail Price Maintenance Agreement-which kept strict restrictions on the saleable cost of vinyl records-had been quietly lifted. In 1970, 22 years before he would publicly weep while selling his record label/airline/mobile-phone/space-tourism conglomerate, Virgin, for over a billion dollars, the rugged and floppy-haired Branson invented the mail-order model of record distribution out of the usual entrepreneurial cocktail of luck and generational wealth.
For me, and for many others, it felt like paradise.īefore the shadow of Bezos, before the Zuck, before, even, the contemporary comedy provided for us by the insidiously dippy Elon Musk, there was Sir Richard Branson. Pure Moods’ essence is safe, formless, and mostly meaningless, like a piece of art hung in a bathroom. For others, it can suggest an intensely ambivalent mixture of pity and allure. For some, hearing the album might pang a Proustian memory of falling asleep on a familiar sofa.
Swooning and naked in its pride, the 17-song compilation album, advertised in 60-second hallucinations disguised as infomercials, was a warm vat of music that we might today refer to loosely as “new age.” Its carefully selected tracklist-a mosaic made largely up of film or television scores, or trance remixes thereof-seemed engineered to induce a ridiculous sort of fugue state. You may not remember hearing this work, but after watching the commercial, you might find yourself feeling that you’ve always known lines from its script. Unexpected, unbidden, and more or less unnecessary, Pure Moods is a piece woven with some wear into the silk of the popular unconsciousness.
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