Vanessa Branson interview: ‘Richard was treated very badly. Maybe he made mistakes’

Back when “all this” began, it was fashionable to make lockdown plans – read Tolstoy, learn to bake – and inevitable that you would give up. Vanessa Branson is not the kind of person inclined to fail at things. I’m talking to her in advance of the publication of her memoir, One Hundred Summers. It isn’t out for a fortnight, and Branson, younger sister of the Virgin founder Richard, is already writing another book.

“It’s a novel. That’s the ridiculous Branson… not arrogance, but it’s just like: challenge yourself, for god’s sake! It’s the most impossible idea, but I thought, I’m going to give it a go. I’ve done two chapters, and set it in the contemporary time, during Covid, so it’s unfolding in real time.”

The novel is about “the art world”, to which Branson herself belongs. Born in 1959, she grew up in the Surrey village of Shamley Green, the youngest of three children born to Ted and Eve. The upbringing was bohemian, but in a modest sort of way. Vanessa would tag along with Richard, who alternated between terrorising his little sisters and reading them Alfred Hitchcock tales.

In her twenties, Vanessa became set on opening a gallery of her own, and in 1986, she did, opening the Vanessa Devereux Gallery on Portobello Road. (She says she has little artistic talent. “It’s only in retrospect,” she says, “that I understand that what I really love is creating an environment that creative people thrive in.”) For a time, it was a success; Branson gave shows to artists from William Kentridge to Sonia Boyce. She almost signed up Tracey Emin, but missed the chance.

Today, she says, it’s difficult to remember what the British scene was like. “It was really considered daring to show a foreign artist in the 1980s. There was still a feeling that you had sporting prints to show that you came from a certain background, or family portraits or something. Contemporary art wasn’t a thing. We were so backward.”

Alas, the gallery collapsed. “It went bankrupt, to be honest. I didn’t have a backer, and we were losing a little bit of money every exhibition. And in those days the bank interest rates were quite alarming – they got up to 17 per cent at one stage, it was just terrifying. Incrementally, I was getting broker and broker and broker.

“And I always thought: oh, the next exhibition is going to be the big one, or the good one… And then I had all these children as well.” She went on to found the Marrakesh Biennale in 2004, and she jointly owns El Fenn, a boutique hotel in the same city.

The invention of projects, Branson suggests, is something of a family vice. “I think we’re slightly rebellious. Mum always said ‘have courage’, whenever I was feeling nervous about something – ‘what’s the worst that can happen’? I don’t mean being foolhardy. We’re not daft. But with all of us being so dyslexic, we haven’t been able to work for anybody else. You play to your strengths.”

And then there’s Richard. “He’s rising 70 years old,” Vanessa says of her brother, “and I’m in awe of his energy still.” He pops up throughout One Hundred Summers, embarking on his schemes in a slightly dotty way. You can forget how many industries Virgin tried to seize: Virgin Cola, Virgin Cosmetics, even Virgin Brides. Vanessa, being a sister, tempers admiration at his success with a wry glance at the plans that failed.

One story in the book, for example, is about Virgin Vision, and its attempt to conquer Hollywood. The first film was Electric Dreams, “a modern-day version of Cyrano de Bergerac in which the love triangle was between a girl, a boy and a computer”. Richard Branson produced; among the cast were Miriam Margolyes, Giorgio Moroder and (unpromisingly) Koo Stark. It was not a success, though the title song, by Moroder and Philip Oakley, escaped to tell the tale.

More poignant, for Vanessa, is the mortal illness of Virgin Atlantic. This could lead to the loss of Necker Island, Richard’s Caribbean home, where the extended Branson clan take an annual holiday. Vanessa mentions the island several times in One Hundred Summers, often in rhapsodic prose: the “two semicircles of coral reef” around it, she writes, make it seem “held in the hands of nature itself”.

With the airline on the rocks, Necker would have been offered as collateral for an emergency government loan. Either way, when Richard Branson came begging, the Treasury was disinclined to help. “He was treated very badly,” Vanessa says. “Maybe he made some mistakes… I spoke to him a couple of days ago about that. It’s about communication.”

Nevertheless, she’s an optimist, citing her brother’s “determination to protect jobs” while saving the airline. “He has an amazing team around him, so watch this space. There was one point, a month ago, when I thought it’s all over, it’s really sad… But he doesn’t roll over.” (Since we spoke, Virgin Atlantic has cut its workforce by a third, losing over 3,000 employees.)

One Hundred Summers is a breezy read, though it isn’t short on candour: there are details of abortions, breakdowns and marital discord. Branson lingers on the parts of her life that have interest to her – she admits that a memoir is “a complete self-indulgence”, which is true, and no bad thing – so she skims over the Marrakesh Biennale, a substantial addition to the art-world odyssey, which was successful when she ran it and now appears to have died a death.

“I rushed it, that bit,” she says. “I got to that point, and thought, I’ve got to finish the book sometime.” Nor did she want to be po-faced. “You’ve got to finish one chapter and think, there you go, there’s the next one.”

There’s plenty of fun, by contrast, in the 1970s, when Vanessa was in her teens and Virgin Records, founded by a brother nine years older, was building a head of steam. She played five-a-side football with Queen, and joined a birthday party for Van Morrison (“a grumpy affair”). Her biology teacher was Hugh Cornwell of The Stranglers. She began a short-lived relationship with Mike Oldfield when he helped her tidy up after a party. (He was dressed as a bear.) She sang on the B-side of his first single (Mike Oldfield’s Song); the track is a reggae version of the folk song Froggy Went A-Courtin.

“It was astonishing,” she says. “Being surrounded by so many creatives. And there’ll have been many more. I didn’t write it down – I wasn’t that aware at the time. We weren’t taking photos.”

Refreshingly, she’s still a sincere believer in the party scene. “Gatherings are so important. In the art world, we sort of kid ourselves that by drinking and partying, you’re being creative, but you are in a way: discussing things, chance encounters, the artist that meets the poet and gets drunk one evening and something comes of it.

“I’m not sure that you can do that virtually in quite the same way.” (We’re talking on Zoom, the video-conferencing platform that I loathe, and suspect she loathes as well. She suggests we have a drink in the real world, whenever that’s possible again.)

She doubts, however, that once the pandemic is over, the art-market set will go straight back to their former ways, flying the same works by the same artist from one fair to the next. “It’s got to change, hasn’t it? It wasn’t all good, the endless fairs. So many works of art being shipped over to America but then being bought by English collectors over there and shipped back again.

“The environmental impact was not the art world’s finest moment. A lot of the work is about saving the environment – and yet it’s very environmentally impactful.”

Branson isn’t a lockdown dissenter, but it’s hard to imagine someone less suited to house arrest. (There’s a nice, dry line in One Hundred Summers: “It takes a particular set of characteristics to work on your own, and I don’t possess any of them.”) She thinks the arts should return as quickly as possible, and she’ll be there as soon as they do.

“If you can go into Safeway or whatever, you must be able to go into a gallery soon… I have a hunch that once the figures have been extrapolated with this Covid thing, we’ll realise that if you’re relatively fit and under 60 years old, you can push on through it and get on. I’m really hopeful that your generation isn’t going to be kept down.

“Life should be playful,” she adds. “A friend of mine called me and said: ‘Look, Vanessa. When we’re very old and we’re sitting on a park bench together, we’re not going to look back and say: Thank goodness we behaved so well.’”

One Hundred Summers will be published by Mensch on May 21