1971 – Tom Newman at the Majestic console in Shipton Manor house (Photo credit: Simon Heyworth)
By Jason Barnard
There are few figures in British music whose fingerprints run so invisibly yet indelibly through music history as Tom Newman. You may know Tubular Bells as the record that launched Mike Oldfield and bankrolled a Virgin empire. But what’s less remembered is the fact that Richard Branson only had a studio because it was Tom Newman’s idea to build it. And the first person to see the potential in the Tubular Bells demo? Yes, that was Tom too.
Newman’s memoir, Fine Old Tales, captures a life that veers from psychedelia and DIY innovation to raucous misadventure and quiet obsession with sonic detail. Speaking with the same mixture of honesty and mischief that made his production style so human, he reflects not just on the making one of the most improbable blockbusters of the 1970s, but on the strange journey around it.
You’ve just published your autobiography, Fine Old Tales. The impact you’ve had is quite remarkable.
That’s very nice of you, thank you very much. It’s been a long time coming. I suppose I’ve made a little bit of difference.
Tell me about growing up, because you had a very interesting father.
My father was an amazing person. He was a precision engineer and in those days, before computerised machinery, he was a cam designer. A cam designer designed everything on automated machinery for years until computers. It was all controlled by shafts with cams that controlled the tools that did the work. I did an apprenticeship with my dad after I got thrown out of school. He was an amazing character.
By your teenage years, you were in Ealing, weren’t you?
Yeah. I got thrown out of school and ended up in Ealing. And I lived in a flat at 33B Blakesley Avenue, just up the road from Ealing Broadway, up the hill towards Pitshanger Lane. I lived there for quite a long time. Most of the things I ended up doing later on were born in ideas at 33B.
The music scene at Ealing in the late ’50s and early ’60s had had some fantastic stuff going on.
Oh, it did. I had a band called The Tomcats, and we did two gigs at Ealing Town Hall. One of the early members was Speedy Keen. He was a dummer in Thunderclap Newman who had that big hit, ‘Something in the Air.’ I still look back at that time with a lot of nostalgia. My first great romance happened there. The first love of my life was there and she died of an ectopic pregnancy, sadly. It was a very complicated time. But the turning point, what turned me into whatever I became, it all happened in Ealing. It was an amazing place to have one’s formative years.
The Tomcats went over to Spain, and for a short period had success.
Yeah, our guitar player Tony Duhig, he’d been to Spain before, so he had a contact in Madrid. We had to raise the money to go, so we did a gig at Ealing Town Hall to raise the funds to get there and back. But bizarrely, our drummer, Speedy Keen for some unknowable logic we gave him the money to go to Spain, the carer of the funds. And he went out and spunked it up the wall, because he was an ardent drinker and lunatic. He was not unlike Keith Moon. So we ended up having to do another departure gig at Ealing Town Hall two or three months later. That took us off to Spain around 1966. Things progressed from there but I enjoyed it enormously. We weren’t organised, we were a bad bunch of wallys, really. But we were good on stage, we knew how to get the audience going, but we were useless at management or focus.
You evolved into July.
We split up as The Tomcats. The idea for July came when the music started focusing toward psychedelia. Our major songwriter was our guitar player Pete Cook, who was the main guitar player in The Tomcats. But a strange thing happened where Tony Duhig, the guitarist and Jon Field, the percussionist, formed an impenetrable bond that wrote Pete out of the songwriting. But eventually when July had formed, it became obvious all the best songs were coming from Pete. He became a kind of silent partner of July. Although not credited at the time he wrote most of the best songs. Me and Pete were the key writers. It was a very odd time for musicians. We were all stupid in the ’60s.
Your record label, Major Minor, went bankrupt right after releasing the July album.
Phil Solomon was the proprietor of Major Minor with his sister Dorothy Solomon. They took us up but Phil was really more interested in horse racing. He had racing horses. He wasn’t interested in the music business at all. He was only in it to fund his horse racing ambitions. That all fell apart and he went bankrupt. We put the July album out and the label collapsed soon after. But we managed to survive it all. We were a very good live band, that was the main thing.
You played the Royal Albert Hall, didn’t you?
We did. That was the first time an electric sitar had been used in a rock band situation. I bought a cheap Indian sitar. The deep strings on a sitar are bronze, and bronze won’t react with a guitar’s magnetic pickup because it is not steel. So I got a string-making company to study the bronze strings and they developed strings that were steel, so they would work with a magnetic pickup. So the Royal Albert Hall was the first gig anyone had played a sitar electromagnetically amplified, because before that you had to mic up a sitar. In a rock band situation an amplified sitar worked much better. I wasn’t very good at playing with it, I was just riffing. But we broke a few barriers there, and things happened afterwards that were kind of important to psychedelic bands.
How did you meet Richard Branson for the first time?
I had a girlfriend called Jacqui Byford, and I was living with her in a flat in Cleveland Square. I’d brought in two old military ferrograph tape recorders and I was bouncing from one to the other, trying to experiment with the sitar and all sorts of stuff. She was completely pissed off with me, it was upsetting her entire lifestyle. So she introduced me to Richard mainly to get me out of her flat. It wasn’t a lifetime romance, it was a youthful thing. Through that introduction it started the whole Manor thing. I moved out of her flat immediately, to her great relief and it all went from there.
Because you had an idea to build a recording studio and wanted Richard to fund it, is that right?
Yes, Jacqui introduced me to Richard, he had a magazine called the Student Magazine, and Jacqui was part of the team who went out selling it on the streets. I recognised instantly he was a true entrepreneur. I thought, “This guy can’t fail, he’s bound to be big.” So it occurred to me that if I could get him involved in building a studio, it would benefit me. And he was very susceptible to that idea. That’s how The Manor came about, really.
And you were involved in building the first studio.
Yes. Richard bought The Manor with a loan from his auntie Joyce. It was £30,000 for 20 acres of land, a 20-bedroom house and a swimming pool. Ridiculous, really, the value, it’d be worth several million quid today. Once Richard got it, I moved in. Fortunately it had a great big squash court building outside the house, a perfect situation for a studio. So that’s where we built The Manor studios, and it all started from there.
Because you first worked with the Bonzo Dog Band, didn’t you?
Yes, they were the first official band. John Cale came and Robert Palmer came while we were still building it. We did some sessions with them, but they never got signed to Virgin because the record company hadn’t developed at that time. The record label didn’t really begin until I found Mike Oldfield and we started Tubular Bells. That was the first time Richard was convinced he could build a label and start something big from Michael.
Was it right that Mike arrived at The Manor as part of a different group? Was he doing session work?
Yes, he was just trying to make a living doing jobbing guitar playing. He was playing with the Arthur Louis Band. I never actually met Arthur, but Michael was playing with him. It wasn’t even in the proper studio, I’d set up some equipment in the library of The Manor and we were working there. Michael came up one day and gave me this tiny three-inch reel of demos he’d done. He wanted me to listen to it and he pestered me constantly. Every day he would come up and say: “Have you listened yet? You’ve got to listen to this because it’s good.” Eventually I did listen to it. In fact, I’ve just discovered the original tape recorder I listened to it on. It’s upstairs now, and I’m cleaning it up and making it work. I was so impressed with his demos that I went to Richard and said, “I really think this is worth looking at.” Richard didn’t really take much notice, but his cousin Simon Draper had just joined the organisation. He was a South African with gigantic musical knowledge and experience. He recognised the potential in Michael, and he encouraged Richard to let me produce Tubular Bells. That’s where it came from really.
How close were those demos in sound to what you eventually produced with Michael?
Honestly, I can’t remember the demos now. Apparently they’re available on YouTube, but I haven’t heard them. All I knew was that I was so impressed with Michael’s guitar technique and his ability to just produce melody and bits of stuff that they reached into my soul. I was very impressed. I can’t remember the demos but I knew that he was something special. So I was totally behind the whole production once Richard said, “Give him some time, but don’t let him get in the way of earning money.” Richard saw The Manor as a money-making scheme, and he didn’t want to risk me wasting time and money on something that might not happen. But luckily Simon Draper saw Mike’s potential almost immediately. So we started, and it soon became obvious it was something special. So that’s how it evolved.
On the one hand, the music wasn’t commercial in a traditional song structures, but you could tell there was something special I assume?
Exactly. That was the risk factor that Richard was worried about. Luckily Simon Draper had far more musical experience than Richard. At that time when we offered up Richard the idea, his favourite tunes were the ‘Theme from Borsalino’ and ‘Bachelor Boy’ by Cliff Richard. That was the entire extent of Richard’s musical understanding. We were a bit worried about that but luckily Simon backed us up 100% so we could override Richard’s inability. It was funny, when we were doing Tubular Bells, Michael and I developed this idea that anyone who didn’t like it was “cloth-eared nincompoops.” So it applied to anyone who didn’t get it. Richard was definitely a cloth-eared nincompoop, but Simon wasn’t! Nobody working at The Manor imagined it would do what it did. I can’t take Richard out of that loop because once he recognised that there was something there. His recognition of it was mainly 70/80% due to Simon Draper’s conviction. Richard grabbed the idea and went for it. He took it to MIDEM and everywhere. He didn’t understand it but because others were convinced he took on the whole idea and went for it.
And you recorded when other bands weren’t booked in, during the off time.
It was very early days, we’d just taken delivery of an Ampex 16-track so it was all done on 16 track. The first band in was the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band. I was recording Legs Larry Smith and the whole of that crew, it was great fun. It was very useful because we only had Michael in the down moments when the Bonzo Dog Band went off to asleep for 24 hours, we’d do Michael’s stuff. But the contrast between the Bonzo Dog Band and Tubular Bells, was a bizarrely interesting dichotomy muscially. It relieved me from the concentration on Michael’s things as I had to concentrate deeply to get all that stuff right. Tubular Bells was a very difficult album to produce because there was engineering as well. It was complex, musically it was like a piece of classical music. So having the contrast of the Bonzo Dog lunacy was a great relief and very helpful for my psyche, to keep me sane. [laughs]
The caveman section is quite a different part.
That happened because the management, Richard and Simon, were worried there were no words, nothing apparently commercial. The caveman bit was the idea of Michael kind of coming out of his world and applying something creatively to the rock world. It was a rock piece that we stuck in. Having put the whole backing track in. I took Michael down to the Jolly Boatman pub down the canal from The Manor and got him drunk one night and bought a bottle of whisky on the way back. He went in and did the whole caveman thing by himself. I set everything up for him all he had to do was press the record button and go for it. He had some pornographic magazines, well not really pornographic, tits-and-bum magazines that he looked at while he was shouting and screaming while doing the caveman bit. I don’t think anyone really knows that, so I’m not sure whether I should have told you! [laughs]
And Michael’s guitar sound, did you help shape that?
Oh yeah. We tried all sorts of stuff. There’s a little amplifier I’m selling in America right now that was the best amp he could have played through. But for some reason he didn’t like it because it was too small. He had a thing about everything needing to be bigger than it should be. So we DI’d the guitars into the mixer by fiddling the midrange. That made him happy so we used that for everything. He’s kept the same sound and has now got it computerised. He can plug in anywhere and get the exact same sound.
Given that Tubular Bells was almost classical in construction, how was it working with tape? That must have made things harder to work with.
No, we had Dolby. It was two-inch tape and a set of sixteen Dolbys, which nobody uses now because it’s all gone digital. The Dolbys were beneficial on the quiet part, particularly on Side Two. It was very different to the end of Side One. It’s a lyrical and gentle piece, the opening section of Side Two. It was important to have the most dynamic range we could get. But the Dolbys worked fine for that. One of the biggest problems we had from it was the mastering and cutting of it. EMI who were the only mastering and cutting company that Richard had a deal with. They refused flatly to cut anything they considered as rock to cut it on virgin 80-gram vinyl with classical protocols. The first test pressings they did make were terrible, noisy, unusable, especially Side Two. Richard eventually got heavy with EMI and got them to cut it on virgin vinyl, that sorted it.
And the mixing process, was it all hands on the desk?
Oh God, yes, it was a complete nightmare. There were four or five ladies who looked after us at The Manor back then, and a couple of guys who looked after the cars, and someone else who looked after plumbing and electricity and stuff. We had everyone in the studio for the mixes. I devised a great long track sheet by sticking a load of A4s together and drawing a great long line down the middle so we could do the whole of one side in one go. The track sheet was marked out where things had to change in a radical way. Everyone was up behind the mixer. I’d say, “Right, Penny!”, and Penny would turn up the echo on something at a certain point. It was fairly well organised and exciting because nobody really knew what they were doing, except they were told to turn a particular knob on the mixer when I told them to. It all worked out. We must have done 30 or 40 different mixes, and then I edited it all together.
Were you surprised when it became as successful as it did?
Oh God, absolutely. [laughs] We had no idea that it was going to work. But that’s all down to Richard really. He’d made all this commitment to expenditure, time, energy letting me build The Manor in the first place. I’m sure there were times he doubted whether he’d made the right decision. But once we’d come up with the product, Richard wouldn’t let go then. He was a very determined and lucky chap. He took it everywhere and to everybody. That’s what made it work. I just provided the product but Richard made it work.
And did Mike feel pressure to go straight in and make Hergest Ridge so soon afterwards?
Yes, Michael didn’t want to do it. Having suddenly made a lot of money, he bought himself a Mercedes sports car. He was very happy being a wealthy chap, he bought himself a house, a lion and all sorts of things. But Richard, being a business head, knew a follow-up was important to him and the rest of the Virgin Records people. So Hergest Ridge was done with a certain amount of external pressure applied. He didn’t feel ready to do another album that quickly. But luckily, as history has seen, there’s a lot of people today who think Hergest Ridge is the best other album that he did. It was really strange. Michael was resentful of being forced to make another album when he wasn’t ready. But it was a very good move on Richard’s part because if Michael hadn’t been under pressure, he’d have gone, who knows where? That kind of pressure, early to make a follow-up, was exactly what was needed. A lot of people think Hergest Ridge is better than Tubular Bells. In some ways I think that is true.
After Hergest Ridge came Ommadawn, which is my favourite. What’s your view of that album?
Well, sadly. I’m not a great Ommadawn fan. I’m sure it worked for Michael, but I’m not sure it was the best thing he could have done. Hergest Ridge is my favourite album. I like Amarok very much, a completely different thing and for different reasons. For Amarok was Michael hating Virgin and Richard and everyone else. It was when he was wanting to go away from Virgin. I kind of enjoyed that, for maybe nefarious reasons. Everyone has got their favourite, I suppose.
What about ‘Five Miles Out,’ because the title track and single is great.
I agree, I think that’s the best single he’s done. It’s wonderful. He’d just learned to fly and it was based on a traumatic experience on one of his first flights. It just works for me. Michael and I had rows over the fade, that’s the only time we almost came to blows. He wanted it to fade earlier than it ended up. I wanted to keep this quick aeroplane swooping sound right before the very end and Michael didn’t like it. We cut it at The Townhouse studios in Shepherd’s Bush. After we cut it, I didn’t know until afterwards that Michael sneaked in and did another cut and changed the fade to the way he wanted. But I think the one that cut on the record was my fade. It’s a producer versus artist, little quibble that often happens.
Was Tubular Bells II the last project you worked on with Mike where you were producing?
I suppose it must have been, yes.
Was that where Trevor Horn had come on the scene?
Of course, yes. I like Trevor very much, he is an interesting guy. I always remember his wife Jill picked him up when he was a drunken bass player and she straightened him out. It was only after that he made a success of himself. We got on alright with him, but he was committed to very early sequencing. This was before computers where everything is sequenced now. In those days, there was a simple program available that would sequence. I was dead against it because the one thing I liked about the quality of Tubular Bells I was that, although Michael could not keep time for very long playing the riffs; he would get bored and the guitar wouldn’t stay in time for very long, even on piano his concentration would vary, so the tempo would vary. I liked that the tempo varied, it was only marginal, but to me as a musician it added reality. Sequencing would have lost that. So I was very insistent that on Tubular Bells II we did not use sequenced, repetitive riffs that were locked on to computer timing. We did not argue because we were too grown up for that. As a co-producer my problem was that I wanted Michael to play everything by hand to a click track. We used a metronome on Tubular Bells I, and I did not mind that because he could never play perfectly locked to it because he was not that kind of guitar player. His character always came through so he was always varying his response to the metronome. On Tubular Bells II I felt he should apply the same rules. He kind of did, but it was not the same. Anyway, it does not matter now.
Did you bring any of the learning you brought from Michael into your own albums like Faerie Symphony or The Secret Life of Angels?
Inevitably, yes. I did not use any sequencing on either of those. I tried to play everything by hand and damn the consequences. The concepts in my brain were about the poetry I was trying to express with The Secret Life of Angels and Faerie Symphony. It was so different from Michael’s work that I was not looking to do anything the same way. I avoided anything that could make people accuse me of copying or referring to Michael. But it was not a problem anyway. The Secret Life of Angels and Faerie Symphony were fantasies in my head, melodic and poetic rather than musical. I am not that good a guitar player. I would never have done anything to compete with Michael’s virtuosity. He is the master. I just am a bodger.
In more recent years you have worked with Rob Reed.
Rob is wonderful. Working with him is heavenly on one level because he is such a good self-producer. I only ever offered radical changes. Rob and I have a relationship where, if I want him to be more inventive, I say stop being so BBC. He falls into a category of musician who is so good at everything he does that it can sit on the edge of being boring unless it’s kicked up the arse. I use the word BBC as a jibe because I want him to think outside the box rather than inside it. He understands that. I get on very well with him. He is brilliant and I like him very much.
At the start we talked about the impact that comes through in Fine Old Tales, and there is that quote from Richard Branson that “without Tom Newman, Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells may never have been recorded, and without Tubular Bells it is quite conceivable that the Virgin Group may never have got off the ground.”
[laughs] It is very kind of Richard to say it. Richard is such a winner and an entrepreneur that, even if he had not got off the ground with records, he would have found another way. Richard was going to be a multi-millionaire as that’s the stuff he is made from. He is built like that, he could not fail. You could give him a car or a bicycle to sell and he would still end up with a gigantic organisation. That is how he is made, that’s Richard’s psyche.
I have really enjoyed Fine Old Tales, and it is fantastic to talk to you again, Tom. As before, it has been brilliant.
You too, Jason. Thanks very much. It’s lovely to speak to you, you’re always welcome.
Further information
Tom Newman Autobiography: Fine Old Tales
July – Magical Days interview – Part 1
July – Tom Newman and Peter Cook podcast
With thanks to Tom Newman, Chris Dewey and Philip Newell for their help. Interview undertaken on 17 October 2025.
