Founded by a very young
Richard Branson in the early
70s as a mail-order retailer, they branched out into their own productions with
Mike Oldfield's
Tubular Bells and LPs by
Gong, et al - a
hippie smørgasbord of music. And then the
Sex Pistols. Virgin helped define
post-punk, post-hippie
cool, signing
XTC,
Magazine,
The Ruts, et al, and even had indie champs
Cabaret Voltaire for a while; they started the Front Line series, an attempt to repackage
Jamaican
reggae for
rock audiences.
But over the years they became just another giant purveyor of pop, and were bought by Thorn EMI in 1992.