Nik Powell obituary
Nik Powell, who has died aged 69 from cancer, made an incalculable impact across two separate art forms. In the 1970s he was the co-founder, along with Richard Branson, his friend and childhood neighbour, of Virgin Records, which grew into the world’s largest independent record label after one of its four debut releases in May 1973 – Mike Oldfield’s atmospheric instrumental album Tubular Bells – became a cultural phenomenon.
Four years later the company enjoyed a succès de scandale when it released Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols after that seminal punk outfit had been dropped by two other labels, EMI and A&M. Then, after leaving Virgin in the early 80s, Powell established, with the former cinema usher Stephen Woolley, a daredevil film company responsible for releasing many of that decade’s most groundbreaking and influential movies, before making its own once it moved into production.
As Palace Video, it put out cult and arthouse gems such as David Lynch’s Eraserhead (1977) and Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo (1982). As Palace Pictures, its distribution of titles including the gory comic horror The Evil Dead (1981), the stylish French thriller Diva (1982), the Coen brothers’ noir debut Blood
Simple (1984) and Wim Wenders’s elegiac masterpiece Paris, Texas (also 1984) placed it at the cutting-edge of cool.
Its eight-year lifespan as a production company was bookended by two original and intoxicating films by the Irish writer-director Neil Jordan – the Angela Carter adaptation The Company of Wolves (1984) and the thriller The Crying Game (1992), which lured audiences with the promise of a shocking twist, became a US smash and won Jordan an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.
Palace also funded Jordan’s other work in this period, including another striking award-winning thriller, Mona Lisa (1986). Even those films that failed to find critical favour were often eyecatching and headline-grabbing all the same, none more so than the splashy, big-budget period musical Absolute Beginners (also 1986).
Powell was born in Great Kingshill, Buckinghamshire, and raised near Guildford, Surrey, by his mother, a nurse, and his father, who was in the civil service. He was educated at Ampleforth college, North Yorkshire. From the age of 11, he and Branson embarked on a series of short-sighted business ventures, including a budgerigar breeding scheme that ended gruesomely: “They multiplied quicker than we could sell them,” said Branson, “and eventually many got eaten by rats before my mum released the rest.”
A rudimentary business plan to grow and sell fir trees in time for Christmas was mapped out on the back of an envelope but went awry when rabbits devoured the seedlings that the boys had planted in Branson’s parents’ garden. Branson dropped out of school to set up his own magazine, Student, launched in 1968 and aimed at readers his own age; Powell distributed it, though the pair fell out when Branson became convinced that his friend’s plan to transform it into a co-operative amounted to a coup.
A rapprochement came about when Branson persuaded Powell, who had just completed his first term at the University of Sussex, to abandon his studies and join him in a mail-order record company, promising him a 40% stake; it was to be named Slipped Disc until Tessa Watts, another staff member, happened to remark that they were all “virgins” at business. Virgin ran a smattering of record shops, including one in Notting Hill where customers were invited to hang out on bean bags (“Not surprisingly some people stayed all day and never got round to buying a thing,” observed the journalist Mick Brown) and another above a shoe shop on Oxford Street. The latter venue later expanded spectacularly to become its leading store.
For some years, the record label resembled what its press officer Al Clark called an “audio Arts Council”, subsidising marginal or experimental musicians with the help of the Tubular Bells fortune. As the company grew it branched out into other areas, building a recording studio and buying the Scala cinema in London, hiring Woolley to manage it. Powell left Virgin in 1982, the same year his first marriage, to Branson’s sister-in-law Merrill Tomassi, ended in divorce. He sold his Virgin shares to Branson for around £1m. Branson sold the company to EMI in 1992 for £640m.
Powell and Woolley ran Palace as a seat-of-the-pants operation with a loose, hip vibe (Powell’s office, for instance, had a sofa but no desk), and its mixture of stratospheric highs and
stomach-turning lows was later documented in Angus Finney’s 1996 book The Egos Have Landed: The Rise and Fall of Palace Pictures.
While Woolley brought his depth and breadth of film knowledge and his passion for cinema, Powell was portrayed in the book as a highly motivated, quick-witted figure with impeccable business acumen and a tight fist.
Angela Morrison, a lawyer who worked for him, recalls in the book giving her new business card to a colleague, only for Powell to object: “Don’t give him that. He already knows you. These things cost money!”
Palace remained at the vanguard of independent cinema for many years, releasing work by directors such as Mike Leigh and Peter Greenaway, and still enjoyed many distribution successes, notably the romantic comedy When Harry
Met Sally (1988). But the staggering popularity of The Crying Game came too late, and at the time of the company’s collapse in 1992 it was said to have amassed debts of around £30m.
Powell then set up Scala Productions, which enjoyed success with films including the Nick Hornby adaptation Fever Pitch (1997) and the Oscarnominated musical drama Little Voice (1998); he was also one of the producers on Dark Blood, which had to be abandoned midway through filming in 1993 when its star, River Phoenix, died of a drugs overdose. (The director, George Sluizer, later pieced together an incomplete version which had its premiere in 2012.)
Powell chaired the European Film Academy from 1996 to 2003, and was then appointed director of the National Film and Television School. He remained in the post for 15 years and was widely agreed to have instilled the place with a new dynamism, quieting in the process those critics who had questioned his lack of educational experience.
He is survived by his partner, Sarah Cellan Jones, and by Amie and Jack, his children from his second marriage, to the singer Sandie Shaw, which ended in divorce in 1995.
•Nik Powell, film producer and businessman, born 4 November 1950; died 7 November 2019