Tessa Watts: Virgin Records linchpin who worked on some of the most memorable pop videos of the Eighties and Nineties

Central player in the music-promo revolution: Watts, centre, with Boy George, right

As head of press and then director of production of its music-video department, Tessa Watts played a crucial role in the development of Virgin Records from its emergence as an underground label in the mid-Seventies to its position as the UK's leading independent company in the mid-Eighties.

Much of this was achieved thanks to the hundreds of pop promos Watts commissioned and executive-produced for acts like the Human League, Culture Club and, most famously, Peter Gabriel, whose award-winnning video for "Sledgehammer", directed by Stephen R Johnson in 1986 and containing segments by future Wallace and Gromit creator Nick Park, became the most-played in the history of MTV. Watts was recruited by the music television channel as head of programming for the launch of its European operation in 1987. She subsequently specialised in the production of long-form concert films and documentaries by Mike + the Mechanics, Phil Collins, Iron Maiden, Beyoncé, Morrissey and Take That until her retirement in 2008.

Born Stephanie Siddons in 1945, she was the daughter of a Bedfordshire garage owner and became known as Tessa in her childhood. Convent-educated, she moved to London in the late Sixties and had a succession of jobs in the emerging counter-culture, including for listings magazine Time Out, for promoter Harvey Goldsmith, and then as press officer for Transatlantic Records, Nat Joseph's pioneering label.

Having become the partner of Melody Maker journalist Michael Watts, she followed him to New York when he was posted there in 1972. When they returned to the UK in 1974, she joined Radio Luxembourg's London office before moving on to Virgin, whose name she is said to have suggested to Richard Branson as more suitable than Slipped Disc when he started his mail-order company in 1970. She helped Branson and his music-mad, South African cousin Simon Draper promote Mike Oldfield, Gong and Robert Wyatt, and thrived as Virgin moved away from its hippie roots and signed punk shockers the Sex Pistols along with Penetration and Magazine in 1977. The Virgin office at Vernon Yard, just off the Portobello Road, became the place to be, as the company added Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, Japan and Simple Minds to its roster.

Watts teamed up with the Australian director Russell Mulcahy and XTC for the loony psychological tests of "Making Plans for Nigel" in 1979; Irishman Steve Barron for the film-within-a-film-clip for the Human League's "Don't You Want Me'' in 1981; and Brit Peter Sinclair for the Mississippi riverboat setting – Weybridge, actually – of Culture Club's "Karma Chameleon" in 1983. In the Nineties, she worked with Michael Bay and David Fincher on big-budget videos for Michael Jackson, Madonna and George Michael. She died of pancreatic cancer at her home in south-west France.

Pierre Perrone

Stephanie 'Tessa' Siddons, music video producer: born Bedfordshire 25 October 1945; married 1977 Michael Watts (marriage dissolved 2008, one daughter, one son); died near Pau/Biarritz, France 13 May 2014.