Martin Mills

Mills grew up near Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire and comes from an "upper-middle-class English family". His father worked as a civil servant and his mother was a teacher and headmistress. Mills attended Magdalen College School and Oriel College, Oxford University, where he studied Philosophy, politics and economics, graduating in 1970.

After graduating from university, Mills worked for the Office of Population Censuses and Surveys, writing reports on abortion law reformation and processing abortion statistics; however, the experience left him wanting "to do something completely different". After leaving, he found a job at the Record and Tape Exchange, a secondhand record shop in Shepherd's Bush, where Mills realised his future was in the music industry. Eventually, Mills opened a record shop of his own, based on the idea of creating a "new kind of record shop which sold new and second hand records side by side", and began promoting concerts.