Mike Oldfield
The folk club child prodigy turned international long-form phenomenon. By Mike Barnes.
FROM AN EARLY age, Mike Oldfield was a prodigiously talented musician who practised obsessively. He first played folk clubs aged 12 as a solo guitarist and then in The Sallyangie, a duo with his vocalist elder sister Sally, who released one album, Children Of The Sun, in 1969. As well as writing songs, he was already experimenting with lengthy instrumentals on steel-stringed acoustic guitar.
Aged 16, Oldfield joined Kevin Ayers’ group The Whole World, playing bass and guitar with them from 1970-72. He borrowed Ayers’ 2-track reel-to-reel tape recorder and a Farfisa organ from the band’s keyboard player David Bedford, and began working on the opening section of what became his debut solo album, a 49-minute, mainly instrumental suite he eventually titled Tubular Bells. Oldfield played virtually all the instruments himself, which was highly unusual at the time (although not unprecedented; Stevie Wonder had been similarly ambitious on his 1972 album Music Of My Mind). Tubular
Bells was the joint first release on the Virgin label in May 1973, shortly after Oldfield’s 20th birthday.
Initially a sleeper, it charted the following year, spent 287 weeks in the UK Top 75 and went on to become an international phenomenon. Oldfield
recorded a series of LPs of long-form
compositions – Hergest Ridge,
Ommadawn and Incantations – but on 1979’s Platinum he revisited songwriting. Hall & Oates took his song Family Man to Number 15 in the UK singles chart in 1983, and
Oldfield’s own single, Moonlight
Shadow, reached Number 4 that year. He recorded a film soundtrack, The Killing Fields, in 1984, pushed himself further out with the hour-long Amarok in 1990, and his later output has encompassed the orchestral
Music Of The Spheres in 2008 and the rockier Man On The Rocks in 2014. His most recent studio LP, Return To
Ommadawn, was released in 2017. Historically, Oldfield is a man for the big occasion. He performed his Royal Wedding Anthem as part of the festivities that preceded the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer in 1981 and was invited to play the Berlin Millennium Concert on New Year’s Eve 1999.
But Tubular Bells still casts a long shadow. Oldfield re-recorded it in 2003, re-mixed it in 2009, and explored its musical avenues further on Tubular Bells II and III. There have also been two orchestral versions of the piece and Oldfield arranged sections for the Opening Ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics, directed by Danny Boyle. Few would disagree with his assertion that this validated an “album that stands the test of time”.
“Historically, Oldfield is a man for the big occasion.”