Mike Oldfield - Tubular Bells

The theme for The Exorcist is one of the most recognizable movie themes in American history. But it's not as well known that the theme was from an early album of prog rocker Mike Oldfield. Oldfield came out with Tubular Bells in 1973; it was used in The Exorcist in the same year. So the first few minutes of this album, at least, are already familiar. The rest of it, perhaps not so much. Tubular Bells is nearly ubiquitous at used record stores, so I decided to give it a try.

What a treat! At first, the unusual time signatures and general repetitiveness of the music reminded me of Steve Reich and other classical acts. With time, though, the way various instruments are introduced, the way things culminate, peak, decay, soar, and disappear reminds me more of prog rockers like Soft Machine. It's rock, it's kinda jazzy, it's well-composed. Tubular Bells is only two tracks; each spans the entire side of a record, much like Soft Machine's Third album. So it's not surprising to see that Oldfield has some connection to Kevin Ayers. (The surprising bit is that he was 16 [16!] when he went on the road as part of Ayers' touring band.)

There are about 50 different instruments that come into the mix here, and Oldfield is playing the vast majority of them. It seems in the early 70s there was this trend of a self-made album, like Paul McCartney's McCartney, Stevie Wonder's Music of My Mind, Roy Wood's Boulders, and Todd Rundgren's A Wizard, A True Star. There's a level of ambition and talent in those albums that seems absolutely inconceivable today.

Really, the more I dig into this album the more amazing it seems. For instance:

Tubular Bells, originally dubbed Opus 1, grew out of studio time gifted by Richard Branson, who at the time was running a mail-order record retail service. After its completion, Oldfield shopped the record to a series of labels, only to meet with rejection; frustrated, Branson decided to found his own label, and in 1973 Tubular Bells became the inaugural release of Virgin Records.

Yowza.