I first came across Mike Oldfield when I was at school and the new music teacher played us ‘Tubular Bells’ on her cassette recorder! Mr. Runswick the former music teacher had retired and with him some of my happiest memories of music. A truly great and inspiring man, he carried a proper tape recorder and played us all manner of interesting recorded music, ran the school orchestra and the choir and drove a bright red Volkswagen Beetle! The new girl (and she was a girl fresh from University I suspect) was a bit of a hippy and from then on we listened to much more modern music and that started with ‘Tubular Bells’.
The idea of multi track recording to a control freak is too delicious to imagine, the notion that you can control every aspect of the work and play all the instruments yourself if you want to is something that I found (and still find) massively appealing and I remember Mike Oldfield giving a demonstration of how he made his albums on ‘Blue Peter’ at the tail end of the 1970s which was fascinating.
What I love about this piece is that it is often on the Christmas albums and when my kids were young we used to grab the tambourines and maracas and shakers and so on, put this on nice and loud and all dance around the living room clapping and joining in with the song, after which we would play it again and again until we were all tired!
In the film that accompanies this song you can see Mike playing all the instruments and can see what a truly amazing musical talent he actually is….
Now listen to the song….
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