30th Anniversary of Mike Oldfield’s “Tubular Bells”
May 27th, 2003 by Koldo Barroso
30 years ago today, on May 27th 1973, Mike Oldfield’s debut album “Tubular Bells” was released on Virgin Records, which is considered one of the most innovative instrumental albums in the history of modern music.
In 1971, while recording a guitar session for Kevin Ayers at Abbey Road studios in London, Mike Oldfield found a store room with tons of instruments. He started recording tracks, using a one tape recorder after discovering that by blocking the erase head he could record many takes. The result was a two tracks album considered as one of the first works of instrumental Ambient music in the history of Rock music, where Oidfield fusioned different styles like Rock, Classical music, and Folk.
Mike Oldfield tried to get his work released by different record companies. Two years after the original recording Richard Branson decided to release his work “Tubular Bells”, which turned out to be the very first edition on the famous Virgin label. The original album was recorded in a week at The Manor studios in Oxfordshire (UK) and Oldfield ended up recording more than 20 different instruments and over 2000 tape overdubs were made. Guest artists were Jon Field (flute), Steve Broughton (drums), Mundy Ellis (vocals), and Vivian Stanshall (vocals). The album was produced by Mike Oldfield with the assistance of Tom Newman and Simon Heyworth.
In 1974 “Tubular Bells” reached the #1 on the UK album chart, 15 months after it’s release, and selling over 10 million copies world wide after it was used for the BSO of William Friedkin’s film “The Exorcist” (1973).
In 1992 Mike Oldfield released the first of a series of sequels to “Tubular Bells”, the latest one being “Tubular Bells 2003″ to celebrate the 30th Anniversary of the album.