Intuitive Music

Mike Oldfield

Born in 1953 in Reading, U.K., Mike Oldfield is one of the most original and innovative musicians and composers from the 20th Century who has crossed the boundaries between different music styles in a very personal way.

Mike Oldfield learned to play guitar as a boy and at the age of 14 he formed a folk band along with his sister, the singer Sally Oldfield. He later played bass for the rock guitarist Kevin Ayers. In 1971, while recording for Ayers at Abbey Road studios in London, he found a store room with tons of instruments and he starting recording a long scale instrumental piece of music. For the recording he used a home tape recorder after discovering that by blocking the erase head he could record many takes. Two years later, owner of Virgin label Richard Branson decided to record and release his work “Tubular Bells”. 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 comedian Vivian Stanshall (vocals). “Tubular Bells” turned out to be one of the most innovative and popular albums in the history of modern music, as well as the first edition on the famous Virgin label. “Tubular Bells” has been often pointed as the first ambient album in the history of pop music. The album surprisingly reached the #1 on the UK album chart , 15 months after it’s release and sold over 10 million copies world wide. “Tubular Bells” was later used for the soundtrack of William Friedkin’s classic horror film “The Exorcist” (1973).

Since 1973, Oldfield started recording a series of instrumental albums fusioning rock with English and Celtic folk roots, pre-ambient music, progressive music, and loads of sound and electronic experimentation. In 1974, Oldfield released “Hergest Ridge” which was again one of the most innovative instrumental albums from the 70’s. The album was produced and engineered by Oldfield and he also played most of the instruments himself, including electric guitars, glockenspiel, sleigh bells, mandolin, nutcracker, timpani, gong, acoustic guitar, Spanish guitar, Farfisa organ, and the Lowrey & Gemini organs. Guest musicians included June Whiting (oboe), Lindsey Cooper (oboe), Ted Hobart (trumpet), Chili Charles (drums), Clodagh Simmonds (vocals), and Sally Oldfield (vocals). The choir & strings were conducted by David Bedford. “Hergest Ridge” was one of the most experimental rock albums from the 70’s, which featured big doses of sound experimentation influenced by musique concrete, like Mike Oldfield climbing on the lid of the piano to get the kind of echo/reverb effect from the resonance of the piano strings.

Both “Tubular Bells” and “Hergest Ridge” were premiered with a Symphony Orchestra at the Royal Albert Hall in London in 1974 and guitarist Steve Hillage (Gong, System 7) replaced Oldfield on guitar due to ‘illness’ (it was later known that Mike Oldfield suffered from stage fright). Other forthcoming concerts in Scotland and North of England featured Steve Hillage, Mike Oldfield, and Andy Summers (later of The Police).

Mike Oldfield

With Oldfield built his home studio in Herfordshire, where he recorded the two following instrumental albums “Ommadawn” (1975), a pioneering work of world music, and “Incantations” (1978), featuring a strong orientation to vocal choirs and sampling with the vocal collaboration of his sister Sally, Maddy Prior of Steeleye Span, and the Queen’s College Girls Choir.

In 1978, Mike Oldfield started a self-assertiveness therapy course known as Exegesis to fight his stage-fright. As a result a year later he started an European tour to promote “Incantations” featuring an orchestra and a female choir. The following three instrumental albums, “Platinum” (1979), “Airborn” (1980), and “QE2″ (1980) saw his sound more oriented to new electronic technologies and short length tracks.

In 1982, Mike Olfield gave a switch to his career with a trilogy of albums that had the same extructure: an instrumental piece in one side and pop oriented songs in the other. The first of these albums, “Five Miles Out” (1982), featured the collaboration of a wonderful team of musicians, including Maggie Reilly (vocals), Carl Palmer of Emerson Lake and Palmer (percussion), Tim Cross (keyboards), Rick Fenn (acoustic & electric guitars), Morris Pert (percussion, keyboards), Graham Broad (drums), Mike Frye (percussion), and Paddy Maloney from The Chieftains (Uilean pipes).

“Crisis” (1983) provided a hit in the charts with the folk oriented song “Moonlight Shadow”. The album featured a wonderful selection of guests, including Maggie Reilly (vocals), Jon Anderson of Yes (vocals), Roger Chapman of Family (vocals), Rick Fenn (guitar), Pierre Moerlen of Gong (vibraphone), Anthony Phillips of Genesis (guitars), Simon Phillips (drums, percussion), and Phil Spalding (bass). For this album, Oldfield was one of the first musicians to work with the pioneering sampler synthesizer, the Fairlight.

“Discovery” (1984) completed the trilogy with another commercially successful work repeating the same schema than “Crises”, this time featuring also Barry Palmer from Triumvirat on vocals. After “Discovery” there was a three year hiatus until the release of “Islands” (1987), after producing the music for Roland Joff’s film “Killing Fields”.

The late 80’s marked the start of a bitter period of friction and legal fighting between Mike Oldfield and Richard Branson’s Virgin Records, who tried to stop the artist to release any further instrumental album under the title of “Tubular Bells”. As a consequence of this dispute was born one of the most absurd albums ever released in the history of pop music. “Amarok” featured an incoherent work where constant changes avoided the label to extract a possible single from it. The album even featured a hidden Morse code with insults to Richard Branson. His following album “Heaven’s Open” featured Olfield on vocals for the very first time and it was produced in a rush to fulfill the end to the contract between the artists and Virgin records.

After Mike Oldfield’s departure from Virgin records the artist signed to Warner records to produced some new age and ambient oriented works, including several sequels of the original “Tubular Bells” albums. He later signed a new record deal with Universal records in 2005.