Mike Oldfield

The earliest musical activities of Michael Gordon Oldfield – a folk-rock guitarist born in Berkshire – involved his own family, first as a duo with his younger sister on the long playing record credited to Sallyangie (“Children Of The Sun”; Transatlantic, 1969), and then with his brother Terry, in a band called Barefeet. But Oldfield really cut his teeth in Kevin Ayers's band. There he began experimenting with instruments and early amateur overdubbing, until his ambitions took the shape of a genuine symphony of a wholly new kind. Rejected by almost everyone, the resulting work was taken on by Virgin boss Richard Branson, who managed to scrape together the funds needed to produce it, after gruelling recording sessions (at the legendary "The Manor" studio) and further harsh rejections from distributors.

“Tubular Bells”, the title it was finally given, is thus the debut album of a barely twenty-year-old Mike Oldfield: an extended piece in two parts drawing its lifeblood above all from an absolute mastery of the instruments (played almost entirely by Oldfield alone), of their respective tonal spectrums, and of the creative ways they interlock (as natural as they are artificial, but also virtuosic, lyrical and geometric). His idea of suite form – both an evolution of pure sound, in which the varied timbres represent little more than a metaphor, and a love for the pictorial detail of sonic inlay – was thus unprecedented.

This debut would above all be remembered as a new source of inspiration for Canterbury rock and, more broadly, for the art-rock and highbrow pages that followed (among others, “Heaven And Hell” by Vangelis, “Equinoxe” by Jarre, “Implosions” by Micus, right through to “Passion” by Peter Gabriel and even “Anima” by Vladislav Delay). Not to mention the broad sweep of its many influences, which shift with extraordinary fluidity from psychedelia to world music, from jazz-rock to hard-rock, from pure avant-garde improvisation to sheer sonic drapery, in a whole that would also be counted among the cornerstones of early new age music.

It could be said that the first part is generated entirely by a Glass-like figure of chattering keyboards, joined by superb bass and piano phrasing, in a dense tension of ever-richer, ever-deepening colour. The piano line then splits into a four-handed sonata with Bolivian wind instruments and sweeping epic guitars, which soften the mood into a Sorrento-style theme for mandolins, touched with joyful glockenspiel. The airy atmosphere leads into a change of tempo worthy of late-Romantic fantasy, where the inexhaustible creative impulse becomes fervent contemplation; the return to the original tempo adds Middle Eastern accents and new variations on the leitmotif, until the calm is shattered by guitar bursts like fanfares. A remarkable break launches an episode of Indian dance, which finally gives way to a new silence made of folk guitars (both murmuring and building to a crescendo), a distant organ, and diaphanous chimes.

The close is a masterclass in agogic crescendo in the manner of “Bolero” (and a summary of the whole piece), in which the instruments enter one by one, single file, to play an enchanted ten-bar motif and then counterpoint it in suspension (a more solemn and cultured version – and certainly less demented – of “The Intro And The Outro” with its Bonzo Dog), over a refined ribbon of fusion riffs, until the whole prodigious spectacle – culminating precisely in the tubular bells of the title – magically dissolves into a classical guitar arpeggio.

The second movement picks up harmoniously from this acoustic mood. Trails of ornamentation sway in esoteric overlap, tangling into an intricate thicket (which nonetheless keeps a thoroughly Bach-like rigour of modulations and counter-modulations) that after about five minutes settles into a rustic minuet for organ, before taking flight, carried by echo-laden mandolin and a female choir. Finally (after almost ten minutes) the wandering harmony spills out into a hieratic Renaissance theme marked by timpani and literally torn apart by a curtain of dissonance. Martial once more, the sarabande evolves into a progressive jam with animalistic grunts and metronomic piano, caught in between stentorian riffs and southern-style improvisation, heightening the suspense. It all crashes into a superhuman chorale of religious organ and celestial guitars, unfolding sinusoidally ad libitum (even revisiting elements from the attacca) until a clearing intoned by organ alone. The surprise grand finale (an impeccable quotation of a well-known cheerful theme), the crowning moment of these graceful feats, closes the perfect symphonic chain without a trace left over.

The British Oldfield, grappling with a heavyweight debut (instantly deemed legendary if only for its scant drum parts), fascinated by the mystical feel that pervades Riley's “Rainbow In Curved Air”, produced the most memorable example of music-as-compensation there is. It is the record with which instrumental rock definitively crosses the threshold into high art, through a recycling of levels in which the possibility of telling magical alteration apart from the written score is as relentless as it is lost from the outset. Guiding this remarkable interplay is nothing but a sense of harmony reduced to its bare essentials, barely absorbed by tireless filigrees, and therefore all the more fervent, cathartic, exploratory. The voice addressing the instruments at the end of the first part belongs to Vivian Stanshall, poet, storyteller and singer of the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band; the possessed grimaces and vocal outbursts of the second part are Oldfield's own, his practical answer to record-label demands for at least a shred of melodic singing to make the album a bit more commercial. In the closing section, the composer appropriated “Sailor's Hornpipe”, perhaps foreseeing – in reverse – the plundering of his opening theme (handed over to "The Exorcist" that same year), one of the greatest ever made. Unworthily followed by “Orchestral Tubular Bells” (1975), “Tubular Bells II” (1992), “Tubular Bells III” (1998), “The Millennium Bell” (1999), “Tubular Bells 2003” (2003) and “Tubular Beats” (2013), which only confirm the inferiority of everything he made afterwards.

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09/11/2008