In the s, Oldfield became obsessed with pop music, themes of which were clearly visible in the next few albums and singles. Oldfield also became interested in song writing and composing tracks for film, one of these included The Killing Fields. In the early s, he released the sequel to his hit album, Tubular Bells.
This was followed by a string of albums, all exploring very different sides of music. Oldfield defined his intrigue of merging and exploring different themes of music in his album Guitars, where he used guitars as the sole instrument to produce all sounds of the other instruments commonly used in production. I have worked with Robin A Smith for almost 30 years, since we presented Tubular Bells together at Edinburgh Castle, through lots of different performances and recordings culminating in the London Olympics in When I started thinking about reinventing Tubular Bells for live performance with dancers and acrobats—and of course live music, it was Robin who I knew could realise this vision.
In addition to his own recordings, Oldfield is a prolific session player and arranger. Tubular Bells , originally dubbed Opus 1, grew out of studio time gifted him 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 , Tubular Bells became the inaugural release of Virgin Records.
An atmospheric, intricate composition that fused rock and folk motifs with the structures of minimalist composition, the minute instrumental piece performed on close to 30 different instruments, virtually all of them played by Oldfield himself spent months in the number one spot on the U. In addition to almost single-handedly establishing Virgin as one of the most important labels in the record industry, Tubular Bells also created a market for what would later be dubbed new age music, and won a Grammy for Best Instrumental Composition in The follow-up, 's Hergest Ridge named after Oldfield 's retreat in a remote area of Herefordshire also proved phenomenally successful, and dislodged Tubular Bells at the top of the British chart.
With 's Ommadawn , he explored ambient textures and world music; however, the emergence of punk left Oldfield baffled, and he retreated from sight for three years following the LP's release.
He resurfaced with 's Incantations. Platinum , issued a year later, kept its eye on the clubs, and featured a dance version of the Philip Glass composition "North Star. The Songs of Distant Earth appeared two years later, followed by a third Tubular Bells update in In , Oldfield re-recorded Tubular Bells in celebration of its 30th anniversary, with John Cleese as master of ceremonies replacing the late Vivian Stanshall ; the album was issued as a two-disc set including a video disc.
I had been a school kid trying to get out of school. I had only played at little folk clubs and colleges. Suddenly, there was this tall guy with tremendous charisma who had just come off a tour with Jimi Hendrix.
I was awestruck by Kevin and his attitude to life. It was a relaxed, Mediterranean attitude. He liked to enjoy life, take it easy and not take things too seriously.
Unfortunately, his attitude was not suited to being tremendously successful in the music business, in which you do need a lot of drive, savvy and street smarts.
Kevin was a lovely character, though. He was very kind and took me under his wing a little bit—not musically, but in terms of an attitude to life. Another musical partner of yours, Pekka Pohjola, departed a few years ago. What are some of your memories of your time together? To be honest, all I can remember is our first meeting. I was at the Manor Studio and he brought me a bottle of vodka and this strange black bread from Finland. He was a very large man—very Nordic.
He played the bass amazingly well. He was a very aloof kind of person. He performed on the first tour I did, the one with 80 people. We did do a little bit of recording together. There are some nice tracks of his out there that I played on. Clearly, you felt there was something of value in the format. There are vibrations in the air that have a tremendous effect on you in a very non-verbal way. What I will say is I have a lot of trouble writing lyrics.
I used to cheat a lot, using a thesaurus and rhyming dictionary. I bumped into Tim Rice many years ago and asked him if he did those things. I think we all use those props. I underestimated his drumming abilities. I used to be the bass player to his drums for about a year and he was amazing. And of course, there was Simon Phillips, the human octopus on the drum kit.
Not really. I decided to work with David Hentschel and made QE2. For 20 years, that was my life. It was album, tour, album, tour. I worked with hundreds of musicians and did God knows how much traveling. I probably traveled all the way around Europe times. At the end, I felt like I lived at Frankfurt Airport, because it was the big hub to get anywhere in Europe. I remember visiting Copenhagen endlessly too.
Describe your initial interest in mixing world cultures. It began when I was in a record store somewhere in England. They used to have record stores, you know. Long before that, in Reading, a little town I grew up in, there was a record store that had a record library section.
They let you take out LPs, as we used to call them, and in the section were a couple of African music albums. I have no idea what they were, but they had people playing these obscure instruments made out of huge vegetable things with strings stuck on them. I was fascinated by the recordings, especially the tribal vocals. I loved the sound of the tribal drumming too.
I want to use that on my track. I just liked the sounds. On the original demos of Tubular Bells, I used a set of toy bells for babies. It was something that made a nice sound. I even used a Hoover vacuum cleaner on one track because I liked the sound I heard when I turned it on. Essentially, it was intended to be the sequel to Ommadawn, right?
Kind of, yeah. When I started it off, I had to begin somewhere. Tubular Bells II? But by then, my relationship with Virgin had sunk pretty low. I was very much put on the back burner.
So, I was committed to do what turned out to be 13 albums. By this period, I was only a few albums away from completing the contract. I had to learn how to do that, because otherwise, I would be sucked dry by all the sycophants and sharks out there. Everybody tries to get as much as they can. It was going to be a complete improvisation. It started with a bodhran rhythm, then the melody came.
I had some crazy ideas. It was going along, turning into this beautiful Celtic thing, and I got a bit bored with it. Then I thought it would be nice to have some footsteps on one bit. They came en masse into the studio. Then I got a choir of people involved in a big studio in London. Margaret Thatcher was being deposed at the time, so we got an impersonator on the album too.
It was just fun. This is the album I am most looking forward to mixing in 5. The album is entirely that first shot. Amarok is my favorite album of all time. Musician friends of mine continue to marvel at Amarok. And it was all hand-played as well. I used a very primitive sequencer and sampler that was a precursor to Notator, which became Logic.
It was on a primitive computer called an Amiga. There were no synthesizers.
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