Tubular Bells

Performer: Mike Oldfield
Artist: John Cleese
Distributor: WEA (Distributor)

Notes: Personnel: Mike Oldfield (guitar); David Bedford (conductor, arranger); The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. Recorded in 1974. Personnel: Mike Oldfield (acoustic & electric guitars, accordion, piano, organ, keyboards, synthesizer, organ, glockenspiel, timpani, cymbals, tambourine, triangle, tubular bells, programming); John Cleese (vocals); Sally Oldfield (background vocals). This is a DVD-Audio disc. The DVD-Audio content can only be read by a DVD-Audio player. The Dolby Digital 5.1 and DTS audio tracks provided on this disc will play on a standard DVD player. When the rights to Mike Oldfield's classic 1973 album returned to him in 2008, he decided to reissue the piece in an expanded form. This 2009 release features a stereo remix and some other bonus material. The work itself still astounds, a densely layered, richly textured tapestry of sound that put "minimalist" musical ideas in a pop music context, and also presaged New Age instrumentals. Years later, the album still holds up, unveiling hidden, layered delights with each listen. The 19-year old Mike Oldfield played virtually everything on the mostly instrumental TUBULAR BELLS. Employing fugue-like classical patterns and wildly eclectic instrumentation, which included the flageolet, the mandolin, and the Farfisa organ, Oldfield created an intricately shifting web of musical phrases that overlapped and interlocked to generate a seemingly endless variety of textures. Oldfield achieved this effect, in large part, by overdubbing hundreds of times during the recording process (Rolling Stone magazine quoted the number of overdubs at 2300). The resulting album was a revelation, a densely layered, richly textured tapestry of sound that put "minimalist" musical ideas in a pop music context, and also presaged New Age instrumentals. The first album to be released on the Virgin label, TUBULAR BELLS was highly successful, in part because the ominous, tingling intro to the album was used in the film THE EXORCIST. A single version, sometimes called "Theme From The Exorcist," became a Top 10 hit, and the album hit #1 on the British album charts. Years later, the album still holds up, unveiling hidden, layered delights with each listen. DVD Features: Region 0 Super Jewel Case Audio: Dolby Digital 2.0 - English 24 Bit/48 Khz Dolby Digital 5.1 - English Additional Release Material: Additional Audio Material - 1. 45 minutes of Demos

Q (9/00, p.126) - 5 stars out of 5 - "...The most incident-packed of his '70s releases: you're never more than 2 minutes away from a crescendo or a beautiful interlude..."

Mike Oldfield was a teenaged, multi-instrumentalist phenomenon who played in various British progressive rock groups (most notably that of Kevin Ayers) before going solo at the ripe age of 20. His first and still most famous release was TUBULAR BELLS in 1973. The first album released by Virgin Records, it became a radio staple and achieved notoriety as the theme from the blockbuster film THE EXORCIST. It is a measure of his talent that the enigmatic Oldfield has continued releasing serious, ambitious works while maintaining a sold fan base decades after his initial success.

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