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ARTICLE
The music begins: magical at first, then growing more sinister as the cyclical piano motif seems to start echoing itself. Rich turns to me from the front seat and smiles. "She always plays this," he says.
This is the memory that comes to mind whenever I hear those opening bars (isn’t it funny how the brain compartmentalises moments like these?) and had the ten-year-old me seen the pioneering 1973 horror film The Exorcist, I would've known this as Tubular Bells, the equally pioneering instrumental album by teen prodigy Mike Oldfield.
But I hadn’t. The music was completely alien to me. And that was before we'd reached the hornpipe music or Oldfield's drunken caveman grunts in part two.
Whilst I probably didn't listen to the album again until my mid-teens, hearing it that morning in Rich's mom's car certainly left an impression.
Remarkable in its scope, the first half of the album grows, layer by layer, before our very ears, as more and more instruments take flight, creating “variations on almost every theme that could form in the head of a young LSD voyager,” as Rolling Stone put it.
Indeed, this entire vision was conjured up by the mind of a kid sitting in his bedroom in Tottenham.
The kid with a vision
Already a promising musician, Mike Oldfield left school aged 15 after the headmaster told him to cut off his long hippy hair. Pursuing music full-time, it wasn’t long before he teamed up with his sister Sally to form a folk duo, The Sallyangie. But after touring England, performing in Paris, and signing a deal with Transatlantic, they split. Next, the young musician tried a project called Barefoot with his brother on flute, but in 1970 this project also disbanded.
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https://store.promobile.online/products/pro-mobile-magazine-6-issue-1-year-subscription
You’ll also get full interactive access to this and the last year of magazines via the Pro Mobile Magazine App which is available from both the Apple App Store and Android PlayStore
This is the memory that comes to mind whenever I hear those opening bars (isn’t it funny how the brain compartmentalises moments like these?) and had the ten-year-old me seen the pioneering 1973 horror film The Exorcist, I would've known this as Tubular Bells, the equally pioneering instrumental album by teen prodigy Mike Oldfield.
But I hadn’t. The music was completely alien to me. And that was before we'd reached the hornpipe music or Oldfield's drunken caveman grunts in part two.
Whilst I probably didn't listen to the album again until my mid-teens, hearing it that morning in Rich's mom's car certainly left an impression.
Remarkable in its scope, the first half of the album grows, layer by layer, before our very ears, as more and more instruments take flight, creating “variations on almost every theme that could form in the head of a young LSD voyager,” as Rolling Stone put it.
Indeed, this entire vision was conjured up by the mind of a kid sitting in his bedroom in Tottenham.
The kid with a vision
Already a promising musician, Mike Oldfield left school aged 15 after the headmaster told him to cut off his long hippy hair. Pursuing music full-time, it wasn’t long before he teamed up with his sister Sally to form a folk duo, The Sallyangie. But after touring England, performing in Paris, and signing a deal with Transatlantic, they split. Next, the young musician tried a project called Barefoot with his brother on flute, but in 1970 this project also disbanded.
...
To read the full article, you’ll need to have a physical copy of the magazine which you can sign up for here for 6 issues delivered to your door from just £16!
https://store.promobile.online/products/pro-mobile-magazine-6-issue-1-year-subscription
You’ll also get full interactive access to this and the last year of magazines via the Pro Mobile Magazine App which is available from both the Apple App Store and Android PlayStore
The full review can be found in Pro Mobile Issue 115, Pages 26-29.
