Mike Oldfield – Tubular Bells (1973)

June 24, 2021

Tubular Bells is a fucking mad one, if you stop and think about. Like, I don’t know why the first part of this very uplifting and experimental journey was used in the unsettling as fuck movie The Exorcist (I’m sure Oldfield’s record label wasn’t complaining, sales wise!), but there we go.

The “famous five minutes” aside, Tubular Bells is a mammoth release, where variations on a theme are looped over and over as Mike experiments with different textures and instruments. It’s kind of like Swans but if all its members converged into sentience as a music teacher in 1970. There’s a bit where each instrument is announced before it comes into play, and I can’t tell if its brilliant or fucking corny as fuck.

Either way, its genius.