I wholeheartedly recommend this documentary from 2014 which I stumbled across on YouTube.
A diehard classical music aficionado, "Tubular Bells" (1973) was one of the very few rock LPs my father had. Others in his collection were albums by Sky, and Dory Previn's "Mythical Kings and Iguanas" - an unusual batch of records connected by the promise of superior musicianship and extended composition. Those were my dad's criteria.
The LP has never been on my radar. It's harder to get affectionate towards an album like this which is so ubiquitous, like perhaps, I dunno, "Saturday Night Fever" or "Thriller". Ten years ago it was suggested that it had sold 16 million copies. But it does emerge from a musical milieu that I am heavily invested in.
The LP was the first release on Virgin - catalog number V2001. Coming directly after it was Gong's "Flying Teapot" TV2002 - followed quickly by Faust's "IV" TV004 - LPs by Henry Cow and Kevin Coyne - and Robert Wyatt's "Rock Bottom" (1974) and Hatfield and the North's debut (1974) following shortly thereafter.
Oldfield had been a sideman on Kevin Ayers' "Shooting at the Moon" and Vivian Stanshall of the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah band served as a compere on "Tubular Bells."
The idea of rock music being arranged into a pseudo-classical music suite was new and especially how Oldfield did it without vocals being the centrepiece. The music was balanced more like the orchestral Emerson, Lake, and Palmer than the vaudeville Genesis - and with no drums. By subtly weaving in repetitive motifs inspired by Terry Riley's "Rainbow in Curved Air" (1969) "Tubular Bells" never descends to Rick Wakeman-like symphonic stodge. It could justifiably be called the first Post-Rock album.
You'll never see it in any greatest albums lists, but "Tubular Bells" has many lovely sections which are very deserving of attention. The opening sequence used in "The Exorcist" is exquisitely evocative and the second half of side one stacked upon on a repetitive bass riff, with Vivian Stanshall introducing the instruments, conjures the zeit with remarkable power. I've even grown fond of Oldfield's angry caveman ululations on side B. Perhaps this is the advantage of coming to the album with fresh ears - of never having heard it before?
However, with regards to my interest in the album, this musical detail is mainly a footnote to Oldfield's intense personal story. His mother gave birth to a frail fourth child, David, who had Down syndrome and, presumably at their father's instigation, she was whisked away from the family home. In due course she returned home on a barbiturate prescription and the children retreated to their own rooms where his sister describes Mike as starting to "...hone his craft."
When he was seventeen, whilst living at 1 Victoria Square in Pimlico, Mike took LSD and had a truly terrible trip. He remembers one "truly disturbing evening" when people resembled biological machines. Shades of Gurdjieff. Apparently it felt like the end of the world, like he was "going to cease to exist." His siblings said that it changed him forever and that he worked to transform the negative experience. Mike says he retreated further into his music, which became "more real to me than normal reality."
At the recording sessions at Richard Branson's Manor studios in Oxfordshire, producer Tom Newman describes Oldfield as being a "mental wreck". "He would walk round with his eyes wet with tears nearly all the time. He was in a terrible state." But nevertheless working obsessively... The tubular bells themselves had apparently been used before on a John Cale album.
Obviously with my interest in the psychic counterculture which I explored in "Retreat" (2020), with the lore of terrible acid trips, and with what R.D. Laing refers to as "breakthrough" as opposed to "breakdown", I found the story of the album completely fascinating. It was especially interesting to hear that Mike, like many a cosmic voyager adrift, and to the consternation of his colleagues, eventually got caught up in the Exegesis cult which I had a brush with once.
Oldfield's subsequent move to the countryside evident on the "Hergest Ridge" (1974) and "Ommadawn" (1975) albums is shadowed by my more recent book "The Garden" (2025).
If you have a moment check out the excellent documentary.