Is It Wrong To Like Mike Oldfield?

hey wait, Tubular Bells, that's one of his isn't it? that's GREAT, or the bit in the Omen is.

oboe!

it's all over the exorcist

I see Nicole is covering for Dan's absence today.

I have been watching Beavis and Butthead, I am feeling inspired.

I got the album for Christmas, in 1976 & for years thought that the listing on each side was the actual tracklist.

Whenever I hear the track "Blue Peter," I immediately think of the Stonehenge/dwarf bit in This is Spinal Tap. Tubular balls...blue peter...good lord people. I think we have a hit off-Broadway show on our hands.

Anyone had a go at his computer game thingy yet? Is it worth downloading?

I do actually rather like "To France".

that song just soars. 'discovery' is a bit dull overall but worth it for that one song.

When he's bad, he's very very bad, the egomaniacal aspects poison everything, can't blame anyone for finding it to be a permanent turn off. Everything changed when I heard 'Hergest Ridge' though, it's a humble, beautiful record. I also like Ommadawn / Incantations (especially the ending) / Amarok. And if you're already having a cheesepool day then Five Miles Out is fun.

His multitracked guitars on the last track of Robert Wyatt's 'Rock Bottom' are one of my favorite moments of recorded sound in the entire world. My heart's still in my throat every time I hear it.

http://nevergetoutoftheboat.blogspot.com/2009/02/mike-oldfield.html

BBC4 video of Mike Oldfield's "Tubular Bells," recorded November 30, 1973

MIKE OLDFIELD (bass, guitar)
MICK TAYLOR - Rolling Stones (guitar)
STEVE HILLAGE - Gong (guitar)
PIERRE MOERLEN - Gong (percussion)
FRED FRITH - Henry Cow (bass, guitar)
JOHN GREAVES - Henry Cow (keyboards, bass)
TIM HODGKINSON - Henry Cow (keyboards)
GEOFF LEIGH - Henry Cow (flute)
MIKE RATLEDGE - Soft Machine (keyboards)
KARL JENKINS - Soft Machine (oboe)
TED SPEIGHT - Kilburn & The High Roads (guitar, bass)
JOHN FIELD (flute)
TERRY OLDFIELD (flute)
TOM NEWMAN (voice)"

http://i8.photobucket.com/albums/a6/Sprad/MikePlaylist.jpg

Hergest Ridge is awesome.

Yes, after yesterday's Baroque Psych-Folk binge, today is all about album side long prog noodling.

(Yes, I also blame yesterday's Daily Note's article on "English Kosmische albums")

Is it wrong to find a young Mike Oldfield kind of.... erm... hott?

http://festive50.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/20080713195401mike_oldfield.jpg

http://www.intuitivemusic.com/images/C-mike-oldfield-1.jpg

Just shoot me now. It would be kinder. Really.

I read that at first as Daily Mail's article on Kos..

Ha ha, erm, no. That would be hilarious, but no. Daily Note. It's some weird thing sponsored by the Red Bull Music Academy whatever that is, but it's this free daily paper that's been handed out on the tube every day for the past few weeks, with strangely really high quality writing for a free sheet. Like yesterday they had a special issue about the BBC Radiophonic workshop, and before that they had Richard Norris and Pete Fowler writing about 60s psych. It's mostly dance oriented - still surprisingly good.

Not to mention the cognitive dissonance of those kind of newspaper touts who usually push London Lite on you handing out primers on krautrock. I'm so used to dodging them that it's odd to see "Hang on - YES PLEASE."

Anyway this is nothing to do with Mike Oldfield. Sorry. The last half of side two of Hergest Ridge with all the spikey over-portamentoed organ is utterly amazing.

that kosmische music, coming here and taking our prog musicians...

I hadn't noticed that Mike Oldfield played on 'Little Red Robin Hood Hit the Road'. And I'm still not entirely sure why that means it shows up in Milton's Oldfield filter up there (but then I know something between 0 and jack shit about itunes).

Yeah, you can play a KAyers CD, and that fairly distinctive guitar line makes you check the musician list.

(I always knew he played with Kev, more wondering if it was him being obvious, or someone else copying his lines like they did with Syd's "Religious Experience" bits)

Did not like Ommadawn - it was way too jaunty and hey nonny-no and all that piping was giving me a headache. Is there anything else that's like Hergest or is that a one-off?

I dunno, I got TBells played at me on a fairly reg basis back then, so when I got a copy of Herg, it sort of left no real impression.

Then Punk happened, and so on.

Exposure (the double live album) is kinda good.

For album-side prog noodling I can recommend Side 3 of Incantations. I wasn't too keen on this album when I was a Oldfield-mad 13 year old but in retrospect it has some brilliant bits in it. I'm still not as keen on the vocal stuff which is a little bit hey-nonny-nonny (Maddy Prior and Sally Oldfield say no more) but is avoidable if that bothers you, since it's mostly on side 2 and 4. The good bits (for me) are the lengthy rhythm build-ups using xylophones, "tribal" drums etc while Mike flails away on his slightly distorted guitar. Compared to TB, the huge repetitive rhythms are really quite audacious.

Is it wrong to find a young Mike Oldfield kind of.... erm... hott?

Exhibit B:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-O-WXcLuM0

He's 28 there.

And I'm still not entirely sure why that means it shows up in Milton's Oldfield filter up there (but then I know something between 0 and jack shit about itunes).

I have Mike tagged as co-composer for that track, which is pushing it, but his solo kills (& that one riff that comes in under 'Can't you see them' is pretty clearly his)

I'm not too big on Tubular Bells or most of Ommadawn either (though I ripped it because mp3's finally make it easy to just skip right to the ending of side 1). Hergest is best, and the other two you probably want to go to after that are Incantations and Amarok. And if you can handle hilariously stiff post-Trevor Horn Fairlight cheese rock, you want Five Miles Out.

ha ha oh god Punkadiddle

I have successfully hurt people's feelings by playing that track before. all of those people were british

I know. Punkadiddle is pure LOL.

Amarok is cool. There's Fairlight on it too, but used tastefully rather than "BANG HERE"S THE FAIRLIGHT BIT". To me it's the purest form of Oldfield avaiable - more so than TB. It's just relentlessly varied, continually changing with a million little bits all over the place, all recorded and performed in his trademarked style. And lots of surprising turns along the way, which is really what you want with Mike.

ha ha 'tastefully', I agree but it's relative with this guy. But yeah more people should know about Amarok, it is over the top, totally untouched by any notions of restraint or good taste. and that main guitar melody that keeps coming back, it's one of those things that can make you happy in under two seconds, it's like ABBA-level irresistable.

& to be fair a lot of the production tricks Mike got up to on Five Miles Out (alternating real guitar tracks with samples, huge dramatic shifts in dynamic range with sample stabs, proggy song subsections) actually pre-date what Trevor Horn did w/ Yes 90125 & the Art of Noise. but less interested in modernism than rocking out like a 14 year old

he just didn't care! later on with the 80's pop attempts and the autopilot 90's TB sequels, he obviously cared a little too much. But how can you not love this guy going platinum with Tubular Bells then following up with "Don Alfonso", not even Aphex could have come up with that

and though some of the pop goes too far for me, there are a few I'm totally grateful for

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-1WfkM1qso

his solo on "May I?" on that Kevin Ayers-Nico-John Cale-Eno June 1, 1974 live album is one of my very favorite moments in all music

I think Mike Oldfield is cool. Sure, some of the stuff totally lacks any credibility, but the best stuff is totally iconic. He’s like Iggy Pop – there’s a grounding philosophy (heavily featuring his own personality and abilities) which informs everything he does, good or bad, and although the albums have their own idiosyncrasies and concepts, or are influenced by who he’s working with or new technologies, he’s staggered through all the cultural changes of the last 4 decades with that philosophy totally intact. There’s not too many people who you can say that about.

Oddly, sweaty and shirtless is really doing NOTHING for me. Plus, I think his fingernails are really disturbing to look at (even if they sound nice).

I'll give Incantations a try tomorrow and see where I get with it. I don't even like Tubular Bells as much as Hergest Ridge but that might be because I've heard TB before just enough to have bad associations with it but not enough to really appreciate it.

(It really is just that one pic where he's kind of looking out from under his hair and looks like a young Chris Cunningham that I'm perving over.)

Five Miles Out (the song) is hilariously batshit *and* it was a single.

Oh and that live album is called Exposed (getting my guitarists mixed up) and IIRC the versions of Incantations are better than the studio album, and you get 'Guilty' as an appetiser.

You're really not selling me on this...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNYuuPEio4A

Convoluted though his career path was, I think he was always pushing towards trying something new until he got free of Virgin, even when he was revisiting prior works. The live "Tubular Bells" on Exposed is quite a bold rhythmic revision of a record that was only six years old at that point. After Tubular Bells II (which I've only experienced watching the show on TV, not on record) he obviously became a little obsessive about revisiting his earlier work, (whether in search of commercial success or as some private aesthetic quest I don't know), but this situation really feels like he's been defeated - by his music, by his muse, by his public (assuming that a large section of his audience only pay attention when there's a bell on his album covers).

Oldfield is still only 71 – is this really the last thing he’ll ever do?

Apropos of nothing, this Incantations performance from the Exposed live album is just terrific: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yF3YWq2w42g

His last album was seven years ago, and his label announced his retirement, which I suppose isn't definitive.

I thought his post-Incantations pop records were pretty good - QE2, File Miles Out, and Crises make up a nice trilogy in my mind. it deteriorated pretty quickly after that.

Amarok from 1990 is probably on par with his classic records; it's close in approach to Tubular Bells, but a lot more sarcastic and weird. I think that's the point where he got fed up with the business and just went his own way...which is pretty exciting, until it became clear that "his own way" was mostly just re-doing Tubular Bells a bunch and leaning hard into New Age. I've heard some of his post-Amarok albums, not really interested in hearing any of them again. But the Ommadawn sequel from 2017 was quite decent. If that's his last one, so be it.

Exposed is a fantastic record

I got one for £2 a couple weeks ago.

Not played yet...

his solo on "May I?" on that Kevin Ayers-Nico-John Cale-Eno June 1, 1974 live album is one of my very favorite moments in all music

Fourteen years late, but that appears to be played by Ollie Halsall, not Oldfield.

(which tracks -- I don't think it sounds much like MO, it's much more fluid and busier)

I listened to Amarok for the first time yesterday. I know it's a fan favourite but I found it really irritating - there's some good moments, but overall it just aimlessly speed-runs a bunch of TB and Ommadawn soundalikes with no development or flow (and with a bunch of choppy Art of Noise production tics). I can understand why, if you were burned on his 80s output, you might be excited to put the CD in and see a single 60-min track but it really outstays its welcome.

Apparently this was all down to his desire to thwart any attempts for Virgin to release a single or promote it on the radio. I know he wasn't the only musician to go to war with his record label, and I'm no Branson fan, but his all-consuming antagonism of a company that, ultimately, did still bankroll and release 14 of his records long after the public had moved on really is quite something.

kinda remember that being my impression as well. I'm willing to give it another shot though.

not sure what the feud with Richard Branson was about, reading Dave Weigel's book it seems like Branson really did go above and beyond to get the guy out there and help him make whatever kind of music he wanted. he probably did get screwed on the money though. I will say Oldfield kind of comes off like a miserable prick a lot of the time. doesn't seem like a guy who wanted to be famous at all.

My understanding is that Oldfield felt betrayed by Branson/Virgin's pivot to punk later in the decade. Which in one sense puts him in the same boat as all the "then the Sex Pistols came along and it was all over for chaps like us" prog landed gentry, but there does seem to be something uniquely self-sabotaging about his clear desire to have hits and his antagonism towards a company who, presumably, also wanted him to have hits.

tbf Oldfield basically bankrolled Virgin in the early years of its existence via sales of "Tubular Bells".

... not to mention "Hergest Ridge" and "Ommadawn"! Henry Cow and Faust albums weren't really selling in those numbers.

slotting amarok into tidal's "track radio" alg* delivers an insane list of related artists

Maggie Reilly (ok, occasional oldfield vocalist, makes sense)
Sandra (german popstar, sometime partner of Romanian Enigma svengali Michael Cretu)
Jennifer Rush
Inker & Hamilton (new eland synth pop duo that was big in germany)
Holly Johnson
Rose Laurens (sang the wildly racist French hit “Africa” aka “Africa (Voodoo Master)”)
Kim Wilde
The Hooters (Philadelphia rock band)
Stephanie (yes that’s Princess Stéphanie of Monaco)

do these ppl sound like one another (or indeed mike oldfield): no they do not

*i know the alg is allgedly somewhat shaped by things i listen to** but come the fuck on, kim wilde is probably the only entry that comes close to someone i've ever played
**also i know tidal's alg is not well thought of but again, come the fuck on

new eland = new zealand

I think Oldfield found Virgin's contract both demanding and constricting, and that Branson held him to the letter of the deal without any gratitude for how his records had basically made his success. Heaven's Open, the 1991 album that was his last for Virgin, was a concept record about how greedy Richard Branson was.

xp could definitely imagine all those artists appearing in a 80s playlist put together by a German and it would almost certainly include 'Moonlight Shadow', but Amarok is very much a stretch

I love “moonlight shadow” quite a bit

gives me huge chills when she songs “will you come to talk to me this night”

oh i love it too, always have done! so many things i like about it...

- all that delay on the vocals, i don't know what other songs use that trick quite as much but it's like the song is already echoing around in your brain even as your hearing it
- the clannad-ish harmonies that occassionally appear and then mysteriously vanish just as quickly like some sort of synthetic ghosts briefly glimpsed in a misty corner of the studio
- the buy-one-get-one-free offer on the guitar solos, the twangy knopfler-y one getting knocked off it's perch as the second swoops in like a screaming pterodactyl and then keeps flapping around for the rest of the song
- that dramatic strum thing where you just hear that and the drums and it's almost like adam & the ants or something
- but listen again to that one bit and then that you finally notice the strings lurking underneath it all
- and ditto on the “will you come to talk to me this night” bit, that tonal shift in her voice, yes!

ugh, its

I do like his pop stuff, actually I think Five Miles Out is maybe my favorite of his, next to Ommadawn perhaps

"Family Man" is pretty fucking stupid though if you ask me

ts. mike oldfield 'family man' vs black flag 'family man'

maybe not quite the right place to mention it, but you do hear sally oldfield played fairly often on nts these days - 'night of the hunters moon' and especially 'blue water'

'To France' is like Moonlight Shadow Pt2, I was so into Oldfield as a kid, but Discovery is where I stopped caring and I don't think I've heard anything beyond that apart from the odd snippet.

Ahh great breakdown, NickB.

I was thinking of "To France" also. At the time I found the rest of Discovery a disappointment, but now I feel that the record and especially "The Lake" is the end of the musical arc he had been pursuing since he first started composing. Everything post-1985 is a different era.

Sorry, there's absolutely no way I can hear "Moonlight Shadow" anymore without thinking of Dave Angel, Eco Warrior.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_IxbKeM-HY

...shadow...

For me Mike's imperial phase is Tubular Bells to Incantations (his best imho), but I like a lot of the 80s stuff and Moonlight Shadow is an all-timer. I don't mind some of the Enigma-ish 90s stuff on Warner too. I'm a fan! I'm just fascinated by that kind of open warfare between the artist and the label, which for obvious reasons doesn't really exist any more. (Apparently Amarok has "f**k off RB" hidden in morse code on it, with Mike offering a prize to anyone who spotted the hidden message. No-one won I believe.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjzpUW_O8YM

This is not unique opinion but I'm blown away by the Clodagh Simonds parts of Hergest Ridge and Ommadawn, mesmerizing, got to hear Mellow Candle soon. Seems like she's been more active in music in the past 20 years than any other time?

She has a really unusual "sour" tinge to her voice, even when she sings sweetly. Maybe Dagmar Krause is a little similar.

That Mellow Candle record is really good, a lot more dramatic and rocking than you would expect given the records it's usually compared to.

I'm in awe of Incantations, despite everything that came before I'm still amazed. I know Oldfield has some massive hits but it's a shame he isn't brought up more, can't think of many bands/artists with a first 4 albums that impressed me this much.

for a few weeks i kept seeing Platinum in a local charity shop and let it go due to the belief that it was a compilation of hits that had gone platinum - mainly cos of the dreadful coverart.
eventually i looked it up.
yeah, i felt rather foolish and was glad it was still there when i realised the errors of my ways.

Totally caning the Youtubes here. The crowd getting into it on that Montreaux Punkadiddle thing are fab!

Live At Montreux is on right now on some shitty free channel I got with my new Freeview box (where they break for adverts every 10 minutes even if it's in the middle of a guitar solo). First of all, he looks so young! Secondly I think he is possibly one of the least charismatic performers I've ever seen but at least Morris Pert seemed to be enjoying himself. Thirdly the keyboard player was from the Adverts! Fourthly lose the vocals. Some great bits but the whole is far too proggy for me.

You can get Boxed on vinyl for very little (especially the re-pressed version) I'm looking forward to hearing how the SQ mixes differ.

he was insanely young when tubular bells was made, given what it is (not quite 20 at its release date, still only 28 in 1981)

it’s absolutely insane. I would probably have worshipped him or something if I was a kid when it came out.

Really want to read his autobio

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1020146.Changeling

Reviews suggest this will be disappointing for anyone wanting to know about his conflict with Branson and what level of creative freedom he had over the years. It seems to focus on the making of his music, mental health and alcoholism.

I picked up Boxed as well, at a record fair a long time ago. And also Tangerine Dream 70-80, which was Virgin's second single-artist boxed set. As far as I can tell Virgin didn't release any more. Boxed is excellent because it has three complete albums plus a disc of extras whereas 70-80 is basically a big complication of excerpts, so it's not as good.

I think like most people my age the Boxed version of Hergest Ridge is the one I'm most familiar with, because the CD used that mix. The quad effect was a property of the waveform rather than an intrinsic element of the vinyl pressing, so CDs of the album will play in quad if you feed them through the right decoder. Adobe Audition will apparently decode the waveform into four discrete channels which presumably could be played through your computer if you had a 5:1 setup.

But do you really want to have Mike Oldfield playing nutcracker, gong, and timpani behind you, and to the right? Behind you, and to the left? Hergest Ridge is frustrating. The original version sounds very spartan to my ears. The remix is fuller but the album needed one more tune on each side. And the recorders at the very beginning are too trebly. They cross over the fine line that separates naive charm from out-of-tune. And yet it has a definite mood. It sounds like a distant ancestor of Sigur Ros. It has ideas. It's mind-boggling that it spent three weeks at number one in the charts.

From what I remember Oldfield had assertiveness therapy in the late 1970s and turned into a completely different musician at that point. And at the same time Virgin kept asking him to sell more records so he concentrated on writing singles. Which worked for a while. I think I got fed up with his unvarying guitar tone although "Five Miles Out" is one of those awesome-but-also-terrible-and-yet-awesome songs that I can't get out of my head.

On a complete tangent I'm reminded of the fallibility of AI. Hergest Ridge had Clodagh Simonds on it. But if you google "clodagh rodgers mike oldfield" the site tells you that "Rodgers is also remembered for her role in various Mike Oldfield projects, including the 1978 album "Mike Oldfield's Hergest Ridge"". Which isn't true at all. Different Clodagh.

Bearing in mind that I'm not a musician, and I'm mentally very shallow, I think the problem is drums. Oldfield came from a solo acoustic / small-ensemble folk tradition that either didn't have drumming, or it was the kind of complicated melodical-style drumming with a bodhran or whatever. He didn't try to add conventional 4/4 rock drumming to his music until the late 1970s, but I have the impression that - as with Tangerine Dream - it was an afterthought. Something he didn't really care about. So his music always had a stiff, slightly fusty quality. It did not have the funk. Could he have embraced his fundamental whiteness and gone full-on Norwegian black metal? That would have been fascinating. Mike Oldfield's Blood and Soil: By The Light of 1,000 Churches. I want ChatGPT to memorise that.

I mean, yes, there's "Guilty", but the tempo is all over the place.

Also, I remember from this interview that Oldfield apparently has, or at least had until 2014, free first class air travel on Virgin Atlantic. So presumably Virgin's booking software has a little piece of code that checks to see whether the passenger is Mike Oldfield. You'd think that given his latter-day disillusionment with Richard Branson the deal would have ended, but no.

Or perhaps the staff are trained to ask each and every single passenger whether they are Mike Oldfield. I've never flown on Virgin Atlantic. I don't know. Still, fuck you, Sally Oldfield! You get nothing. That'll teach you to sign to a subsidiary of EMI.

He didn't try to add conventional 4/4 rock drumming to his music until the late 1970s, but I have the impression that - as with Tangerine Dream - it was an afterthought.

I disagree to an extent. Pierre Moerlen, Phil Collins and Simon Phillips (among others) are among the best drummers of the era and their contributions are both inventive and mixed crisply and clearly on the records. In fact Oldfield's sense of rhythm was probably more generally successful than his attempts to write pop songs. The version of "Tubular Bells part 1" on his 1979 live disc Exposed shows what he was going for in relation to where he was coming from (and that it's a surprisingly adaptable piece of music).

The original version sounds very spartan to my ears. The remix is fuller

You must have this the wrong way round? The remix removed loads of overdubs to make a smoother, more ambient but maybe less "eventful" record. The original mix is the one with bells starting 10 seconds in.

I guess the remix retains the bells, but they're way buried.

The third mix he did around 2010 on the deluxe HR is kind of the best of both worlds. I love it.

Should also point out that Chris Franke was a drummer, so I'm sure Tangerine Dream would have had no real issues with incorporating rhythm into their music - and that's without mentioning Klaus Schluze.

I like this more funky Mike Oldfield (channeling David Byrne?) from 1979:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1rqt8NbTZg

Lol at his look of irritation at 1:29 - presumably at the timing of his fellow musician...

Well Maddy Prior was certainly having a good time. The closing melody of that tune is insanely familiar.

No mention of Killing Fields? It was my first Oldfield, I seen it on an old Amazon list called Evil Eighties Music and it is quite eerie in places. Not much like the other Oldfield albums I've heard.

Tell you what, a fair bit of "Family Man" sounds like "Map Ref" by Wire