There’s a concert video of Mike Oldfield on YouTube where he has a very familiar smile on his face. It’s one I recognize from a good many artists, when they are in unguarded moments. He is taking pleasure not just in his performance, which is of course very good, but also in the pleasure he is giving the audience. The music is good. He is good. Everyone is enjoying it. He has created this moment, and he is taking great pride in it. This is a moment when things are going right, and not only is he in the moment, he’s getting paid for it. It’s a good moment.
In 1968, Mike Oldfield left school at age fifteen rather than cut his hair. Since then, he’s been a professional musician. In 1971, he had a demo including part of what would become Tubular Bells. Engineers Tom Newman and Simon Heyworth heard it and brought it to the attention of businessman Richard Branson, who eventually agreed that it would be the first recording released on his new label, Virgin Records. It was the first of a six-album deal Oldfield was given with Virgin.
The album would come to the attention of William Friedkin, who used it without the slightest hesitation as part of the soundtrack of his new film, The Exorcist. Oldfield has never seen the movie, as he’s certain he would consider it too frightening. Oldfield has since done surprisingly little in the way of film scores; he wrote a score for a Virgin documentary about the Apollo missions, and he composed the score for The Killing Fields. Honestly, by Academy rules, that’s arguably more deserving of the nomination than Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, which is at least in part an adaptation of the score of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Musically, he is more versatile than I think people are aware. Yes, he’s been playing with Tubular Bells for years, writing sequels and so forth. On the other hand, there is also the Earth Moving album, itself a diverse assortment of songs. He played most of the instruments on his early albums and has shown skill in both acoustic and electronic music. Still, there is something about the image of him in the studio in 1974, sitting in an inward-facing ring of musicians performing the original Tubular Bells that will linger.
It’s funny to consider that this music is one of the only things of value that I definitely got from my relationship with my firstborn’s father, other than my firstborn, of course. In the long run, his musical ability and (most) of his taste in music were some of the best of what I got from him, and he and I were never going to get along. Similarly, I’m disappointed to learn of Mike Oldfield’s personal beliefs. He’s an extremely talented musician who I guess has come a long way from that long-haired teen who rejected authoritarianism, and not entirely for the better.
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