Tubular Bells
:
This article is about the Mike Oldfield album. For the percussion instrument (also known as chimes), see Tubular bell.Tubular Bells is a
record album, written and mostly performed by
Mike Oldfield (and later orchestrated by
David Bedford for the
Orchestral Tubular Bells version). The late
Vivian Stanshall provided the voice of the "Master of Ceremonies" who reads off the list of instruments at the end of the first movement.
It was the debut album for Oldfield as well as the first album to be released by
Virgin Records. The opening theme, used in
The Exorcist, gained the record considerable publicity and is how most people have probably first heard the work. It was also used in the 1979 movie,
The Space Movie, and in a television advertisement for
Volkswagen in 2003. The cover design was by
Trevor Key, who would go on to create the covers of many Oldfield albums, and was inspired by
Magritte's "Castle in the
Pyrenees".
Mike Oldfield played most of the instruments on the album (see below), often recording them one at a time and layering the recordings to create the finished work. Many of his subsequent albums feature this technique. Though fairly common in the music industry now, at the time of the production of
Tubular Bells not many musicians made use of it, preferring multi-musician "session" recordings.
The
coda at the end of
Part Two, the "Sailor's Hornpipe", was originally created as a much longer production, with Vivian Stanshall providing comic narration as an obviously-inebriated tour guide showing the listener around the Manor House where the album was recorded. It was cut from the final version for being too strange to be put on an unknown artist's first album, though it can be heard "in all its magnificent foolishness" (from the liner notes) on the
Mike Oldfield Boxed set, which features completely
remixed versions of
Tubular Bells,
Hergest Ridge,
Ommadawn and several shorter tracks.
Tubular Bells is the album most identified with Oldfield and the reverse may be true as well as he has frequently returned to it in later works. The opening passage of the title track on the album
Crises is clearly derived from the opening of
Tubular Bells. The opening is also quoted directly in the song "Five Miles Out" from the
album of the same name and the song also features his "trademark" instrument, "
Piltdown Man" (referring to his singing like a caveman, first heard on
Tubular Bells).
The "bent bell" image on the cover is also associated with Oldfield, even being used for the logo of his personal music company, Oldfield Music, Ltd.
Tubular Bells can be seen as the first of a "series" of albums consisting of
Tubular Bells II (1992),
Tubular Bells III (1998) and
The Millennium Bell (1999), leading some critics to suggest that Oldfield was like
Quasimodo â€" "chained to the
Bells". Finally in 2003 Oldfield released
Tubular Bells 2003, a re-recording of the original
Tubular Bells with updated digital technology and several "corrections" to what he saw as flaws in the first album's production. This version is notable for replacing (the late)
Vivian Stanshall's narration with a newly recorded narration by
John Cleese.
Other versions include a
quadrophonic version in 1975 ("For people with four ears", as the sleeve said; the quad mix was later used for the multi-channel part of the
SACD release), an orchestral version in the same year (the
Orchestral Tubular Bells with
David Bedford), and different live recordings; a complete one can be found on the double live album
Exposed from 1979.
Tubular Bells stayed in the British charts for over five years, reaching the number 1 spot after more than a year and taking there for one week the place of his second album,
Hergest Ridge, thereby becoming one of only three artists in the UK to knock himself off the first spot. It sold more than two million copies in the UK alone and according to some reports 15 to 17 million copies worldwide. The album went gold in the USA and Mike Oldfield received a
Grammy Award for the best Instrumental Composition in 1975.
#"Tubular Bells" - part one â€" 25:36 #"Tubular Bells" - part two â€" 23:20
Acoustic guitar,
bass guitar,
electric guitar,
Farfisa,
Hammond, and Lowrey
organs;
flageolet,
fuzz guitars,
glockenspiel, "
honky tonk" piano (piano with detuned strings),
mandolin,
piano, "
Piltdown Man",
percussion,
Spanish guitar, speed guitar, taped motor drive amplifier organ chord,
timpani,
violin, vocals and of course,
tubular bells.
The "lyrics" announcing the instruments are: "Grand piano; reed and pipe organ; glockenspiel; bass guitar; double speed guitar; two slightly
distorted guitars; mandolin! Spanish guitar, and introducing
acoustic guitar, plus... tubular bells
"
There are listeners who hear it as" brass... tubular... bells!
" (The actual instruments are brass'' tubular bells). This leads some to ponder if Vivian Stanshall (of
Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band fame) misread or mispronounced it as "brass" or "glass". It could also by this rationale be "...at last, Tubular Bells".
*
Steve Broughton -
percussion*
Lindsay Cooper -
string basses
*
Mundy Ellis - vocals
*
Jon Field -
flutes
*
Sally Oldfield - vocals
*
Vivian Stanshall - Master of Ceremonies
*The Manor Choir (actually
Simon Heyworth, Tom Newman, Mike Oldfield)
*
Eduward Starink made an abridged cover for an album
Synthesizer Greatest (the first album in a multi-volume series) that was released in 1989. Tubular Bells appears only on the CD-version as a "bonus track". Other tracks on the album are cover versions of famous synthesizer songs but the original Tubular Bells features no synthesizer.
*Finnish one man
a cappella rock band,
Paska, recorded an abridged cover version for his 2005 album
Women Are From Venus, Men From Anus. Paska has also performed the song at his live performances. This number may be a parody of the original work, or perhaps it is mocking the whole genre of
progressive rock or new age music.
*
Book Of Love opened their 1988 album
Lullaby with a danceable cover version.
*
Duo Sonare, a German classical guitar duo, has made a complete rerecording of
Tubular Bells for two guitars.
*
Paul Hardcastle based his hit single
Nineteen around the piano theme of
Tubular BellsFurthermore, many dance acts and other artists have used the intro to
Tubular Bells as the basis for their songs. A long list can be found at
Rainer Muenz' discography.
With the aid of the software house
CRL and distributor
Nu Wave, Mike Oldfield released an interactive
Commodore 64 version of the album in 1986, which utilised the computer's
SID sound chip to play back a simplified re-arrangement of the album, accompanied by some simple
2D visual effects.[
1],[
2].
The "interactivity" offered by the album/program was limited to controlling the speed and quantity of the visual effects, tuning the sound's volume and filtering, and skipping to any part of the album.
The software was not very successful, partly due to its unusual nature. It can be considered the first, if not only, example of commercial, albeit relatively simple, interactive
computer demo or "musicdisk", while other sources consider it a "union between music and videogames".
This, combined with the low quality of the final sound output compared to the original album, despite the
C64 arguably having one of the best
sound chips of its era, decreed the attempt's failure. It's also one of the earliest attempts by part of a musician to release an interactive/multimedia software based on his works, before the CD-ROM era and before the first videogames and multimedia discs licensed by a music artist appeared.
*
Mike Oldfield Discography (Tubular.net) - Tubular Bells
