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Tubular Bells is the debut studio album by the British musician Mike Oldfield, released on 25 May 1973 as the first album on Virgin Records. It comprises two mostly instrumental tracks. Oldfield, who was 19 years old when it was recorded, played almost all the instruments.
Tubular Bells initially sold slowly, but gained worldwide attention in December 1973 when its opening theme was used for the soundtrack to the horror film The Exorcist. This led to a surge in sales which increased Oldfield's profile and played an important part in the growth of the Virgin Group. It stayed in the top ten of the UK Albums Chart for one year from March 1974, during which it reached number one for one week. It reached number three on the US Billboard 200, and number one in Canada and Australia. It has sold more than 2.7 million copies in the UK, and an estimated 15 million copies worldwide.
Oldfield learned to play the guitar at an early age, and as a teenager he became the bass player for the Whole World, a band put together by Kevin Ayers, formerly of Soft Machine.[5][6] The Whole World recorded their album Shooting at the Moon (1970) at Abbey Road Studios over several months in 1970, when Oldfield was 17. When the group did not have a recording session booked in the morning, Oldfield would arrive early and experiment with the different instruments, including pianos, harpischords, a Mellotron and various orchestral percussion instruments, and learned to play each of them.[7]
The Whole World broke up in mid-1971 and Ayers lent Oldfield a two-track Bang & Olufsen Beocord " tape recorder.[8] Oldfield blocked off the erase head of the tape machine, which allowed him to record onto one track, bounce the recording onto the second, and record a new instrument onto the first track, thus overdubbing his playing one instrument at a time, and effectively making multitrack recordings.[6]
In his flat in Tottenham in north London, Oldfield recorded demos of four tracks he had been composing in his head for some years, using the tape recorder, his guitar and bass, some toy percussion instruments, and a Farfisa organ borrowed from the Whole World keyboardist David Bedford. The demos comprised three shorter melodies (early versions of what would become the sections "Peace", "Bagpipe Guitars", and "Caveman" on Tubular Bells 2003), and a longer piece he had provisionally titled "Opus One". Oldfield was inspired to write a long instrumental after hearing Septober Energy (1971), the only album by Centipede.[7] He was also influenced by classical music, and by A Rainbow in Curved Air (1969) by the experimental composer Terry Riley, on which Riley played all the instruments himself and used tape loops and overdubs to build up a long, repetitive piece of music.[9][a]
Oldfield spent much of 1972 working with his old bandmates from the Whole World on their solo projects[13] while trying to find a record label interested in his demos. Oldfield approached labels including EMI and CBS, but each rejected him, believing the piece was unmarketable without vocals.[7] Increasingly frustrated and short of money, Oldfield heard that the Soviet Union paid musicians to give public performances, and was at the point of looking through the telephone directory for the phone number of the Soviet embassy when Draper called him with an invitation to dinner with Branson on Branson's houseboat moored in London.[7] Branson told Oldfield that he liked the demos, and wanted Oldfield to spend a week at the Manor recording "Opus One".[14]
Tubular Bells was recorded on an Ampex 2-inch 16-track tape recorder with the Dolby noise-reduction system, which was the Manor's main recording equipment at the time.[7] Oldfield had Virgin hire instruments including guitars, keyboards and percussion instruments.[15] Oldfield has recounted differing stories over the years regarding the inclusion of the tubular bells; in 2001 he suggested that they were among the instruments he asked Branson to hire,[6][16] but in 2013, he said that he saw them among the instruments being removed from the studios after John Cale had finished recording there, and asked for them to be left behind.[17]
Oldfield, Newman, and Heyworth spent their evenings drinking in a pub, after which they returned to the Manor and recorded through the night. Heyworth recalled several disasters, including one instance where half a day's work was accidentally erased.[6] Final mixing was an involved process, with the faders operated by Oldfield, Newman, Heyworth, and two others simultaneously. They followed detailed tracking charts and the process was restarted if one person made even a slight mistake.[18] Heyworth recalled difficulty in cutting the album due to vinyl's limited dynamic range, and insisted on heavy vinyl normally used for classical records.[19]
Oldfield played the majority of the instruments as a series of overdubs, which was an uncommon recording technique at the time.[20] In total, 274 overdubs were made and an estimated two thousand "punch-ins",[21] although Newman said "it was really only 70 or 80" in total.[12] Despite various guitars being listed on the album sleeve, such as "speed guitars", "fuzz guitars" and "guitars sounding like bagpipes", the only electric guitar used on the album was a 1966 blonde Fender Telecaster which used to belong to Marc Bolan and to which Oldfield had added an extra Bill Lawrence pickup. The guitars were recorded via direct injection into the mixing desk.[7] To create the "speed guitar" and "mandolin-like guitar" named in the sleeve notes, the tape was recorded at half speed. An actual mandolin was used only for the ending of Part Two.[7] Oldfield also used a custom effects unit, the Glorfindel box, to create the "fuzz guitars" and "bagpipe guitars" distortion.[b] In 2011, Oldfield's Telecaster was sold for 6,500, and the money was donated to the mental health charity SANE.[23] According to the engineer Phil Newell, the bass guitar used on the album was one of his Fender Telecaster Basses.[24]
Oldfield recorded side one, known as "Opus One" at the time, during his one allotted week at the Manor in November 1972.[7] He was particularly interested in starting the piece with a repeating riff, and devised the opening piano sequence after experimenting with an idea for several minutes on Bedford's Farfisa organ. He wanted a slight variation on its 16/8 time signature by dropping the sixteenth beat, and chose the key of A minor as it was easy to play. Oldfield recorded the opening riff on a Steinway grand piano, but struggled to perform in time. Heyworth solved the problem by placing a microphone next to a metronome in another room and feeding it into Oldfield's headphones.[18] The short honky-tonk piano section was included as a tribute to Oldfield's grandmother, who had played the instrument in pubs before World War II. The staff and workers at the Manor made up the "nasal choir" that accompanies it.[7] Oldfield had difficulty in producing a sound from the tubular bells, as he wanted a loud note from them but both the standard leather-covered and bare metal hammers did not produce the volume that he wanted. In the end, Newman obtained a heavier claw hammer and Oldfield used it to produce the desired sound intensity but cracked the bells in the process.[25]
The track closes with a segment featuring Vivian Stanshall, formerly of the comedic rock group Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, introducing each instrument being played one by one. The idea originated when the band were due to use the Manor after Oldfield, and had arrived while he was still recording. Oldfield had liked the way Stanshall introduced the instruments one at a time on the Bonzos' song "The Intro and the Outro" on Gorilla (1967), and told Newman that he would like Stanshall to do the same.[26] Newman agreed, but had to persuade the shy Oldfield to ask Stanshall if he would carry out the request. Stanshall readily agreed to the idea and is credited on the liner notes as "Master of Ceremonies", but Newman recalled that the job proved to be more difficult than anticipated, as Stanshall forgot the names of the instruments and introduced them at the wrong points. Oldfield wrote a list of the instruments in order, indicating where Stanshall should introduce them.[27] The way in which Stanshall said "plus... tubular bells" inspired Oldfield to use it as the album's title.[28]
After Part One had been recorded, Oldfield was allowed to stay on at the Manor to record additional overdubs during studio downtime. He spent Christmas and New Year at his family's home, but returned to the Manor from February to April 1973 to record the second part of his planned album.[7][29] Oldfield had "Part Two" mapped out and sequenced by the time he came to record it.[30]
The "caveman" section is the only part of Tubular Bells that features a drum kit, which is played by Steve Broughton of the Edgar Broughton Band. The section begins with a backing track of bass and drums, with Oldfield overdubbing all other instruments. The shouting vocals developed near the end of the recording, when he had practically finished recording the instruments for the section but felt it needed something else. Heyworth recalled that Branson was getting impatient and pressured Oldfield to deliver the album, and to include vocals on one of the tracks so he could release it as a single. Angered by Branson's suggestion, Oldfield returned to the Manor where he drank half a bottle of Jameson's whiskey from the studio's cellar and demanded that the engineer take him to the studio where, intoxicated, he "screamed his brains out for 10 minutes" into a microphone. The incident left Oldfield so hoarse that he was unable to speak for two weeks.[6] The engineer ran the tape at a higher speed during the recording, so that upon playback the tape ran at normal speed, thus dropping the pitch of the voice track and producing the "Piltdown Man" vocals listed on the credits.[7]
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