Tubular Bells: The Mike Oldfield Story

This programme contains some strong language.

LAPPING WATER

We've been a bit short of music this season

and tonight we're going to make up for it.

The piece is called Tubular Bells.

It was written by a young Englishman, Mike Oldfield, when he was 17.

He worked for nine months to compose Tubular Bells,

which takes up both sides of this LP.

Oldfield used 20 instruments to make the original recording

of that music, all of which he played himself.

Grand piano, bass guitar, electric guitar, tin whistle,

Hammond organ, it goes on like the Guinness Book Of Records...

It's like yesterday.

It doesn't feel a long time ago at all.

It was such a special time in my life.

It was strange - right after I'd finished it, I didn't

want to know about it, because it was such a big thing.

That kind of got it out of my system and for about, five, even ten years.

I just...I didn't want to know about it...

I find it astonishing that it's lasted this long and I'm here

talking to you 40 years later all about it.

It's very close and dear to my heart. I put on the old tapes,

and it's like I'm instantly transformed back to 1972, November 1972,

which was when I started working on it.

MUSIC: "Tubular Bells" by Mike Oldfield

Very few people knew who he was.

It was sort of talked about in reverential tones.

An album with one track on it, over two sides.

You know - that's different.

It sold millions in the first couple of years of release.

But it never stopped selling, so they now quote the figure of 16 million.

In the '70s, everyone had a copy of Tubular Bells.

If you were in any gathering of people for any length

of time, at some point Tubular Bells would come on the turntable.

Virgin going into space most likely wouldn't have existed

if we hadn't had that particular, that particular instrument.

When we made it Michael was a mental wreck.

He would walk round with his eyes wet with tears nearly all the time.

He was in a terrible state.

Mike had a very difficult time with the fame of Tubular Bells.

Lots of people calling him saying, "We want you to do this,

"we want you to do that..."

"No, go away!"

I was born in Reading, in Berkshire.

In 1953.

The name of the road was Western Elms Avenue.

My father was a doctor, a GP.

My mother used to be a nurse, before she had us.

I've got two older siblings, a brother Terry and a sister Sally.

He was very, very lively, very energetic, always dashing around

and...creating things.

He had a gang of friends and he was the ringleader.

Telling jokes and...he was very outgoing, very extrovert.

There was a little bit of music in the family.

There was always a guitar hanging on the wall which my dad would take

down every Christmas and he'd play three songs with three chords.

I, you know, played folk guitar,

so I showed Mike the three basic chords.

And I thought, "Well, that will keep him quiet for a few months."

And I think it was about two weeks later, and he was doing this

extraordinary...

you know, running up and down the keyboard, loads of other chords...

He just taught himself.

When I was about 14, and Mike would have been ten then.

Our mother definitely had some problems.

Because I have a lot of memories from that period.

After me, she got pregnant again.

I remember feeling her tummy and feeling the baby moving in there.

One day, she just wasn't there and she was gone for a long time.

All I know is we had a garage full of baby things,

and the baby didn't come home.

And we were told he had a hole in his heart

and we were spun all sorts of yarns about it.

Our dad told us that the baby had died

and that Mummy wasn't coming home, she was going to go

to a nice place by the sea.

Then later found out that the boy actually survived for a year...

And he didn't have a hole in his heart, it was Down's Syndrome.

His name was David.

He must have been very frail, cos he only survived for a year or so.

But then when she came home eventually, it was then...

..the problems started.

She started being prescribed barbiturates

which are lethally addictive.

The doctors prescribed them for insomnia.

Sometimes I would go into my mother and father's bedroom

and I'd see her sitting on the bed just rocking

backwards and forwards howling. Almost inhuman.

Then it became very dark, very difficult.

We tended to lock ourselves in our bedrooms

and do our own things, and, I think, that's when Mike...

really started to hone his craft.

Mike just used to play and play and play.

He sort of shut himself in his room a lot.

And we didn't see him.

Whenever you went into his bedroom, he would be...

incredibly fast guitar-playing and he became a prolific

guitarist very, very quickly.

We used to travel around with my friends playing in folk clubs

from a very early age.

Got paid £2 a night for a gig there.

I was 16/17, and Mike was 12/13.

We all, actually, at this point were looking up to him.

And, I suppose, being envious of the fact he could

just do this so naturally without seemingly having to put in

any effort or work into it, it just came out of him.

And we were all...

busting a gut, as it were, to try and keep up with him.

MUSIC: "A Sad Song For Rosie" by Sallyangie

It was 1968 and that was a very, very powerful year

in the '60s.

If you wanted to do something, you tended to just go and do it.

I was just coming up to do my Finals and I said,

"I don't want to do this any more.

"No, I'm going to be a pop singer.

"I'm going to get a record deal, I want to make record now."

So, I was going to go and see Transatlantic.

I had my demo. Walked in to see...

it was Nat Joseph, who was the MD, and he listened and said,

"Oh, that's interesting, that's really unusual.

"Yes, I'm interested.

"But we need some musicians, I don't think just you and the guitar's

"quite enough."

And I said, "No problem, I've got a younger brother,

"he's a brilliant guitarist, shall I bring him in?"

MUSIC: "Banquet On The Water" by Sallyangie

I first came across Mike Oldfield when he was in this duo

with his sister, Sally, called the Sallyangie.

He was a very fine guitarist - there's no

getting away from that - and he knew it.

And he wanted to be treated with respect.

And he was only bloody 15, you know, come on!

I remember one particular instance, Sally berated him...

At that time, he thought - "I'll hit 1,000 notes,"

and Sally would stop and say,

"Too many notes, Michael, you've got too many notes!"

London was full of virtuoso guitar players, and he was such

a precocious little prick, he really got up my nose,

but he had a great potential. I was quite disappointed

that we didn't hear anything more of them.

The demise started

when I had the bright idea that we ought to do a bit of styling.

Unfortunately, went to see a dressmaker and asked her advice,

and she came up with this idea of, er,

pink velvet for me, lime green for Mike.

It didn't go down well at all!

Mike was on to better things by that time!

I next came across Mike when he joined Kevin Ayers' band,

The Whole World.

The Whole World was part of a different scene, a general scene.

# I just came in off the street

# Looking for somewhere to eat... #

Kevin was the front man.

# I find a small cafe... #

Tall, looking film star-ish.

# Then I say, may I?

# Sit and stare at you? #

Mike was a good bass player.

He had very clear ideas the way he wanted the bass to play.

He said, "I don't want it just going, boom, boom, boom, boom!"

# Sit and stare at you

# For a while... #

You've got to remember, I was only 16 when I joined.

To have two strings taken away from me and just four bass strings.

I wasn't happy with that, so I would keep hitting

the bass note of the chord in between, I'd play little melodies.

# That's all. #

Around that time, Mike, Sally and I experimented with LSD.

Our present opinion about LSD is that LSD is something like an amplifier

or catalyst which just manifests the unconscious processes in the brain.

When he was very, very young, he did LSD, and I think that probably had

an effect on him that he...

probably still has resonances even now.

DISCORDANT MUSIC

I was living in a little flat, actually - number one Victoria Square

in Pimlico.

And I do remember one extremely disturbing evening where...

people didn't look like anything recognisable.

They almost looked like machines, biological machines.

And it completely...disturbed me.

SHRIEKING

You never believed a bad trip existed until you had one.

Just your worst fears, your worst nightmares.

You know, hallucinating and all that, you think it's cool

and really good fun until it starts going wrong, and then you think,

"Wow, this is not good."

At the time, when I was 17, it was the end of the world for me.

I didn't know what was going to happen, I was going to cease to exist.

"Am I going to die...?" It scared the life out of me.

From that time on, I think he had trouble. It triggered

something in him which created an instability,

which took him years to get over.

He had to transform all that misery

into something...

you know, in his own psyche that kept him sane.

What it did was it made me retreat even more into my music.

In a way, music was more real to me than, erm, normal reality.

Here's this guy who finds life so hard...

and music is his only escape.

He described the music as a creature.

It's this lovely creature...

who...cuddles up against me and makes me feel better.

I moved into the house

with Kevin Ayers on the top of Seven Sisters Road.

The deal was - Kevin would do the cooking,

and we had to do the washing up.

That lasted - not that long - maybe six, nine months, I suppose.

And then one day, erm, Kevin came to me

and he said, "This is not working for me..."

And he, basically, disbanded the group.

And, erm...

but part of that, he offered to lend me his tape recorder.

It was a simple tape recorder - two tracks.

"I can make some demos, I've got a tape recorder."

So, I took it up to my little room.

I also borrowed the Farfisa organ from the keyboard player.

And then I was thinking,

"I want to make some repetitive thing at the front."

Thought of A Rainbow In Curved Air, Terry Riley...

This sort of underground synthesiser

or the birth of the synthesiser.

And, erm, I just played it straightaway, like this...

MUSIC: "Tubular Bells" by Mike Oldfield

That is the Farfisa organ, these are the original tapes.

For Tubular Bells.

I made the demos, I took them to EMI.

There was a chap there called Nick Mobbs who kind of quite liked it,

and he said he'd get back to me but never did.

Erm...I remember taking them to CBS who just thought I was crazy,

cos it...it didn't have any vocals, didn't even have any drums.

And I gave up then.

So, what's interesting about this story is how the two main

protagonists come to meet.

You have Mike Oldfield, retreated in his bedroom writing

his masterwork, and there you have Richard Branson who is also obsessed -

he's obsessed with getting on with his future.

He's been doing the Student magazine

and he's looking for a business opportunity.

I decided not to risk launching the first issue of Student

unless we had managed to get hold of enough cash from advertising

to cover both printing and paper costs.

He started a magazine called Student which was a DISASTER!

Nothing he'd done up until then had really succeeded.

We'd started a mail-order company that would sell any record

from any record manufacturer for 10%, 25% less than the commercial price.

He was a chancer. He was prepared to gamble and go for it.

He was perceived as a visionary, putting it all together.

But, really, he was importing records illegally and flogging them.

He was a second-hand car salesman.

Being independent, one of the major advantages we have is that

we can make policy decisions quickly.

If we want to produce a record we don't have to have

a mass of meetings, we can immediately say,

"Yes, let's go ahead and produce it."

So, the saga continues that Richard Branson looks to investing

in The Manor, the first proper live-in, recording studio in Britain.

I found The Manor in... it was in the Country Life magazine.

Richard was 19, I was 29...

We'd bought his old manor house in Oxford.

I'd managed to get a mortgage from the bank and then

on the second mortgage managed to find...

..er, an aunt to lend us 10,000 on a second mortgage.

We thought that silver-spoon Richard had got all this easily,

but he had to pay back

about 5% above the bank rate to Auntie Joyce on a regular basis.

She gave him no favours at all.

And, lo and behold, who goes there but Mike Oldfield.

Doing some recording as a session man.

Michael came to me with this little reel.

He was very bad at social intercourse.

And he poked his face and he was like,

"You've got to listen to this!" he said.

And I said, "Ah!"

-HE LAUGHS

-"All right, I'll listen to this."

-And it was a little three-inch reel.

-Yeah.

The sort of tape you used to send to your mummy in Australia -

"Hello, Mum." You know, that kind of stuff.

BOTH LAUGH

And I said, "All right, I'll listen to it." "Now!" he said. So, I...

I...we were all stopped, so I took it upstairs anyway.

And listened to it on a tape recorder I had upstairs.

-And I was just captivated.

-It was the most beautiful piece of music.

I mean, to this day, I can still hear it in my head.

They made a copy...

They kept a copy and they said, "We'll speak to...Richard...

"Simon Draper, and we'll let you know."

I took it into London next time I went to London.

And played it to Richard...no, I didn't play it to Richard, actually,

because we all knew that Richard wouldn't know...

-No, no, we didn't play it to Richard.

-No! We played it to Simon.

-Yes.

-The other Simon, Simon Draper.

Tom played me the demo and I loved it and I thought

this was absolutely bound to be...successful. I had no...

real means of gauging what success meant,

but I just knew this thing would make an impact.

We discussed the problem of Richard being...being Richard!

Whose favourite record was Bachelor Boy.

# He said, son You are a bachelor boy

# And that's the way to stay... #

When I went to work at Virgin, I had quite strong views

about what sort of record label we should start.

The only person there who knew very little about music was Richard.

I don't think he even had a record player at home.

I got a call from Simon Draper, who had heard the demo tape

of Tubular Bells, and he was excited by this tape

and wanted to come over to the houseboat to play it to me.

PHONE RINGS

I picked up the phone, and it was Simon Draper.

And he said, "We've been listening to your demos..."

I said...

And he said, "We'd like you to come over to Richard's boat

"to have dinner." And I said, "Oh, all right, then."

We said we loved it, we didn't really have any spare money

to record his album, but we told him just to go and live at The Manor,

and in between recording sessions, he could record his album.

I said, "Well, I am going to need some instruments."

And he said, "Just write down what you need, and we'll get it for you."

We were a bit astounded at all these instruments that Mike was ordering,

cos he needed a lot of instruments.

Acoustic guitar...

Spanish guitar... Electric guitar, bass guitar...

And they looked horribly expensive to me.

And later on, there was a concert timpani...

there was a glockenspiel...

Glockenspiel...

£9. Possibly mandolin, I'm not sure.

We didn't know anything about anything.

We were fighting to survive in those days.

There was a truck which was, erm, delivering my stuff and taking

out stuff of the previous musician, who was John Cale.

As they were taking his stuff out, I just watched this set

of Tubular Bells going past, and I just said to the chap,

"Er...can you leave those?"

Never though that the word tubular bells was going to play

such an important part in our lives, and even for the fact that,

I suppose, that...like Virgin going into space most likely wouldn't have

existed if we hadn't had that particular...

that particular instrument!

And, erm, there I was in a real studio, which I could use...

a proper multi-track studio, 16 tracks.

And I was amazed that so quickly Mike had gone from this little 2-track

in his bedroom to this huge mixing desk, cos in those days,

they were vast.

This is the original master.

The piano was recorded to a clockwork metronome ticking away.

And, erm, I've got live bass here...

And, er, can play around with some keyboards.

Starts off with the piano, familiar piano...

then a glockenspiel comes in, and the Farfisa organ, so...

MUSIC: "Tubular Bells" by Mike Oldfield

And the glock...

And the Farfisa...

It's the same old pattern here...

And I've got the live bass now...

And a little harmony comes in there...

And then we wanted to have...

it was supposed to be... you know when...

Erm, horns go "Ba!" like in, you know, those...

big-band sound, but we couldn't have a horn section, so I just sort of...

organ, miked it up.

Played it really loud like "DA!" like that, you see.

HE COUGHS

And then...this is the introduction of that 3/4 time.

To me, that represented a human heartbeat

made on the left-hand of a piano.

If you can listen, the piano's going...

"Dum," like a heartbeat.

And then, erm...

Bit later on...just coming up, guitars start,

the thing builds up to a big climax.

What we are listening to here is unmixed, so it's just completely

as it was recorded.

But, erm...I can plug in my guitar and I'll show you that if you like.

Hang on a minute...

-CLATTER

-Ah!

Whoops.

LAUGHTER

Idiot.

There's the guitar, I missed it, you see.

Then...

Then we've got these two, erm...

fuzzy guitars coming in in a minute.

And it builds up to the big climax.

I think those start on this...

And then there's a lead up...

The melody comes in, the flute comes in...

and then, I was telling you yesterday about this organ chord

that's supposed to go...

"Whoo...!" like that. There it is...

And the big beautiful melody comes...

The point really, I suppose, that people would not understand

was that when we made it, Michael was a mental wreck.

He would walk round with his eyes wet with tears nearly

all the time, he was in a terrible state.

He found it an enormous disquiet.

About the idea of being mortal flesh. And yet what was going on

in his head was...eternal and beautiful and everlasting, you know.

And that really...my heart went out to him.

He always had fag packets in his pocket

and he would suddenly stop and he would write in tiny little writing -

he'd slash five staves on it and write a little tune on it.

And put it back in the fag packet and then...carry on.

So...he was constantly...you know...

er, working.

What's so interesting about Tubular Bells, if you view it

in totality, it's like a compendium of tunes, textures, ideas.

There's a honky-tonk piano, you see.

That's all the kitchen staff from The Manor.

CROWD HUMMING

Got them all in from their cooking and...

that was a honky-tonk piano like my grandma's.

Oldfield had been sort of working up to this point for a number of years,

so not surprisingly,

therefore, you get elements of the school band in it.

You remember that - "Dum, de, dun, de, dun, da, da, da"?

I like this bit...

I'll turn it up...

You see, it's got everything in it. It's got the pub piano, it's got

the, you know, the thrash rock.

The big question when you've got this compendium of tunes

is how do you find a kind of climax point?

How do you find a tune which is going to burn a hole in people's souls?

DEEP BASS CHORDS

-I mean, the tension there, you see.

-Yeah, it's phenomenal, isn't it?

This is the build-up to the riff.

This is the build-up to the bass guitar riff...

The bass line was very hard work.

Because the one I hired wasn't particularly nice to play.

I had to play it all in one go for about seven minutes.

And that whole part, right from there to the very end,

was all in one take.

See, even now...

my muscles are starting to tire.

Feel a little bit of sweat coming out of my...

But I had to keep going on...

So I'm starting to get tired now.

Had to keep going...

The accident of getting Vivian Stanshall involved in that

was great as well.

Vivian was with the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band,

and they'd been recording already.

Vivian was around and getting drunk,

cos he could drink a bottle of brandy, you know, for tea.

You couldn't keep him out of anything, he would just blunder in

and, "Hello, dear boy, what's going on in here?"

-HE IMITATES GUFFAW

-And that was it, you had to give in to him.

HORN MUSIC

And from behind the magnificent 20th-century Norman portal,

you'll find the downstairs lavatory and me seated,

toying with my worms.

Michael said to me, "Wouldn't it be great to get Vivian to introduce

"the instruments?"

I said, "Well, go and ask him?"

"I'm sc... Oh! I can't do that, I'm scared!"

BOTH LAUGH

And eventually, I made him go and ask him.

I said, "Go and ask him, go and ask him.

"Ask him. Say you want a slug of his brandy."

While you're watching, why not have a glass of Chateau Tilbury?

At river temperature, it's absolutely delicious.

I just gave him the words and... I wrote them down...

just the cast in order of appearance.

It starts with the grand piano.

We could not cue the fucker at all. It was a nightmare.

-He was impossible.

-He was...

"Oh, grand piano!" In completely the wrong place, you know.

Next comes in at the beginning, reed and pipe organ.

-VIVIAN:

-Reed and pipe organ.

"Reed and pipe organ."

-HE LAUGHS

-I love it!

I couldn't believe my luck, especially when he said,

"Plus tubular bells," and the bells hit.

I-I was over the moon, cos he just sounded so perfect.

Plus...tubular bells.

The thing about the tubular bells is that it's an instrument

that normally is quite far back in an orchestra.

And, you know, in this case, we wanted the tubular bells to be

the loudest instrument.

We had a lot of arguments about that, me and Tom.

He was asking for the impossible, virtually.

-Within the technology we had.

-Nearly came to blows about it, you know.

It's got to be loud, and the bell's got to be that loud.

I don't care if we had to bring the whole track down...

And then he would say, "Then it will sound too quiet on the radio."

It doesn't matter...the bell...

Let them turn all...all them turn their radios up.

I said...

Cos they come with this neat little hammer with the leather on one end.

And copper on the other end, I think, and it was...

even hitting it with the copper didn't work.

-So, we got a real hammer.

-Got a real claw hammer, a bloody great...

BOTH LAUGH

..12-ounce claw hammer. I said, "Look, just hit it..."

Here we have the bell...

Tubular bells...

BELL CHIMES

We worked all night,

finished side one about eight or nine in the morning.

And, erm...a copy was sent off to London, and I didn't hear

anything until...

that evening.

Richard's reaction to the first side of Tubular Bells was,

"It hasn't got any vocals on it."

It was a major nightmare in his head about what we do with this.

We went to the Midem Music Conference in Cannes

in order to try and gauge interest in our product.

We hadn't released anything,

obviously, at this point. And see whether we could set up

overseas licensing deals.

I definitely remember when I took the tape

around some record companies, one of the record company bosses

saying he wanted to put some vocals on it.

If we put some vocals on it, he would sign Mike up.

What Richard did when he came back. He said, "Should we try and put vocals on it?"

And he may well have mentioned it to Mike,

but I don't think anyone else thought this was a good idea.

And...certainly Mike didn't.

Eventually, it was decided I could stay on in the house,

and whenever the studio wasn't being used, I could go in

and work on Side Two of Tubular Bells.

I had all the sections mapped out.

I had the Caveman mapped out. I had the beautiful, peaceful tune.

When the time came to choose the sleeve, the design and so on,

we introduced Mike to Trevor Key.

He did all this on his own.

And I just looked at it and went, "Oh, wow!"

My jaw dropped at just how amazingly beautiful it was.

This is a real...an actual real object,

which was built, but then it was chromium-plated...

As I understand it, it didn't have a back, so it wasn't like...

completely solid all the way round.

Trevor asked me, "What kind of typeface?"

And I said, "I don't want it big, plastered all over it.

"Leave this beautiful picture.

"You can put Tubular Bells..."

I chose the colour... "And put my name very small."

Cos I didn't want the type to destroy the image, you see.

Tubular Bells became the premiere Virgin release, there it was.

V2001, 25th of May 1973,

the label was launched with this piece of music.

An album with one track on it, over two sides.

You know, that's different.

Richard Branson rang me up -

"How would you like to come up to my recording studio

"and meet Mike Oldfield?"

Now, Mike was hard work.

He didn't want to answer the sort of questions I wanted to ask.

-(MUMBLES)

-You know what I mean...

I remember I hated it. He was asking me all these personal questions.

"Tell me about Tubular Bells."

Mumble, mumble, mumble.

He was not the greatest interviewee in the world,

especially at this time.

"Why did you write Tubular Bells?"

What a weird question.

It's a bit silly, isn't it?

I think it is.

I can't imagine me asking such a question, it's a stupid question.

Er...

I racked my brains for 20 minutes and I couldn't think...

There wasn't a reason.

I didn't want to have a...

I didn't do it for that, you know, it's just...

HE SIGHS

And at the end, I said, "How was that?

"It wasn't all that painful, was it?"

He said, "I feel as if I've been raped."

I was taken into a room by Richard, Tom...

I think the lot of them, and they sat me down and said,

"You are going to have to do this live."

I said, "No, absolutely not."

I'd become a bit of a rebel by that time.

I hadn't realised quite how big a problem that we had with Mike.

To be frank, he had a sort of mental problem

and he wouldn't disagree with that,

at that time.

He said he didn't want to go on tour, but he agreed to do one concert.

I was pushed and pushed, and there was no getting out of it.

"Oh, what have I let myself in for?"

We assembled a group of musicians, many of whom were signed

to the label by this time, so it was members of Hatfield

and The North, Henry Cow, and then Mick Taylor played guitar on it.

The Queen Elizabeth Hall was suggested - nice size,

predominantly a classical venue.

Interesting, isn't it, that Branson decided that for the one live

appearance of Tubular Bells, it should be in one of the great,

hallowed bastions of culture.

Yeah, he wouldn't put it in a rock venue.

So, it's quite a strong statement behind that, I think - he wanted it

to be seen as a piece of...artwork.

I'd started getting nervous about it by then, cos I was thinking,

"Oh, my God, I've got to do this live."

There was no sampling then, no backing tracks,

you had to...

you all had to play everything.

As we got closer to the gig, Michael got more and more scared, I mean,

he was really scared.

I remember the rehearsals, we were going over and over this piece,

and Mike suddenly burst into tears and left the room,

because he just couldn't handle it, he was so emotionally...

..it was so difficult for him.

I'd been given an old beaten-up Bentley for my wedding present.

So I was driving him to the concert, and suddenly he turned to me

and said, "Richard, I'm sorry, I just can't do it. I just can't do it."

And this was about an hour and a half...

and the concert was sold out, and I kept driving, and he just said,

"Richard, you're not taking me seriously. I'm not going on stage."

And I was just desperately trying to think,

"What the hell do I do now?"

And then I just turned to him and said, "Look, Mike, if I give you

"the keys to this car, and you can drive this car off after

"the concert, do you think you can overcome whatever's bothering you?"

ANNOUNCER: Our Live from London radio concert comes tonight from

The Queen Elizabeth Hall.

And features Michael Oldfield performing his composition, Tubular Bells.

We got up on the stage and started...

MUSIC: "Tubular Bells" by Mike Oldfield

David Bedford came in out of time, and Mick Taylor's guitar

wasn't quite in tune...

I was just waiting for the silence and the boos.

Fruit they were going to throw at me, cos it was so awful.

And the...just to my amazement, there was this roar.

APPLAUSE AND WHISTLING

Everybody...standing ovation, straightaway, it was instant.

We all had tears in our eyes, and, you know,

Tubular Bells was born, Mike Oldfield was born,

Virgin Records was born...

He couldn't understand it. He said, "What the fuck are they standing up clapping for?

"That was crap!" I mean, he was really amazed.

I felt that I'd done it so badly that...

..perhaps I didn't deserve that...

..you know, that reaction, that reward.

John Peel came to the boat one day.

Simon and myself played him the whole album,

and he absolutely loved it and he chose to play the whole album

on his radio show, which was unheard of.

I've been introducing Top Gear for nearly six years now,

but I think that that is...

certainly one of the most impressive LPs I've ever had the chance

to play on the radio.

Really a remarkable record from Mike Oldfield

and one of the first releases on the new Virgin label.

John Peel was responsible for breaking so many bands.

It was a very influential club, it was a very select club.

It was like, "Let me let you in on this secret."

I remember a kid coming into school with a copy of Tubular Bells,

and us all just looking at the sleeve and thinking, "What is it?"

We had a mate's house we'd go to. He lived near school.

So we were able to get a fix at lunchtime, as well.

And we'd go off and listen to it there.

Records used to happen through word of mouth then.

Somebody would buy it, take it home, play it, and another person

would then want to buy it.

There was no internet or no communication like that.

It just began to explode, it evolved.

I can remember going to an Italian restaurant in Little Venice

with Richard shortly before the record actually came out.

And we were trying to guess what it would sell

-and we absolutely had no idea.

-We knew nothing about the industry

but thought we might sell 4,000 copies.

It took a while, you see. It crept and crept and crept.

It didn't do it like things do nowadays, they go in at number one.

It took about, probably, a year.

It was quite a warm summer, and I can remember hearing it

coming out of windows,

and you thought, "Boy, this is happening.

"This is word of mouth."

But I think what made it different was the fact

it sort of kept on going.

It started to attract

much bigger audiences. It became a talking point.

I suppose as it started getting successful, I was thinking,

maybe I'd had the opportunity

to not get involved and do the...

be a star or anything but just to get out, go away.

Mike had a very difficult time with the fame of Tubular Bells.

He locked himself on the top of the remotest hill he could find

in Wales!

And lots of people calling him, saying,

"We want you to do this, we want you to do that."

"No, go away!"

Every year, it seems, a film is released with scenes

in it so disgusting or so disturbing

that controversy is stirred up over whether it should be shown or not.

A strong contender for the title this year is this film

The Exorcist, which was released yesterday in London.

The Exorcist, which was one of the biggest box-office hits

of all time, opened late in 1973.

But very close to the opening,

they'd thrown out the original score and were looking

for music to fill the gap.

The director, William Friedkin,

was in the offices of Ahmet Ertegun, head of Atlantic Records

in America.

And he came across an anonymous record with a white label.

And he took it out the sleeve and he put it on the record player

there in Ertegun's office and he put the needle on,

and it went, "Da, dum, dum, dum..."

and he went, "That!"

Mum, you should have seen this, a man came along

on this beautiful grey horse...

Firstly, he heard, the childlike thing,

cos, obviously, the centre of The Exorcist is the story

of a young girl who's possessed by some demon.

The second thing he heard

was that the notes are very simple, but there is something

about the time structure

that's...that's odd.

The way it is, it's one bar, seven, one bar, eight.

So it'll be...

-IN TIME WITH UNDERSCORED MUSIC

-..one, two, three, four, five, six, SEVEN,

one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight,

ONE, two, three, four, five, six, SEVEN...

If that was just two simple bars, all of eight notes each bar,

the brain would switch off after a while, but because every other one

trips you up, you can't not concentrate on it.

-I think I'll walk home tonight.

-OK.

Take that, drop it by my house.

'There's a couple of moments when it appears.

'Chris comes walking down the street.'

As she comes round the corner and starts walking down the street,

you hear... # Dun dun dun der-dun... #

SOUNDTRACK REPLACES SUNG VERSION

'There are these kind of strange little gusts of wind.

'A group of kids run by wearing Halloween marks

'which is sort of an indicator of stuff that's to come.'

KIDS YELL EXCITEDLY

'There's a low-angle shot of nuns with their habits

'blowing in a slightly Gothic way.'

Later on, when the doctors are trying to diagnose what's happened

to Regan, you see a closed-circuit television feed of her

in a hospital bed raging.

It looks like a type of disorder that's rarely ever seen any more,

except in primitive cultures. We call it somnambular form possession.

'And so you have this really strange thing which is these very'

brief uses of that piece of music.

Somehow it becomes the theme from The Exorcist.

The Exorcist was hugely important in breaking Mike in America.

The album went top five. I mean, it won the Grammy

for Best Instrumental Album.

And at that juncture, Mike could've gone and capitalised on that

and could've been a huge American star.

After The Exorcist, where obviously he'd become very well-known,

I think he was really in quite a bad way.

I think, really, he had nobody to turn to.

He seemed very distressed, he seemed very alone.

It wasn't unusual to find him on his own,

because we'd always known he'd lock himself in his bedroom

and do his music, but it was a very different type of loneliness,

I got the impression.

I do remember my mother coming and visiting,

and she was going very much downhill at the time.

And I do remember sitting in a car with her...

That's probably the last time I saw her, actually.

I was suffering too, and she looked at me and she said,

"You know what it's like, Mike, don't you?"

And I said, "Yeah...yeah, I do."

And then, of course, the question came, you know...the follow-up.

We were talking about Tubular Bells, but the follow-up was a nightmare.

What Mike needed - and obviously what Virgin needed as well -

was for Mike not to be just known for Tubular Bells,

and it was important that Tubular Bells...

the name "Tubular Bells" didn't become bigger than Mike Oldfield.

Richard was so eager for me to do something that...

I looked at the first thing and I said,

"What's that?" "Oh, it's Hergest Ridge."

"All right. Well, I'll do an album called Hergest Ridge

"and I'll make it about kind of old, legendary things,

"and it'll have little whistles in it

"and things that sound like wild horses and all that."

He didn't want to do a follow-up that quickly, because it was...

he'd drained himself. He'd spent himself completely.

I was kind of disappointed with lots of the ideas I was coming up with,

waiting for...you know, "the big one".

Didn't realise that I'd already done the big one.

It's really tough to follow such an enormous album like Tubular Bells.

It didn't capture people's imagination

in the same way that Tubular Bells did.

To be honest, it's not my favourite album, either.

I remember I was recording with Tom, and we kind of got bored.

It was a nice, sunny day, so we went flying model aeroplanes instead.

After Ommadawn, his third album,

we then went through a sort of lull period for a while.

We had other artists that did reasonably well, but we then needed...

we needed a new shot in the arm.

# Babylon's burning

# You're burning the street

# You'll burn your houses with anxiety... #

By the time we got to punk, the reaction was,

"Don't play me that hippy shit."

# Babylon's burning Babylon's burning... #

The whole thing with punk was three chords and the truth

in and out under three minutes.

The idea of putting on one side of an album

and it being one piece of music was complete anathema.

The whole punk thing happened, and they were calling me

rude names in the press for no reason.

We had The Sex Pistols and Magazine and The Skids and so on,

The Ruts. Virgin started having a lot of hit singles.

I must say I felt betrayed, because Richard suddenly

jumped on that bandwagon, and Virgin became the punk label.

After a year or two, I'd just run out of steam

and I didn't know what to do, and I got really...depressed.

I started maybe drinking too much alcohol.

It was in about 1978, I got involved with this

self-awareness group called Exegesis.

TV ANNOUNCER: This group of 58 people has just completed a seminar

which many of them now believe has transformed their lives.

It lasted three days and cost them £175 each.

One of their...they called them "processes"

seemed to me a combination of primal scream therapy

and rebirth therapy.

This seminar does not function under the same laws and rules

that your life does out there.

I had to lie down on the floor, and he said, "OK, it's the time now."

I thought, "Oh, my God, it's going to be

"like facing a firing squad for me." You know, it's terrifying.

He said, "Just start making a noise."

Start to put the feelings of your body into a sound.

'Gradually, the noise I made became louder and louder and louder

'until it turned into'

a kind of a shouting and then it turned, after a few minutes,

into a scream like you wouldn't believe.

WAILING

I was screaming at the top my voice.

WOMAN SCREAMS

Stop it, stop it, stop it!

What they did was they held me up by my feet,

and these people all round me pushed these cushions

into my body, so I felt completely cocooned,

and then, very gradually, I calmed down, and they laid me down

on the ground, and I cannot describe the feeling that I felt,

because I felt the wetness of a newborn infant.

That's it, good night.

APPLAUSE

I was on a high like you wouldn't believe and I did all kinds

of strange things which I'd never done before,

like instead of shunning all interviews,

I almost suddenly wanted to talk to everybody.

JAUNTY PLUCKED GUITAR

'And it turned him into a kind of mini-monster for a period.

'Firm handshake,'

leaning forward into it. It was so uncharacteristic and wrong.

TAPE REWINDS INCONSISTENTLY

MUSIC: "Blue Peter" theme tune

The hair is cut, the beard is gone,

he's got no clothes on on the front of music mags,

he's doing a version of the Blue Peter theme.

PLAYS ALONG WITH THEME TUNE

'It's just this completely different character,'

and bear in mind, he's still not...30.

The worst thing he ever did was to do that rebirthing thing.

TAPE LOOPS AND WHIRRS

That might sound cruel, because I'm sure

he's more comfortable in himself dealing with the rest of the world.

MASS CHANTING

'I think that since that rebirthing thing,

'he's found it very hard to reach the places

'where the real music came from,'

because I think the music that Michael made was...

was the grist of his pain. He didn't want to do the pain any more.

Quite reasonably so, I suppose.

But it was the pain that was bringing the music through.

SCREAMING AND APPLAUSE

APPLAUSE FADES

MUSIC: "Ommadawn Part One" by Mike Oldfield

About five years that lasted, and I did all the things

I hadn't been able to do. It was like an incredible high.

It sort of wore off.

It really worked for Mike, but it didn't last,

because all it does is give you a glimpse,

but then all the automation kicks in again after a few weeks.

The emotional undercurrents were so strong, which had been held back

for so long, the powerful force of that anguish was still there

and it was trying to come through.

Then there was the passing away of my mother,

had to deal with the grief of that.

That was a terrible loss.

Best way I can describe that was a big balloon bursting full of grief,

and I had to let it out.

Right now, I'd see that Mike is opening up in a way

that he's never opened up before.

Because the music that Mike's come up with has touched people

in a way that's just so amazing. He's given so much...

..he deserves something back.

Not just the money, which he spends...HAS SPENT in the past

to create a wall, build big walls around himself.

The money doesn't help.

TUBULAR BELLS PLAYS IN REVERSE

Our starting point was music.

For the second sequence in the Olympic ceremony,

it was Tubular Bells

that we wanted to actually make a cornerstone

of 20 minutes of the evening.

ANNOUNCER: Please welcome Mike Oldfield

and the staff of the United Kingdom National Health Service.

'It's tricky, because you think, "How's he going to react?"

'We're not going to be able to play all 40-odd minutes of it,

'it's going to be a cut-down version,'

and I have to say, of all the collaborators that we worked with

on it, he was extraordinary.

'Not only the ability to manipulate that tune in different ways,

'but also his appetite for it was amazing.'

He's had to be very protective of the work, understandably,

but with us he was like, "Oh..."

We started to put it together with this sequence which was borne

out of children's literature and caring

and the villains in children's literature,

because the theme tune of The Exorcist,

that made sense as a starting point for it,

and then the celebratory sense of Tubular Bells was also good,

because we wanted to celebrate the NHS

and we wanted to use a lot of the staff from the NHS to learn dancing.

'Here we are, 40 years later, this little piece of music I had

'when I was in this terrible, panic-stricken situation,'

I was standing there on the stage live

in front of this massive audience and thinking,

"I remember writing that all those years ago,"

and here's these thousands of people and millions of people

watching it, and it was going out across the planet.

It was...magnificent.

GUITAR SOLO PLAYS

I think he'd arrived at a point where he thought,

"This would be a wonderful way to celebrate the album nationally."

Because he lives abroad now, but it does belong to Britain.

I think it is borne out of our culture.

The most extraordinary pleasure in the album

is that he brings it all together,

that feeling of something experimental being brought together

and complete. Because everyone can experiment and everyone can doodle

and go off strange places, and they're fascinating,

but to complete it and to give a sense of wholeness,

that he brings you to the end of a journey is amazing, really,

and it feels, the sense...

The sense of satisfaction and completion you get from that

is the reason that it's successful.

To have that kind of mainstream public appeal for something

so weird without vocals, over such a long space of time,

to have that much public appeal means it's a masterpiece, I think.

SOFT ACOUSTIC GUITAR MUSIC PLAYS OVER LAPPING WAVES

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd