A month-long A-Z of geography based on my Spotify algorithm...
Well. The maestro... it had to be for this letter of the alphabet.
If I had to choose three artists whose music I would only have access to for the rest of my life, Mike Oldfield would be on the list and I'd definitely have some of his first three albums in my Top 10... not that I'm going to compile something like that right now - perhaps by the end of the year.
I've been listening to his music regularly for over 50 years...
Here's a short documentary on how it all started, with Tubular Bells.
A huge amount of video and other material is available around this particular album and how it was recorded and its influence.
Of course, for geographers his first album's cover featured a big question to answer: is that a constructive or a destructive wave on the cover?
One memory for people of my age is when Mike Oldfield worked to record the Blue Peter theme tune.
I was very envious of Simon Groom who got to see the whole recording process and participate. The resulting piece of music was used for years after. Here's the full version of the session.
I've got all of Mike's albums in some format or other.
I was also fortunate to see Mike play live four times - which many people will also be jealous of perhaps - particularly those who discovered his music later.
Mike's last ever live performance was the biggest of his career and dates back to 2012.
It was at the Opening Ceremony of the 2012 Olympic Games in London: called "Isles of Wonder" and developed by Danny Boyle and Frank Cottrell Boyce. More on that to come in a future blog post.
I hadn't expected him to be performing as he hadn't performed live for some years since the Premiere of Tubular Bells III (which I attended - more on that in a future blog post). I hadn't intended to watch the majority of the event as I was down in Devon at the time, and was actually heading to see Leeds United playing a friendly against Torquay.
As we came back from the match, we had the radio on, and they were playing the music from the opening ceremony and I was surprised to hear them say Mike Oldfield's name....
I knew that Bob Digby, GA President was at the Opening Ceremony. He had been following the development of the Olympic Park for many years as it took shape - as an example of urban redevelopment. There were various changes to the area - I visited myself with John Widdowson and a school group from Suffolk who kindly invited me along. Bob's never said how much he paid for his ticket...
There aren't many decent videos of the performance as they are copyrighted due to the Olympics' fairly stringent rules.
The audio is here however, and has been released in various formats since 2012:
Mike has made numerous varied albums in his career. I will be blogging separately about quite a few of them as they all had an impact on me in different ways.
He was also an innovator in the early days of computer games and video graphics - buying the most powerful graphics computers available and spending hours making videos for his own music. They look dated today, but then so do most things from back in the 1980s.
Check out 'The Wind Chimes' from 1987's album 'Islands'. Plenty of 3D objects floating about for no good reason... the music is great though, and was a rare side-long piece of music by then. This sounds great on a decent sound system for the bass. Like 'Discovery and the Lake' it was recorded in the French Alps.
If you want to know more about Mike's life and career, you need to visit the Dark Star website. I used to receive Dark Star magazine when it first started.
What is your favourite Mike Oldfield album?
Did you see him play live?
Let me know in the comments, and keep an eye out for more Oldfield related posts.
Discography - AI generated
What 'O' is on your playlist? Let me know...
No comments:
Post a Comment