MIKE OLDFIELD
Tubular what? Long overshadowed by its illustrious predecessor, Oldfield’s 1974 hymn to the British landscape gets the belated Golden Jubilee treatment – and it’s never sounded so brooding or beautiful.
Words: Sid Smith
Illustration: Pete Fowler
Edited by Dave Everley prog.reviews@futurenet.com
Returning to a certain point of their back catalogue can be a profoundly uncomfortable experience for some artists. All they can hear are the circumstances in which the music was born, the difficulties in writing that material, or shortcomings in performance; a gap between the artistic tangle of what is in their head versus the unforgiving reality of the finished item. For Mike Oldfield, Hergest Ridge will, to some extent, always be a reminder of the crushing pressure to produce the follow-up to Tubular Bells while still coming to terms with the stresses and strains of sudden fame.