condition (record/cover):  NM / VG+ (edges wear)

Released October 1987 (Virgin V 2466), Islands is Mike Oldfield's thirteenth studio album and the most overtly pop-rock-oriented record of his Virgin years. The follow-up to Crises and Discovery, it continues the late-1980s Oldfield template of one long instrumental piece flanked by songs with rotating guest vocalists. Side A is the title track, twenty minutes of layered Fairlight and treated guitar; Side B is a string of songs.

"Magic Touch", sung by Anita Hegerland, was the single. Bonnie Tyler appears on the title song "Islands", Aled Jones delivers a boy-soprano vocal on "The Time Has Come", and Hegerland returns for "When The Night's On Fire" and "Flying Start". The musical territory is the slick, Fairlight-saturated mid-1980s production aesthetic that Oldfield would carry through to Earth Moving and Heaven's Open: glossy, sequenced, with the long Oldfield guitar solos now embedded in a more conventional songform.

The original vintage Virgin UK pressing on V 2466, distributed across Europe. Islands is the album where Oldfield's commercial 1980s phase reaches its high-water mark. Not the album any Oldfield purist would start with (begin with Tubular Bells, Ommadawn, Incantations or The Killing Fields), but a fascinating document of how the most idiosyncratic British instrumentalist of the 1970s adapted himself to the dominant production aesthetic of late-1980s pop.