Mike Oldfield

Featuring: Roger Chapman, Jon Anderson

condition (record/cover):  NM / VG+ (light ring wear)

Released May 1983 (Virgin V 2262), Crises is the Mike Oldfield album most people know for two minutes of music and almost nothing else: "Moonlight Shadow", the Maggie Reilly-sung pop single that hit number 4 in the UK and went top-ten across most of Europe, and became one of the best-selling singles of the 1980s. The rest of the record (a twenty-minute side-long title piece plus three further songs across side two) has tended to live in its shadow.

Side A is the long piece, simply titled "Crises", and continues the Tubular Bells / Ommadawn / Incantations methodology of building a single composition out of layered guitar, mallet percussion and keyboards over twenty-plus minutes. By 1983 Oldfield had moved into the digital era: the Fairlight CMI appears throughout, alongside Linn drum machines and early sequenced synthesisers. The result is more rhythmically pulsed than the 1970s records, less folk-derived, more in conversation with the Tangerine Dream / Vangelis / Jean-Michel Jarre electronic axis. Side B contains "Moonlight Shadow", Roger Chapman of Family on "Shadow On The Wall", Jon Anderson of Yes on "In High Places", and Maggie Reilly returning for "Foreign Affair".

The original vintage Virgin UK pressing on V 2262, in the strikingly minimal storm-and-figure cover. Crises is the bridge record between the long-form 1970s Oldfield and the pop-instrumental 1980s Oldfield, and a much more interesting album than its single-driven reputation suggests.