condition (record/cover):  NM / VG+ (general wear - innersleeve VG with 1" rip and seam splits)

With original innersleeve.

After the global success of Tubular Bells (1973) and the more meditative follow-up Hergest Ridge (1974), Mike Oldfield withdrew to the Welsh borders and built a home studio at The Beacon in Herefordshire. Ommadawn (October 1975) is the record he made there: a more deeply pastoral, more rhythmically supple work than the two preceding albums, structured again as two long-form sides but built around African and Celtic percussion as much as melodic guitar.

Side A is the album's centrepiece, twenty minutes of slowly building, layered acoustic guitars and recorders augmented by Paddy Moloney of The Chieftains on uilleann pipes, Pierre Moerlen of Gong on timpani, the South African ensemble Jabula on drums and the all-female Penrhos Children's Choir singing Irish-language fragments. The piece rises through three distinct movements before resolving in the famous "On Horseback" coda, the closest Oldfield ever came to a folk song. Side B is the slower piece, more elegiac, with a long acoustic guitar passage that drifts into uilleann pipe and choir before "On Horseback" returns to close the album.

The pressing on offer is the Italian Virgin edition catalogued VIL 12043 (the UK first issue is V 2043), distributed across Italy and continental Europe. Not the 1975 UK first edition but a later European Virgin pressing on the local catalog number. Ommadawn is widely considered Oldfield's most consistent extended piece, the album where the Tubular Bells methodology finally produced a record without filler or showmanship. A major pastoral work of the 1970s.