Mike Oldfield

condition (record/cover):  NM / EX+

Misprint on both labels: Tabular Bells instead of Tubular Bells.

The first Virgin Records release, V 2001, May 1973: a nineteen-year-old Mike Oldfield alone in The Manor studio in Oxfordshire, multi-tracking nearly every instrument across a single two-part forty-nine-minute composition. Tubular Bells would shortly become one of the best-selling albums of the 1970s (more than fifteen million copies worldwide), sustain the entire Virgin operation through its critical early years and (after William Friedkin licensed the opening piano figure for The Exorcist in late 1973) attach itself permanently to a particular pop-cultural mood that has nothing to do with Oldfield's actual intentions.

The music is not horror music. It is a young man's bedroom-prog masterpiece: a recurring piano motif in 15/8 elaborated across folk, progressive rock, electronic and orchestral textures, with Oldfield playing acoustic and electric guitars, bass, glockenspiel, organ, tin whistle, mandolin, tubular bells and (in the celebrated side-one finale, narrated by Vivian Stanshall of the Bonzo Dog Band) every instrument announced in turn. The record's deliberate calm, its avoidance of conventional rock dynamics, and its sustained patience would make it an early text for what would later be called post-rock, new age and ambient instrumental music.

The pressing on offer is the Italian Virgin edition catalogued VIL 12001 (the UK first issue is V 2001), the version that circulated across the Italian market and across much of continental Europe in the late 1970s. Not the 1973 UK first edition but the Italian Virgin pressing on the local catalog number, with the famous bell-sleeve cover intact.