Mike Oldfield

selected Mike Oldfield TShirTS, PosTerS & Prints

Michael Gordon Oldfield (born 15 May 1953 in Reading, Berkshire) is an English multi-instrumentalist musician and composer, working a style that blends progressive rock, folk, ethnic or world music, classical music, electronic music, New Age and more recently dance. Mike Oldfield's music is often elaborate and complex in nature. Mike Oldfield is best known for his hit 1973 album Tubular Bells which broke new ground as an instrumental concept album and launched Virgin Records.

Tubular Bells became Mike Oldfield's most famous work. The instrumental composition was recorded in 1972 and launched on 25 May 1973 as the inaugural album of Richard Branson's Virgin Records label. The album was groundbreaking, as Mike Oldfield played more than twenty different instruments in the multi-layered recording made in Branson's Manor studios, and its style progressed continuously, covering many diverse musical genres. The album quickly reached the Top 10 of the UK album chart and has spent 279 weeks on the chart to date, a figure bettered by only ten other albums in chart history. Its 2,575,000 UK sales put it at No.28 on the all-time list of the best selling albums in the UK. In the U.S., it received attention chiefly by appearing in the soundtrack to The Exorcist. In the autumn of 1974, the follow-up LP, Hergest Ridge, was No.1 in the UK for three weeks before being dethroned by Tubular Bells. Although Hergest Ridge was released over a year after Tubular Bells, it reached No.1 first. Tubular Bells spent 11 consecutive weeks at No.2 before its solitary week at the top. In 1979, Tubular Bells was used as the main musical score for The Space Movie, a Virgin movie that celebrated the 10th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission. The Exorcist track is the score used for the landing sequence of the Apollo flights.

from Wikipedia licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.