5. Mike OldfieldTubular Bells
This is one of those albums I remember seeing before hearing. My parents always had their vinyl stacked up at floor level in the lounge. As a child, I was always fascinated by all the sleeves, the spines, the covers, and I’d look at the records before I could listen. Of course, the album has that fantastic artwork on the front, which for a kid seemed so futuristic and space age.
I don’t remember the first time I heard it, but I do remember inhabiting that record a lot during my toddler years. I think it is a record you can kind of live inside of just because of its repetitive nature: it’s quite hypnotic and has so many repeating motifs. I think it’s probably the perfect record to encapsulate the way that my musical influences are at this cross-juncture between the classical, the progressive and the ambient – it sits neatly at the joining-point of all those influences I think.
I also love that story about Mike Oldfield having massive anxiety about playing it live and Richard Branson kind of bribing him with something like a Rolls Royce if he made it to the gig! Just that kind of perfectionism and anxiety around replicating something that is capturable in a studio environment but very difficult to replicate live, and that’s something I can empathise with. I really struggled with something similar when thinking about The Art Of Losing and how to perform it live with all the vintage synthesisers – which are very temperamental beasts – and thinking ‘how the hell can I do this?’
The record also influenced my love of Talk Talk and my interest in neo-classical. I went on to play in orchestras and started to see the way I could bring that into the alternative, progressive rock world as well. It became a really important record for me and a good example of not really understanding how important it would become at the time]. The serendipitous nature of it just happening to be there in my Dad’s record collection. I am really the product of that family tree of music that my parents love – the Motown of my Mum’s side and then the progressive rock of Yes and Mike Oldfield from my Dad’s side. It’s quite funny that I ended up making music that is the perfect hybrid of those two things.
