Is It Wrong To Like Mike Oldfield?

He loves a bit of Hey-Nonny-No does Mike Oldfield.

Nah, hadn't heard the Sallyangie stuff. It is terribly twee, but there's an element of spookiness that is quite appealing. More naive than twee - though perhaps that's the thing. I like what he did when he was shy and fragile and spooky, but then he went off and did EST and got all confident and all, but that destroyed the kind of fragility that I liked about him.

Maybe.

Or maybe it's the over the top production of the later stuff that I don't like.

Totally caning the Youtubes here. The crowd getting into it on that Montreaux Punkadiddle thing are fab!

wow that guilty clip was hilarious and amazing. and the foreign affair track is great. for another pop song (one that even got covered by Hall & Oates!). i think i've got it as a bside to five miles out

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLCYfqTU1kc

here's another great disco-y single by his sister

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXJZEC4FRa4

Had no idea Family Man was Oldfield!

Have people hear the killer Italo version of Incantations/Foreign Affair (the 2 mashed together that is) by G.A.N.G.????
If not then here: http://www.altairnouveau.com/Incantations.mp3

^awesome! there's another rad edit of foreign affair that peter visti put out a few months ago

yeah have to say most of these youtubes don't make the argument in favor of mike for me, but I'm glad people are into those & I'm not surprised disco edits of those are turning up

Incantations is the first one he did after discovering Reich & Glass, and it's his last album completely free of pop attempts (at least until Amarok). The next one Platinum has the disco cover of Glass' "North Star", which some might be strong enough for.

I know his pop albums are heartfelt & not commercial pandering -- he can write incredible melodies & hooks, but his instincts for perfect, shamelessly grandiose sidelong instrumental suites usually don't translate well over into songs, they come off a little klunky. And songs don't let him exercise the same slow developments & repetitions that he's so strong with, you can see why he felt an affinity with Glass & Reich -- Hergest Ridge isn't minimalism but it works because of the way the repetitions build and change.

The original 1974 mix of Hergest Ridge is drastically different than the post 1976 one that came out on Boxed. The original mix never made it to CD -- it's not as good, less atmospheric and textural -- you definitely want the CD version, but if you really love the piece the original mix is interesting to hear, it's mixed more like a rock record, guitars louder than the oboes. And the quadraphonic mix that came in the vinyl version of Boxed is especially epic during the guitar wall section on side 2.

wishing I had Amarok on my iPod though, that's the first thing I'm headed for when I get home tonight. that album is the only thing that's like that album.

Re the disco edits: "Guilty" is itself a discofied version of bits from Incantations.

By the way, I had no idea about the different mixes of Hergest Ridge. I think I've only heard the original.

I never put that together about "Guilty"... btw if you get the 12" it sounds rad slowed down.

i have a record at home and can't remember who it's by, but mike plays on it. it's this older long grey haired dude. cover is just his face. he almost looks wizardly w/o a beard. the album is long, ambienty, minimalist tracks. i think the titles have something to do with pythagorean?

The Mathematician's Air Display by Pekka Pohjola? He produced it.

wow, never heard that one, thanks

jaxon: he's bearded, but maybe Bedford's The Odyssey? 'The Sirens' is the great track from that one.

Mike's on Bedford's Stars End & Rime of the Ancient Mariner as well, the former is a pretty groovy post-Ligeti/Nono/Strauss dissonant orchestral freakout with timpani and awesome Oldfield guitar solos and the latter is a theatrical reading of the poem with hypnotic seasick minimalist settings of sea shanties (w/ awesome Oldfield guitar solos)

that's it! mind was cloudy at work. beard and Phaeacians. it's all greek to me. i wasn't feeling that record when i first heard it, but put it on recently w/an open mind to more ambient things and it's great. also some great guitar freakout stuff.

I never put that together about "Guilty"... btw if you get the 12" it sounds rad slowed down.

ya. i have the 7" and both that and the bside, incantations sound great at 33

David Bedford is the bloke wot sings on "Don Alfonso"

Incantations = the business.

He is brown haired on this album, I think my comparison holds.

Ha-ha. I think he's got great hair most of the time. Probably not nowadays though.

Hands up who on this thread went home and listened to Mike Oldfield last night? I did.

I checked out that Pekka Pohjola album. I enjoyed it, especially the long title track. Reminded me of Alf Emil Eik's Joy & Breath of Eternity.

saving Amarok & Hergest for a car trip this weekend

i listened to 'crises' and 'ommadawn' last night. still waiting for 'amarok', 'hergest' and 'incantations' to dl, looking forward to those very much

also can't get "foreign affair" out of my head

used to hammer tubular bells when i was a kid and have just heard guilty for the first time. in fact im already in the process of doing an edit of it to play tommorow night, wow. incantations sounds sick too, reminds me of the chord progression of a song from fenneszs venice. belbury poly has gave me such a lust for anything completely out of time that i seem to be absolutely eating up medieval style ballads with soaring guitars over the top (which is a surprise)

I will confirm that I listened to Hergest Ridge and Guilty last night.

This thread has been great for bringing me back to Mike! Last night I listened to a chunk of 5 Miles Out.......on a plane! I'm not sure if I was technically 5 miles out but it was over the Rockies so it must've been close. Actually it wasn't that good because of the plane noise. I listened to the whole thing when I got home and that is a great Mike Oldfield album. All the usual tropes are present: singing guitars, vocoders, never-ending anthemic crescendos, a full-on hey-nonny-no hoe-down; neanderthal-inspired rock banging (what is it with this guy and his caveman influences) etc. And the title track and Family Man are both really great. I'm starting to really like the vocal stuff on Incantations now too. The Hiawatha track especially. It's quite beautifully hypnotic.

I can't believe that people on ILM will rep so hard for Mike Oldfield and totally ignore Steve Hillage. Sigh.

Or Steve Tibbetts for that matter

ha.
just deleted 3 albums of Hillage off my hard disc (Rainbow/L/Fish Rising)
.. now i am beginning to want to revisit them.
off to see if they are still in my bin to restore ..

Hey, I'm a fan of Gong and was just listening to Fish Rising last week. It's great. Masonic, i thought you were allergic to that stuff owing to the pixie dust and patchouli? I don't really place it in the same category as Mike Oldfield though. Maybe I need to hear some of his later albums? I guess Hillage wasn't as ubiquitous in parental/older sibling's record collections as Tubular Bells was, so our impressionable ten year old minds weren't programmed by him in the same way that they were by MO.

I'm digging Tubular Bells right now, all I ever heard of it was that creepy opening bit. Is any of his other stuff worth it? Heard so many good and bad things about him...help!?

Read the thread.

i have read it, there's like zero consensus
thanks anyway

dude all your help is upthread

but basically, Hergest, Incantations, Amarok

i can't see photobucket
but yeah i'll have to give one of those a listen

I always assumed Tubular Bells was like Oxygene - like a classic work
But it all seems too scattershot for that; is this the way he usually records his albums?

Hergest & Incantations are a bit more coherent, but yes part of the appeal is that these are suites that go all over the place & I love Amarok because you just have no idea what it's about to do

I did check out the deluxe reissues of Hergest and Ommadawn that came out last year -- each one a 3 disc set with a 2010 remix on disc 1, original mix w/ bonus material on disc 2 and a 5.1 surround DVD

Hergest lineage is complicated -- there was the original 1974 vinyl mix, which is trying its hardest to be a rock record. then he remixed it completely for the 1976 'Boxed' set, with liner notes that quote him saying something like 'now it's the experiment in texture I always wanted it to be'. that's the only version that's been pressed to CD for the last 25 years. but the 1976 mix isn't on this deluxe edition -- it's the 1974 mix and a new 2010 mix. and the 2010 mix is actually very close to the 1974 mix in approach, back to trying to be a rock record, but carefully composed out with automation, tons of changing dynamics & balances and everything trying to reach out and grab you every few bars - utterly different details are brought out, other ones totally obscured, just a completely performance of the music.

It's always going to be the 1976 version for me. Maybe because it's the first I heard, but it's just got that floating ambience -- this new version is way too flashy. But disc 2 also has a home demo of the whole piece, tracked almost entirely with home organ & guitars, and that's worth hearing if you're a fanatic.

The 2010 Ommadawn I thought was pretty maxed out and epic, especially the end of side 1. And the packaging has that picture of his extended family under the tree.

Amarok is the Oldfield album for people who like the editing aesthetic of The Faust Tapes

Thinking I'm gonna check out Heargst then. I've heard a ton of good things about Amarok tough so I was surprised to see that it came out in 1990.

From what I can tell Oldfield never really had much of a sense of how his work would be recieved or what it should sound like, so it doesn't surprise me that he's constantly re-recording everything.

Dude was racked by self-doubt and little or no self-confidence, in the early days anyway

Timely revive. Ordered Hergest Ridge yesterday as it happens as my camping soundtrack for next week on account of good memories of this thread.

Trouble is frogbs, there's worthwhile tracks on pretty much each album I've heard (all of them up till maybe Amarok) you might like the more longform ones.

What's weird also if how much in hock he is to Glass and Reich, but especially Glass. Nobody ever really mentions it, Milton did upthread mind.

well, it was Glass he did a cover version of in 1979 (even hired Glass' engineer & arranger for that track) but I hear a lot more Reich than Glass on things like Incantations

people do not mention it because Oldfield's awkward pop songs have never been 'cool' but now that Kayne's sampled him maybe things will change

& people all crazy about things like Ford & Lopatin, y'know, if you want to see something genuinely awkward, you can only fly until dawn

ha ha oh GOD, at the ending, Mike's triumphant fist-clenching o'er fireworks

kinda love that one. it is not even wrong.

some tracks from his Guitars album keep popping up on last.fm

is his whole style just overdubs, or does he actually do band-oriented stuff?

now that Kayne's sampled him

or Kanye I guess is how you're supposed to spell his name

some tracks from his Guitars album

I just joined a band with one of the only other Oldfield fanatics I personally know and he always swears there are things worth hearing after 1991 but whenever he tries to play me some of it I get scared pretty quickly

is his whole style just overdubs, or does he actually do band-oriented stuff?

I can't think of anyone since Les Paul who'd really made overdub fetishism such a part of their music's persona, where what you hear is not trying for the illusion of a live band, but intended to be heard as one person's expression, only Les Paul sounded like a band, and Oldfield took it to a point where he sounded like an entire orchestra. common practice now, but it wasn't when Oldfield put out his debut album at age 19

but the BBC4 TV live version of Tubular Bells upthread, I like better than the record, and the late 70's live band record 'Exposed' is worth checking out after you hear the originals

y'know what I'd never seen until just now? the video for 'Heaven's Open'. please do not watch it

Been listening to Hergest Ridge a bit lately; it doesn't have the iconic feel of TB but in many ways is a "cooler" record. I have the 2010 remaster on, in what ways is the 1976 version different? Is it a dramatic thing? I'm a little annoyed by all the Tubular Bells extras - you get the original, the demo, the 2010 "remix", not sure what exactly the differences are among any of these things.