Mike Oldfield - The Bell
Oldfield’s oldest gimmick is that of the Master of Ceremonies, played at the climax of Tubular Bells and repeated here, at the climax of Tubular Bells II. The Master of Ceremonies is a wizened British actor (in this piece, Alan Rickman) announcing the names of instruments seconds before they play, culminating in the proclamation of the tubular bells.
It’s a statement of Oldfield’s composition style: For all he’s an impressive multi-instrumentalist virtuoso, he is first and foremost a studio musician who initially produces his pieces by playing every part on his own. That’s a common practice in the present, partly thanks to him, but when he released the original 40-minute-long Tubular Bells, a rock piece that was influenced by the likes of Saint-Saens rather than Elvis, it was stunning. The Tubular Bells pieces, after all, are not simply five-part rock pieces but complex pieces of music, all woven together with studio magic rather than with a proper orchestra.
The Master of Ceremonies is a bit silly, but at the same time it can be breathtaking, especially when you’re listening to the full piece and get fully into the music’s groove. Tubular Bells II is, in my opinion, a vastly improved composition to the original; its instruments sound better, its harmonies are more complex; its guitar solos are on occasion mindblowing, particularly seeing as they happen not separate to the rest of the music but as an integral part, so a guitar solos in harmony with choruses of people and the sounding of bells. Once The Bell, which ends the first movement, begins, the instruments drop back and a more repetitive groove begins. Then Rickman calls out one instrument after another, and every time the instrument sounds, unnervingly clear, first playing the piece’s theme and then dropping back into the harmonies of the piece. The tubular bells are the last instrument named, and they are astoundingly powerful. Then the music all fades away, leaving only Mike Oldfield playing an acoustic guitar piece. The entire movement is an effective dissertation on the nature of this compositional style.
It’s powerful because it directly addresses what’s so great about Mike Oldfield’s music: He makes magic in the studio, creates sounds that aren’t actually there. The Bells takes the listener closer to Oldfield’s processes than they are listening to the music without thinking. Certainly it’s magic. Listen to when the “vocal chords” sound, enveloping the rest of the music, and think about the fact that those voices never really sounded along with the rest of the instruments, and how beautiful the final result is, and you can appreciate the genius of Oldfield’s style.
When Mike Oldfield played Tubular Bells II on tour, he did so with an enormous band behind him. Watch it being played and you’ll see it has the same effect live. You start to realize, for the first time, just how many people go into the production of a single sound. Live you can see their faces.
The genius of Tubular Bells is not just that it is the product of a single man’s thoughts and performances. Oldfield himself has done notably better than the Bells series. The genius of Tubular Bells is that it is a piece of music about writing and playing music, about how music is created. It makes powerful music and then has you think at length about how that music is created. It’s a gimmick in the best way imaginable.
