Amarok is one unbroken hour of music, and one of the most spectacular acts of revenge in the history of the record industry — an album Mike Oldfield built so that his own label could never sell it. Released in 1990, it hides a coded insult in Morse code, and many of his admirers call it his masterpiece.

The short version

Amarok (1990) is Mike Oldfield’s thirteenth album: a single sixty-minute piece of continuous, ceaselessly shifting music, recorded at his home studio with Tom Newman, the engineer of Tubular Bells. Oldfield plays almost everything himself, on dozens of instruments and a few household objects. Made in the depths of his quarrel with Virgin Records, it was designed to be impossible to cut into a single, and contains a hidden message aimed at the label’s founder.

An act of revenge

By the late 1980s Oldfield’s relationship with Virgin had soured badly, worn down by arguments over contracts, royalties and advances, and by years of pressure to produce chart singles. The label wanted a sequel to Tubular Bells, the record that had launched them both. Oldfield gave them the opposite: one unbroken hour of music, arranged so that no passage could be lifted out for radio, and no single released. He called it his personal revenge. Tubular bells do appear, but the sleeve lists them, straight-faced, as long thin metallic hanging tubes. The back cover carries a mock health warning about the hazards facing cloth-eared nincompoops, parodying the spoof instructions on Tubular Bells itself.

The sound

What makes the joke bearable is that the music is glorious. Across sixty minutes Amarok moves through African rhythms and voices, Celtic melody, flamenco guitar, folk dance, long stretches of near-silence and sudden orchestral explosions, never resting and never repeating. Oldfield plays guitars of every description, banjo, bouzouki, bodhran, Northumbrian bagpipes, jaw harp, kalimba, psaltery, spinet, marimba, timpani, violin — and, in the spirit of musique concrete, shoes, spoons, a vacuum cleaner and the contents of a model-maker’s toolbox. Old friends from Ommadawn return: the percussion group Jabula, Clodagh Simonds, Bridget St John, and Paddy Moloney of the Chieftains.

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The songs

There is only one, and it will not sit still. Guitars gather into a dance, then dissolve into ambient quiet; a wall of African drumming rises and is answered by a lone penny whistle; a passage of pastoral beauty is shattered by a sudden orchestral blast. Twice Oldfield deploys the processed voice he first used on Tubular Bells, shouting into a microphone with the tape running fast so that it plays back as a growl. In an interlude he can be heard, faintly, reciting the album’s instrument list. Forty-eight minutes in, synthesized trumpets tap out a short and quite unprintable message in Morse code, addressed to Virgin’s founder. Oldfield offered a thousand pounds of his own money to the first listener who found it. Nobody did.

Reception and legacy

Virgin proposed calling the album Tubular Bells II, on the strength of the music. Oldfield refused, and has said that if it is a sequel to anything it is a sequel to Ommadawn. He would not make the real Tubular Bells II until he had left the label. Amarok sold poorly and was scarcely promoted, which was more or less the point; his contract expired a few months later. Yet its reputation has climbed steadily, and it is now the album his admirers most often name as his finest — the one where his gift for long-form melody, his multi-instrumental invention and his sheer bloody-mindedness all pull in the same direction. He has never performed it live in full.

The verdict

Amarok is not the first Mike Oldfield album to hear — Tubular Bells and Ommadawn come first — but it may well be the best, and it is certainly the most extraordinary. It asks for an uninterrupted hour and gives back a world: beautiful, funny, restless and defiant. Come for the story of the hidden message, stay for the music, and hear a musician making exactly the record he wanted to make, at the cost of everything the industry wanted from him. Few artists have ever taken revenge so beautifully.

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