Tubular Bells is one of the most remarkable debut albums ever made: a nearly fifty-minute instrumental, composed and played almost single-handedly by a nineteen-year-old, that launched a record label, soundtracked a horror classic and went on to sell many millions of copies. Released in 1973 as the very first record on Richard Branson’s Virgin, it announced Mike Oldfield as a once-in-a-generation talent and remains, half a century on, one of the defining albums of progressive rock.

The short version

Tubular Bells (1973) is Mike Oldfield’s debut, and the first album Virgin Records ever released. It is a single instrumental composition in two parts, one to each side of the LP, running to around fifty minutes. Oldfield, then just nineteen, played almost every instrument himself — piano, organ, guitars, glockenspiel, bass and the tubular bells that give it its name — layering them one by one at Virgin’s Manor studio in the Oxfordshire countryside. When its hypnotic opening theme was used in the 1973 film The Exorcist, the album took off worldwide: it eventually reached number one in Britain, spent an astonishing five years on the chart, and has sold well over ten million copies.

The album nobody wanted

Getting it made was not easy. Oldfield had recorded rough demos of the piece — then titled Opus One — in his London flat, overdubbing part after part on a borrowed tape machine, and he took them round the record companies, only to be turned down again and again; several thought an album-length instrumental with no singing was simply unsellable. His luck changed at The Manor, a residential studio where the young Richard Branson and his colleagues were building what would become Virgin Records. They heard something in the demos, and agreed to let Oldfield record the piece properly — and to make it the first release on their brand-new label. It was a gamble that paid off spectacularly: Tubular Bells became the foundation stone of the entire Virgin empire.

The sound

Tubular Bells is really two long pieces, each a continuous journey through many linked themes. Part One is the famous one: it opens on that instantly recognisable piano figure, in an unusual lilting metre, then builds through variation after variation — new instruments and melodies layered on top — before a snarling electric guitar bursts in, and, in a celebrated finale, an announcer grandly introduces each instrument in turn, ending with the triumphant clang of the tubular bells themselves. Part Two ranges wider still, from delicate, folky beauty to a strange, primal passage of grunting, wordless vocals, before closing with a rousing romp through the old folk tune The Sailor’s Hornpipe. Blending rock, folk, classical and hypnotic repetition, and built almost entirely by one pair of hands, it sounded like nothing else at the time.

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The songs

With only two tracks, the album’s most famous details lie within them. The roll-call of instruments that closes Part One was voiced by Vivian Stanshall of the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, who happened to be recording at The Manor next; it was the way he announced ‘plus — tubular bells!’ that gave Oldfield the album’s title. The bells themselves had been left behind at the studio by a hire company, and Oldfield simply grabbed them. Part Two contains the album’s oddest moment, the growling ‘Piltdown Man’ vocal that Oldfield produced by shouting into the microphone, and ends with the knees-up folk dance of The Sailor’s Hornpipe — a mischievous, very English full stop to an otherwise sweeping and serious work.

Reception and legacy

The scale of what followed is hard to overstate. Tubular Bells topped the UK chart, stayed on it for more than five years, and became one of the best-selling albums in history, making stars of both Oldfield and Virgin. It has since been ranked among the greatest progressive rock albums ever made, and Oldfield returned to it repeatedly, with an orchestral version, a series of sequels in the 1990s, and a full re-recording for its thirtieth anniversary. Its reach extends far beyond music: its themes are a fixture of horror and Halloween thanks to The Exorcist, and in 2012 Oldfield performed it, live, to a global television audience of hundreds of millions at the opening ceremony of the London Olympic Games. Few debut albums have ever cast so long a shadow.

The verdict

If you are going to start anywhere with Mike Oldfield, start here. Tubular Bells is not only his most important album but one of the true landmarks of its era: audacious, inventive, strange and beautiful, and all the more astonishing for being the work of a teenager alone in a studio. Some of its joins show, and its sheer fame can make it feel over-familiar; but put those things aside, listen from beginning to end, and its spell is undimmed. This is where progressive rock’s most singular one-man orchestra began — and it remains a truly great record. An essential.

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