Magnum Opus
Masterworks Revisited REASSESSING TREASURES FROM A BYGONE ERA…
It’s autumn 1972. John Cale is vacating the studio. A picturesque residential studio in the Oxfordshire hills, The Manor is a recent acquisition by one Richard Branson, a hirsute, budding music impresario. The next artist booked in is a wan, taciturn 19-year-old unknown called Mike Oldfield. Noticing a shining set of tubular bells among Cale’s equipment, he asks if he can add it to the two dozen instruments he’ll use to record his one-man symphony, tentatively titled ‘Opus One’. Released the following year, that album, redubbed Tubular Bells, would become a commercial and cultural phenomenon, launching Oldfield as one of the UK’s most acclaimed composers, bankrolling Virgin Records for years to come and setting Branson on course to become the country’s most recognisable captain of industry.
Thirty-six years on and with the rights to the album now his again, Oldfield, the arch-tinkerer, remixed it again. Surely it’s hard for him to remain objective about an album he knows inside out?
“It’s actually easier now. Listening back,
