It’s hard to imagine Tubular Bells getting made today. But 1973 was a very different time, and a much younger and less weird Richard Branson was willing to take chance on Mike Oldfield and his astonishingly creative and original project. The result, of course, was a spectacular piece of music written, performed and recorded almost single-handedly by Oldfield and which has become one of the most famous and acclaimed albums of recent decades.
And so fifty years on (or fifty-one; it’s taken a while for things to make their way down under), Robin Smith, a long-time collaborator with Oldfield, has put together a seven-piece band to perform Tubular Bells in its entirety by way of marking its anniversary, and the show made its way to Auckland’s Bruce Mason Centre last night.
It’s an interesting format, not far removed from the Come Together shows we’ve seen recently. The first half of the set is a “greatest hits” package, with the second half a full run-through of the featured album. So we opened with Smith alone at his grand piano, improvising around the intro to Tubular Bells II (yes, Oldfield has taken many, many trips to this particular well), a passage not found on the original album. The band took their places and added their instruments to the mix until it was time for Lisa Featherstone, giving a serious “Fleetwood Mac soundtracking I Dream of Genie” vibe, sang a languid but effective version of To France from 1984’s Discovery album. A couple of instrumental passages followed, from Hergest Ridge and Ommadawn, along with guitarist Jay Stapley, the world’s oldest and most utterly relaxed guitar hero, singing Family Man from the 1982 album Five Miles Out. I’d have preferred to have heard the title track, but such is the extent of Oldfield’s back catalogue that picking out half a dozen tracks is an exercise that’s inevitably going to leave someone unsatisfied.
But no matter. After a brief intermission, Tubular Bells began. Smith picked out that unmistakeable piano line that sends shivers down the spine no matter how many times you hear it. Faithful to the original recording, the sound grew as Maxime Obideau, putting down his guitars and mandolin for a moment, added reed and pipe organ, and Featherstone’s magnificently thrumbling basslines underpinned the whole thing. Twenty-some minutes followed of the most extraordinary music. There’s little point in trying to describe it—if you’re familiar with this piece of music, you’ll have a pretty decent idea of what we were treated to, and if not, then it’s hard to do it justice. This, however, is what Smith’s band did. Stapley and Obideau traded guitar duties, Obideau as animated as Stapley was understated, with Kwesi Edman producing a surprising range of sounds from his electric cello. And driving the entire thing was a percussion section led by Will Miles-Jack that added an unexpected but entirely welcome dimension to the sound. This was a remarkably faithful reading of Oldfield’s original recording—he has, as we’ve said, reinvented and reimagined Tubular Bells countless times, from Tubular Bells II and its late-80s pop sheen, to Tubular Beats and other versions that are almost unrecognisable as Bells. But Smith and his band played a version that for the most part remained true to the original.
A notable exception came at the very end of Part 1, a percussion workout that preceded a quick showcasing of each instrument before the Master of Ceremonies’ roll-call of the instruments which was not expected but which fitted into Oldfield’s framework perfectly. Smith, it should be repeated, has worked extensively with Oldfield, who has endorsed these shows, and this addition worked well.
And then on to Part II. For all the magnificence, the beauty, the splendour, the sheer creativity of side one of this phenomenal album, I’ve never quite been able to get on board with side two. It’s just a tad noodly for me, that little bit too meandering, all build-up and no climax. And that’s what we got last night. Smith’s reading of Tubular Bells cleaves, as I’ve said, quite closely to the original, and so it’s only fair that that’s what he and his band played last night. But until the guitar wig-out that builds up to the profound silliness of Piltdown Man, it feels like a piece that doesn’t quite know where it’s going next. But to the extent that it does know what it’s doing, Smith and his band played a strong and accurate rendition of it.
So what to make of last night’s performance? It was, obviously, a show for Oldfield devotees. I’m a fan, and I loved it. I’m not sure it would have won over any Oldfield agnostics, but with the man himself notoriously stage-shy, Smith has put together a worthy tribute to one of my favourite pieces of music, and I’m awfully glad I got to see it.