Tubular Bells - it’s still all about the Bass

Ladies and gentlemen. Live music is back!  And fittingly after 18 months in enforced hibernation, it is nostalgia fuelled.  Hot on the heels of seeing the extraordinarily good Rumours of Fleetwood Mac at The Cadogan Hall, I just got back from seeing the ‘50th Anniversary Performance’ of Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells at the Royal Festival Hall.  Well, technically it was not the 50th anniversary of the album (which was famously the first record on Richard Branson’s newly created Virgin Records) as the album was released in 1973.  The composition was though started a few years earlier when a 17-year old Oldfield, fascinated by all the instruments he saw at Abbey Road studios, resolved to make an album on which he played everything.  And play he did, creating a wonderful evocative textured and varied album that over two sides is exquisite in its execution, production and, almost fifty years later, still sounds somehow contemporary (horn pipe solo excepted). 

The Festival Hall production was very well done – though unsurprisingly, without Oldfield there.  The London event marks the start of a two-year tour of the show.  The “show” also features an acrobatic troupe called Circa, who perform death-defying contortions and acrobatics, while the exemplary nine-piece band play the album note for note with vigour and verve, particularly the pianist Dominic Ferris, who seemed to be enthralled to be playing live. The idea of the dance troupe, I guess, is to illustrate the changing textures and passages of the music, but their performance probably distracts from the great musicianship, though an earlier non-Tubular segment did feature the bassist Lisa Featherston singing Moonlight Shadow.  She also had the unenviable task of playing out the last 8 minutes of Part 1, where Oldfield’s complex bass figure is played repeatedly with finger achingly accuracy and speed.  A great feat of physical endurance – mirrored by the acrobats swinging from the trapeze above her head.  If you’re intrigued by the bass playing – and why not!, I have shared below a clip from a documentary about Oldfield that I found inspiring.  On some remote island hideaway, he talks about making the record and he also plays the opening bass sequence.  It’s a real wonder to see this shy man, reconstruct a small part of a classic Album that became the template for fifty years of progressive rock, the soundtrack to The Exorcist, inspired a new genre called ‘New Age’, inspired producers and instrumentalists and became a feature element of the opening of the 2012 London Olympics. For me though, it’s still about that bass.