Tubular Bells

Mike Oldfield's "Tubular Bells" and the Launch of Virgin Records

Mike Oldfield recorded Tubular Bells primarily during 1972 and 1973 at The Manor Studio in Oxfordshire, England, a residential recording facility owned by Richard Branson. The album, which consisted of two extended pieces filling the entirety of a long-playing record's two sides, was recorded by Oldfield largely alone, with the multi-instrumentalist playing most of the parts himself and overdubbing them in layers. The project was produced by Oldfield with Tom Newman and Simon Heyworth as recording engineers.

Tubular Bells was released in May 1973 as the inaugural release on Virgin Records, the label founded by Richard Branson and Simon Draper. The album's commercial success was crucial to the survival and subsequent development of Virgin as a label. Initially treated with considerable skepticism by the British music industry, which was unaccustomed to extended instrumental music being commercially viable in the pop market, the album eventually sold millions of copies worldwide and established Virgin as a commercially serious enterprise.

In the United States, the album's profile was transformed by its use in William Friedkin's 1973 horror film The Exorcist. Friedkin used the opening theme of Tubular Bells as the central musical motif of the film's score, and the movie's extraordinary commercial success — it became one of the highest-grossing films of the decade — introduced the music to an enormous American audience. The association with The Exorcist gave the music a sinister, unsettling cultural resonance that was somewhat at odds with Oldfield's intentions but proved commercially decisive in the American market.

Atlantic Records released an edited version of the Tubular Bells opening theme as a single in the United States. This version entered the Billboard Hot 100 on February 23, 1974, debuting at number 99, and climbed through sixteen weeks on the chart to reach its peak position of number 7 on May 11, 1974. The performance was remarkable for an instrumental piece with no conventional pop song structure, demonstrating both the power of the film association and the genuine appeal of Oldfield's melodic invention.

Oldfield had been a working musician from his early teens, playing sessions and performing with various folk and progressive rock acts before embarking on the ambitious project that became Tubular Bells. His technical facility on multiple instruments, including guitar, bass, piano, glockenspiel, and the tubular bells that give the album its title, was extraordinary, and the album's creation was a feat of sustained compositional and technical effort that took over two years to complete.

The album's structure, in which themes are introduced, developed, recombined, and transformed across its extended duration, drew on classical compositional techniques while remaining accessible to listeners without formal musical training. The gradual introduction of instruments at the album's opening, in which each new instrument is announced by name in a spoken voice, became one of the most recognized musical gestures of the 1970s. Critic and broadcaster John Peel, whose BBC Radio 1 programs were instrumental in introducing adventurous music to British audiences, was among the earliest and most influential advocates for the album.

Tubular Bells went on to sell over sixteen million copies worldwide, making it one of the best-selling instrumental albums of all time. It was followed by several sequels and companion pieces, and Oldfield returned to the material repeatedly across his subsequent career, including a celebrated live performance at the opening ceremony of the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. The album's commercial and cultural legacy extends far beyond any individual chart position or radio performance, representing a genuinely unusual case of extended, non-vocal, non-rock music achieving mass commercial success in the era of the pop single. Virgin Records, sustained in its critical early years by the revenue that Tubular Bells generated, would eventually grow into one of the most significant independent music companies in the world, signing artists including the Sex Pistols, Culture Club, Simple Minds, and later signing global stars like Janet Jackson and the Rolling Stones to its international imprints.