As much as glam rock, flared trousers and Malcolm Macdonald banging in the goals for Newcastle United, Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells remains a vivid symbol of the eventful year that was 1973.
Rubbing shoulders with such diverse musical bedfellows at the time as Pink Floyd, Donny Osmond and Slade, the pioneering album, released 50 years ago, trod a previously unwalked path. A bold and progressive piece, Tubular Bells was a 49-minute journey through classical, jazz, folk, progressive rock and electronica.
It became an instant classic - a must-have record for those 'in the know' about music. Winning a Grammy for Best Instrumental Composition in 1974, Tubular Bells is credited with helping Richard Branson build the Virgin brand. To date it has spent 287 weeks on the UK album chart where it also reached number one.
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The complex piece of music has seldom been played live in our region, but was given a rare outing at Newcastle City Hall in October 1975 when an orchestral version was performed by the 64-piece Northern Concert Orchestra. (The support act that night, incidentally, was Tyneside jazz fusion band Last Exit, featuring a young Geordie bass player called Gordon Sumner who would go on to make quite a name for himself as Sting).
Half a century after the classic album's release, Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells: A 50th Anniversary Celebration stopped off at The Sage Gateshead last night, midway through a celebratory UK tour. Oldfield himself was sadly not in attendance, but the show - featuring an expansive live group, and conducted and arranged by long-time Oldfield collaborator Robin Smith - was hugely enjoyable nevertheless.
The first half of the show featured music from Oldfield's extensive back catalogue, including Theme From Tubular Bells II (1992), Theme From Ommadawn (1975), To France (1984), and Theme From Return To Ommadawn (2017), as well as one of Robin Smith's own compositions, The Gem (2021). And for a musician largely recognised as an 'album artist', two hit singles were performed - Moonlight Shadow from 1983, and Family Man, a 1982 transatlantic smash for Hall and Oates, which not many folk will know (I certainly didn't) was originally penned by Mike Oldfield.
The second half of the show brought what we'd all been waiting for. The lights dimmed and Smith, on piano, began playing Tubular Bells' iconic opening theme (one that later gained much fame as an integral section of the soundtrack to the horror film The Exorcist). For the next hour or so, a dazzling performance of the epic work - augmented by the stage-generated smell of joss sticks and a well-synchronised light show - simply mesmerised the audience at a packed Sage Gateshead.
It will surely have sparked different memories for those in attendance. For myself, Tubular Bells was an album bought and played regularly by parents in the mid-70s, in the process unwittingly becoming part of the soundtrack of my own childhood. All these years later, I remembered nearly every note.
Each section, each shifting time signature, each dynamic twist and turn, each stylistic change of the challenging piece was handled with effortless ease by the fantastic 8-piece ensemble, with a few added 21st century flourishes complementing the 1973 original. And a big 'hats off' to the mixing engineer. The sound was crystal clear, with every instrument finding its own appropriate place, and every nuance of the piece having a voice.
The high point of the piece - the end of the record's first side - as Vivian Stanshall famously announces each of the instruments (his voice was recorded here) was faithfully reproduced. And there was surely more than one lump in the throat as the years fell away and the clanging tubular bells, situated centre stage, brought the show to its climax.
So that was Tubular Bells at 50. A magnificent performance of a piece that's now part of the fabric of popular culture. And when you think Mike Oldfield was just 17 when he began writing it, and was 19 when the album was released, it's nothing short of a work of genius.
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