Virtual Jukebox

As a naive teen - still struggling to understand myself in relation to the rest of the world - I was obsessed with the music of Mike Oldfield.  I loved 'Tubular Bells', but 'Ommadawn' seemed to strike at something deeper.  I bought the album with my first week's wages after starting work.  I think it cost me £3.  Every night, I'd come home from work and sit and listen to it as I ate my dinner, alone, with my headphones on, whilst mum and dad sat and watched the telly.  The bit after 12 minutes always has me hypnotised.  The drums.  The strange, foreign-sounding lyrics, the dramatic crescendo.  I played it over and over and over and over then... and I still do, over 40 years later.  It seems to strike at something primal...

Ommadawn Part 1

As a naive teen - still struggling to understand myself in relation to the rest of the world - I was obsessed with the music of Mike Oldfield.  I loved 'Tubular Bells', but 'Ommadawn' seemed to strike at something deeper.  I bought the album with my first week's wages after starting work.  I think it cost me £3.  Every night, I'd come home from work and sit and listen to it as I ate my dinner, alone, with my headphones on, whilst mum and dad sat and watched the telly.  The bit after 12 minutes always has me hypnotised.  The drums.  The strange, foreign-sounding lyrics, the dramatic crescendo.  I played it over and over and over and over then... and I still do, over 40 years later.  It seems to strike at something primal...

Ommadawn Part 1

That's rung some (tubular?) bells. In my teens, I didn't have a huge amount of interest in pop music. Partly through my Dad's taste in music, I was mesmerised by the likes of Mike Oldfield, Vangelis, Tangerine Dream, Tomita, JM Jarre, etc. I always had a preference for music that took me on journey, and where the experience wasn't spoiled by paying attention to lyrics. I loved anything with unusual instrumentation, bizarre time-signatures and polyrhythms, atmospheric effects etc. The opening to Tubular Bells was the first riff I ever taught myself on a keyboard; blissfully unaware that it's in a peculiar time signature. When my folks were out, I would sneak a go on my Dad's posh headphones (I wasn't supposed to touch the hi-fi!). I always laid down in the middle of the room, and would get the feeling of falling through the floor when I slipped into a little universe filled only with the music.

Odd to think that I later played in punk bands! I'm not sure if my continuing preference for odd time-signatures was a blessing or a curse in those - the later stuff I did came out like Crass flailing out an attempt at a Gong track! (I have a compulsion for utter chaos in music on a regular basis!)

Anyhow, thinking back to my teenage "falling through the living room floor" moments, and since I mentioned "little universes", here's one that I always loved for some reason, even though there is so little to it, and it has lyrics - the vital statistics of planet Earth...