By AL CLARK

LONDON -- Three months ago, Mike Oldfield, a slight, reticent 19-year-old musician who began his career in a folk duo with his elder sister, was staying at his father's house in the country and excavating a duck pond in the hours not dedicated to sleeping off exhaustion. A winner's exhaustion.

He had recently given a eulogistically received London concert for which he had assembled and rehearsed a multitude of prominent musicians to perform the music from his first solo album, a continuous 50-minute multi-instrumental work which he had recorded largely by himself several months earlier.

Oldfield initially conceived Tubular Bells while he was still a member of the group Kevin Ayers and the Whole World, and he subsequently did the rounds with the demo tape when they broke up in the summer of 1971. The search for interested parties proved fruitless, and it was only through the foresight of the newly hatched Virgin Records label that he finally acquired the opportunity to record it properly. From September of last year, he became a permanent resident at the Virgin owned Manor Studios, situated in a tranquil corner of Oxfordshire. He used the facilities  whenever they were available. After such a protracted period of preparation, it was not surprising that the actual recording took only a total of about three weeks, with a further three spent on the mixing.

Oldfield was emphatic about the fact that, while he had considered arranging it for an orchestra, which he ultimately did for the concert performance, the intention had always been to do it on his own. And although the music he had written was on the whole pleasing to the senses, and thus unlikely to cause brain damage through prolonged exposure, he confessed to being extremely weary by the time completion was near. "I was getting drunk all the time," he said, pausing languidly, "and not feeling too well."

When the album was eventually released on a tidal wave of publicity, Oldfield had many reasons for feeling better. Every critic from John O'Groats to Land's End reached for his thesaurus and fired live superlatives.

Despite the fact that one individual likened the feeling it possessed to that induced by Sibelius or Debussy, Tubular Bells is, in essence, simply a shifting instrumental collage built on fairly conventional rock patterns. But What is remarkable about his achievement is that, without departing from a sphere familiar to rock-conditioned ears, he succeeds in achieving a sustained intricacy: The territory. may be already established but the manner in which he  treads it is highly innovative. It was decided to commemorate the event with a single promotional concert, and the first list of musicians announced included, among others Steve Winwood. "He would've been perfect," says Oldfield. "But when he couldn't do it, it became a bit embarrassing, not so much for me as for Virgin because they had used his name on the advertising. He was going to play guitar and organ, so we got another organist and then thought of good guitarists who would be suitable. Mick Taylor was one, and fortunately he wanted to do it."

Facing an audience which included an abundance of press - including the "serious" papers - and celebrities - Mick Jagger for one - Oldfield affirms that he was very apprehensive, especially in view of his dependence on fellow musicians: "I had fears about how it was going to turn out with so many other people involved. I was disappointed with the first half, because the things that went right in rehearsal didn't go right in performance. The second half went according to plan." At the end there was, in the words of one witness, "one of those rare spontaneous bursts of appreciation." But there was no encore. The performance of Tubular Bells was over, and so was the evening.

He was generally pleased at the reception, "Although one reviewer thought that I was trying to write a symphony, and criticised it in those terms. That really wasn't what I was attempting."

So, with Tubular Bells under his belt and Atlantic distributing the record in the States, Oldfield lies around plotting the future. "Right now, I feel slightly responsible about coming up with another piece of music. I've got a few ideas but I don't know how they're going to develop."

At the time, however, it was back to excavating that duck pond.

Source: Rolling Stone, n150, Dec 20th 1973.