The story of Tubular Bells: At 17, Mike Oldfield began composing snippets of what would becomeTubular Bells and recorded a demo with a Bang & Olufsen tape recorderborrowed from Kevin Ayers. He tinkered with the device so that he managed to dooverdubs on his own, allowing him to layer the sound of his Telecaster, aFender Precision bass, a Farfisa organ, and a xylophone, probably a child'stoy. In the summer of 1971, he went around record labels with his demo,without success. The demo, however, happened to please Tom Newman, who workedat The Manor studio being set up by young entrepreneur Richard Branson. In 1971,the latter was building a network of record stores and hewas unsuccessfully trying to find a record label to release the music of theyoung guitarist. It was not until 1972 that Richard Branson decided tocreate his own label and offered Mike Oldfield a place among the firstartists on Virgin.Tubular Bells was released on May 25, 1973, a few days after Mike's twentiethbirthday. It is an instrumental music album featuring a single longpiece of symphonic rock on each side of the LP. Almost all the instrumentsare played by Mike Oldfield, which required, for the time,technical feats during recording. Richard Branson promoted the albumto the English media and the famous English disc jockey John Peel played both complete sides of thealbum on his BBC rock show. The album would achieve colossal success and become one of thebiggest sellers in music history, which is remarkable for purely instrumental music. Theuse of the introductory theme as the main theme of the film The Exorcist, a few months later, would amplifythis success.
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