“At least in the old days you could be a bit scruffy” — Mike Oldfield recording some bass.Photo: Redferns Photo: Redferns Forty years after its original release, Mike Oldfield tells us the story of recording his hugely successful debut album, Tubular Bells. Featuring an eclectic array of instruments and an equally heterogeneous assortment of sounds and rhythms that, ingeniously blended together, created a sublime, mesmerising, sometimes startling, symphonic trip through New Age prog rock, Tubular Bells was the landmark album that launched Virgin Records — and the career of self-taught 19-year-old English multi-instrumentalist Mike Oldfield.

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Tubular Bells was issued in the UK on 25th May 1973, just 10 days after Oldfield's 20th birthday. Comprising two distinct, yet cohesive parts that each occupied an entire side of a long-playing record, it gained worldwide attention after its hypnotic opening piano theme became synonymous with the classic demonic-possession horror film The Exorcist, released at the end of that same year.

Only then did it become a British number one, amid a 279-week run on the chart. Two very different singles were made available to record buyers on either side of the Atlantic: a slapdash edit of the first eight minutes of Part One, assembled by American distributor Atlantic Records without Oldfield's authorisation, which reached number seven on the Billboard Hot 100 in May 1974; and his own re-recording of Part Two's 'bagpipe guitars', centred around Lindsay Cooper's oboe and released the following month as 'Mike Oldfield's Single'. This peaked at 31 in the UK.