Mike Oldfield’s first second within the business sunshine might have been some years within the making. However in early October 1974, the recognition of the British multi-instrumentalist was so ubiquitous that on the UK album chart, he succeeded himself at No.1.
Oldfield had been on the UK chart summit for 3 weeks with his second album Hergest Ridge, a direct bestseller that capitalized on the success of his well-known 1973 debut, Tubular Bells. That album, then again, was the final word gradual burner. The primary launch on Virgin Information, its success was a shock even to the fledgling firm.
Virgin co-founder Simon Draper instructed this author in Prog journal how the album formed the label’s enlargement. “The success of Tubular Bells gave us a lot of money,” he stated. “It gave us the opportunity of expanding abroad, which none of the other independent companies did. Having acts like Mike Oldfield and then like Robert Wyatt, like Gong, gave us a real strong foothold in Europe.”
Trying again on the album as an older man, Oldfield instructed Prog: “The sound quality is actually great, and the most amazing thing about it was that it was all first take. Nobody, myself included, would dream of doing that now.” He confessed that the album’s therapeutic audiophonic qualities labored not solely on its multi-million viewers, however on the artist himself. “It was the only time I felt sane and vaguely happy,” he stated. “I suppose it describes in a nutshell the anguish of teenagerhood, which most people can relate to. It personifies all that.”
Tubular Bells was the best new entry of a quiet chart week of July 14, 1973, at a low-key No.31. The soundtrack of the rock’n’roll nostalgia film That’ll Be The Day was the highest album of that week. Bells then began a unprecedented run that noticed it constantly among the many bestsellers for months and months to return.
The album spent virtually the entire of 1974 within the High 10 of the UK chart. On October 5, it not solely lastly made it to the summit after an epic 15 months on the survey, however did so by changing Hergest Ridge there. Oldfield is amongst a really small elite of artists to have succeeded themselves at No.1 in that means, becoming a member of The Beatles and Bob Dylan in that record.
To make the achievement all of the extra extraordinary, Bells had been sitting at No.2, pushing for that last climb, not only for your complete time that Ridge had been forward of it, however for ten weeks in a row, all the best way again into July 1974. As of autumn 2020, the Official Charts Firm offers Tubular Bells a complete of 287 weeks on the UK chart; its most up-to-date look, after an absence of some 5 years, got here in March 2018. That’s an mixture of 5 and a half years among the many British bestsellers.
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