Blast From The Past: Mike Oldfield

At thegeneral, we believe that music snobbery is quite a bad thing. If you like something, love it, listen to it with pride and don't feel guilty (unless it's Justin Bieber, in which case hang your fucking head in shame). It's the mission of this blog to try and be as open as possible to all different kinds of sounds.

With this in mind, today we're taking a trip back and having a Blast From The Past episode. The previous BFTP we featured some time ago was the wonderful, scuzzy Leeds indie-pop act CUD (recently reformed and still touring, the gorgeous bastards). Today, it's the turn of Tubular Bells hero and all round guitar genius, Mike Oldfield.

Why? This is why...

Over the last few years, Mike has been remastering and re-releasing many of his early albums. This September sees the remastered and Deluxe versions of Five Miles Out and Crises take their turn.

Crises I'll skim over - it wasn't really my favourite - though the title track has its merits. However, Five Miles Out was a very good record indeed. If you don't believe me, have a listen ^clicketh ye the linky above^.

I have reservations about the remastered works. With the Tubular Bells Deluxe Remaster there was a lot of new material, demos that hadn't seen the light of day since the 1970s and they were wonderful to hear. The same goes for the Deluxe Remasters of Hergest Ridge, Ommadawn and Incantations - all contained material that was really worth a listen and (if you're a serious Oldfield nut, like what thegeneral is...) versions of tracks that definitely needed geeking over. However, then came the new editions of Platinum and QE2 - and they started to..well...wear a bit thin...

Looking at the track listings for the new Remastered versions of Five Miles Out here and Crises here there really isn't that much to tempt. Just a couple of new tracks and not much else. thegeneral has previewed them on the old iTunes and can report that yes, they sound nice and you can tell some tinkering has gone on, but really these may only be for the very serious Oldfield completists. Jungle Gardenia on Crises, is a good track though and has a nice, typical Oldfield style. thegeneral also hopes that one day he sees fit to put a remastered version of The Path on one of his next releases as that is genuinely one of the most spooky and haunting tracks that never properly saw the light of day. You can listen to that HERE.

Anyway - for those of you who care (and let us not forget, this man gave us TUBULAR FUCKING BELLS FERCHRISSAKES) the release date for both these old new albums is September 2nd. My advice is to go and revisit the Deluxe remasters of TB, Hergest Ridge, Ommadawn and Incantations first though...