Celebrating 50 years of Tubular Bells – Simon Dobson and the Royal Philharmonic Concert Orchestra

Venue:

The Royal Albert Hall

Date: 01/11/2022

I’ll try and keep this as brief as I can, but as a highly opinionated Mike Oldfield fanatic and this was a once in a lifetime experience, so I’m going to find it hard to hold back my opinions. I apologise in advance.

If you can’t be bothered reading all this, I’ll summarise: a good gig in an astounding venue, with wonderful emotional highs and some disappointing lows (mainly in the shape of Brian Blessed).

What’s the capacity of the Royal Albert Hall? Google says 5,272, and last night it was about two thirds full, so at a guess there were about 3,000 people in attendance. In advance, I was curious about how this would work. Are there really 3,000 Mike Oldfield fans willing to go to a concert of his music when Mike himself wasn’t even involved with the event?

In short, no, there aren’t. Maybe it’s because I was WAY up in the high seats and all the True Fans paid through the nose to sit down in the middle of the action, but judging from the conversations going on around me, the majority of people were just there for a wee night out at the Albert Hall, had never really heard of Mike Oldfield, and didn’t particularly care what the orchestra was playing. The two guys to my right were raving about having seen ABC’s Lexicon of Love at the Albert Hall previously, but seemed to at least be aware of Tubular Bells. The guy to my left, once he realised I was here as a fan, didn’t know what he was listening to and started to use me as an unofficial guide to what was being played. (He even got up to go home after the first act, before I explained they hadn’t even played the Bells yet, and that was still to come in the second act).

My own journey to the gig was quite a pilgrimage. I sniffed out the most cost effective way of getting from Glasgow to London, like the canny Scot I am, and there was no real alternative to the cheap-as-chips Megabus – overnight down there, a day of tramping around London (which was very pleasant, and involved a trip to see The Evil Dead at the Prince Charles Cinema), then the gig, then overnight back to Glasgow. As I write this, it’s the day after, and I’m a bit frazzled to say the least.

I was ambivalent before the show. I’m a hard man to please and I wasn’t sure such a show could live up to my expectations. Ever since being stopped dead in my tracks by Tubular Bells, as a musically sensitive and highly impressionable 10 year old, I’ve loved that album like nothing else in the world. The idea of a 50th anniversary show with none of the original musicians (not even Oldfield himself) in attendance, arranged and conducted by a guy I’d never heard of (Simon Dobson), and with an extremely tacky looking promo image of a tubular bell wrapped into a rough “50” shape (truly horrible) was not that appealing to me. The icing on the unappealing cake is that the 50th anniversary of the album isn’t until next year (I should know, I was born in the same month it came out), so their timing is all screwy (but not as screwy as the guys who jumped the gun and did a 50th anniversary show at the Queen’s Hall LAST year).

On the plus side, however, the inclusion of Brian Blessed as the MC seemed like a hoot, and like many of my generation I have fond memories of him as Vultan in Flash Gordon. Plus, it’s the bally Albert Hall: I had never been and this was a good excuse. And, most tantalisingly, they were apparently going to play Hergest Ridge (side one) and Ommadawn (side one) as well.

That last point was the clincher for me. If there are two things I love in this world just as much as Tubular Bells, it’s Oldfield’s two follow up albums, Hergest Ridge and Ommadawn. Never in all my years would I imagine I would get to hear them played live in concert. I couldn’t miss this.

(An interesting point to note is that, had Oldfield actually been involved in this concert, he probably would have vetoed the inclusion of Hergest Ridge, as he himself doesn’t rate it).

Anyway, let’s get to the show.

The stage line up:
Three guitarists front and centre, sharing a variety of acoustic, electric and spanish guitars, as well as a mandolin. The stars of the show, they were uniformly spot on in their playing, copying Oldfield’s style to perfection, and painstakingly recreating all those weaving, triplicate guitar patterns that give these albums their characteristic sound. Their playing just reeked of 1973, which was just what the doctor ordered.
A bass player, stage right. This guy was also great, but gave the whole thing more of a modern feel. It was a deep, lush bass sound, and since the music (apart from some key areas) has a deliberate lack of drums, the bass was crucial in holding the sound together and making it fill the hall.
Two keyboardists, one at each side of the stage. One was the ubiguitous grand piano, the other played a variety of synth patches to round out the sound, from hammond organ to harp. (No live harp, I’m afraid to say, which was a bit disappointing).
Behind the front guys, a trio of drummer/percussionists, also looking after melodic percussion sounds like glockenspiel and some long, thin, metallic hanging tube things.
Then behind them, the conductor and the orchestra: a stripped down ensemble. About 20 people I think? A FANTASTIC choir, a group of string players, a group of wind players and a group of brass players. I mean, you can’t really fault the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, can you?

The first half of the show consisted of the non-Tubular Bells stuff.

Unfortunately, before the music started we had Brian Blessed giving us an… introduction? He’s a lovely guy and an engaging speaker, but he honestly just waffled about 10 minutes about god-knows-what, and didn’t seem to really know or care what Tubular Bells was or why he was even there. I do get that they needed a face to front it all, and he’s a larger than life guy and an infectious presence. But they should definitely have written him a short script for him or something to set the scene and give some background to the music. (Or maybe they did and he just threw away the notes). As everyone got a bit more uncomfortable, shifting in their seats and wondering where he was going with his monologue, he spoke about… well, I don’t know. Anything but Mike Oldfield. He talked about his mountain climbing, he quoted his famous line from Flash Gordon, he told us he was a trained cosmonaut, he told us he was 86. He seemed to think the night was all about him, frankly. About six or seven minutes in, he seemed to suddenly remember where he was… “Bells… yes, bells!” … and started telling some story about the sound of the bells in the church in Innsbruck. Who knows where he was going with that, but his anecdote just petered out anywy.

I actually don’t think he had ever heard of Tubular Bells before he was offered this gig. Someone explained to him that his job was to introduce the instruments (the bit that Vivian Stanshall does on the record) and then do the Caveman voice on Part Two (more of that later), and he just kind of ran with it.

(However, ’twas ever thus. Viv Stanshall himself was hardly that bothered with the original Tubular Bells. he had to be coaxed out his drunkenness and edited out of all recognition to fit him into the recording at the time. And his one and only live appearance, at the 1973 Queens Hall show, broadcast live on the BBC, was a shambles: he said all the right words… but in all the wrong places.)

But then he left the stage, Simon Dobson came on, and without a word started up that instantly familiar (to me anyway), warming, ethereal melody line at the start of Ommadawn. And all was forgiven, and I totally melted. It was absolutely beautiful. In that atmosphere, in that glorious hall with spotlights slowly circling the place, with the choir and the strings all reaching to heaven, the walking bass throbbing away… I’d never heard anything like it. As the piece played, the big screen showed tasteful images like a misty forest, the aurora borealis and raindrops, which all matched the music beautifully. If you don’t know Ommadawn, it’s hard to describe just how good this was.

The climax, and overall probably the best moment of the night, was the first climax leading to the folky section with the recorder melody. Teetering on JUST the right side of celtic-y Riverdance-ness, it genuinely brought a tear to my eye.

The closing section with the tribal drumming was also terrific, the ensemble capturing the perfect sense of tension and release that drives the original recording. (Pedant alert: I’m about 90% sure there was a pre-recorded tribal drum loop playing underneath; it just sounded too massive to be played by those three percussionists alone. Still, it felt like the roof was going to rise off the place, so who’s caring?).

It was some opener.

Next was even better. Side One of Hergest Ridge: sadly, a truncated version, missing out the long, wistful opening section with the penny whistles and all that. It just jumped straight in at the sublime oboe bit about seven or eight minutes in. Bafflingly, there was no oboe, but the combo of acoustic guitars, flutes and strings was so bewitching it just worked and there was no grounds for complaining. Here, Simon Dobson’s arrangement shone through. The original is a delicate balance of acoustic guitars, that oboe, twinkly electric guitars and organ drones, with a unforgettable horn part adding a counter melody – Dobson teased out a near-perfect interpretation with a variety of voices and orchestral sounds washing in and out beautifully, stretching it out just enough to make it a viable live experience, coaxing an all-encompassing sound out of the solipsistic original. The lights in the Albert Hall twinkled, the big screen showed drone footage of the real life Ridge that inspired the music, and I shed my second genuine tear of the night.

The closing section of Hergest Ridge Part One is this buildup around a driving bass guitar line, and the ensemble played a blinder at this bit, hitting the perfect groove. As it drew to a close, I had this feeling that this was perhaps the most awe-inspiring musical moment of my life (so far). It really was that good.

And then it was over. Given it’s hardly a well-known album, and its composer doesn’t really even care for it, I don’t think I’ll ever get a chance to hear Hergest Ridge live again in this lifetime. Certainly not played as well as this in a venue as good as this.

The first half drew to a close with a singer called Ella Shaw coming on to sing Oldfield’s 80s hit, Moonlight Shadow. Shaw was great, but I found myself wondering why they couldn’t have just asked the original singer Maggie Reilly herself. She’s a key part of the success of that record (the central point of Oldfield’s 80s pop comeback after his prog years) and she is still active. Maybe they did ask her and she wasn’t interested?

Anyway, I’m not a huge fan of the song, and I felt it had been drafted into the setlist for people who would have been baffled by all the folky proggy stuff up until now. Hilariously, the guy to my left asked me if that was “that Cat Stevens song”.

The second half was Tubular Bells in its entirety.

I’m sorry to say this wasn’t as successful (for me) as Ommadawn and Hergest Ridge had been. I’ve been trying to work out why that was (Brian Blessed aside, which I’ll get to in a moment). I think maybe it’s because the original Tubular Bells was so unique and so much of its moment that it just can’t be repeated: it was made on a shoestring and held together with sticky-back plastic and cannibalised studio gear by guys who didn’t have the experience to know how to do it any other way, it’s odd, it’s dream-like, it’s muffled, it’s all out of tune. Oldfield himself has spent half his career trying to write sequels and trying to remake it, all with less than a tenth of the success of the original. It’s been picked apart, remixed, cleaned up, re-released on countless occasions, yet still sounds best on that muffled old vinyl, old V2001.

By comparison, this slightly tweaked and orchestrated version is smooth, lush, widescreen, sounding more like a Hans Zimmer soundtrack than the bonkers creation of a 19 year old musical progeny.

In short, the original is homely, spooky and insular. This wasn’t, couldn’t, be the same.

The audience roar when that instantly recognisable piano riff started up felt strangely out of place. I would have preferred hushed silence. But then I’m a snob and a misanthrope.

There were great moments:
The bass riff on the end section of Side One was excellently done. It sounded deep and brooding, with the lights in the hall going dim with just some circling spotlights in the middle of the place. And the arrangement was brave enough to keep this hanging, lingering, building the tension just like the original.
And… yes… when Brian Blessed came out and started to introduce the instruments… it worked. He was very different to Vivian Stanshall (booming instead of deadpan) but it was an amazing sense of relief after the tension buildup, and it just worked. (In my opinion: there are some very angry Oldfield fans on the internet today who hated what he did with it).
The opening section of Side Two, the Quiet Bit, could have so easily lost the subtlety of the original. But the three guitarists came into their own here. It sounded brilliant, with that hazy, twinkly sound that made the original so magical.
The same goes for the closing section of Side Two, the other Quiet Bit. They did the impossible and reproduced Oldfield’s un-reproducable twin guitar duet, and it was amazing to see this in the flesh.

And there were some not-so-great moments:
A lot of the humour of the original was truly of-its-time, and I say that as a fan. There are some jokey, cacophonic moments on Side One and then there is the stomping, Caveman bits on Side Two. Like Monty Python or the Bonzo Dog Band, these are frothy and spontaneous and are great as little time capsules of the moments they were made. But as soon as you bring them into the daylight and recreate them, the humour just disappears.
The Caveman bit in particular, Brian Blessed’s encore, was, frankly, an embarrassment. He gurned, he warbled, he did big evil laughs and big hearty laughs and intimidated people in the front rows. He did his Brian Blessed thing, essentially. But I couldn’t wait for it to end; it just didn’t work. There was about thirty seconds in the middle where his mic dropped out, and that was the best thirty seconds in the section.
As well as this, the tasteful screen images of Ommadawn and Hergest Ridge were gone, replaced by some tacky looking, mid-90s standard CGI animation of some floating bells and dolphins and stuff. (There was one point where it was just some footage of a rolling sea, and that was gorgeous but all too brief).

The standout moment of Tubular Bells, however, was the simple little acoustic guitar solo bit at the end of Side One. You may know that bit, but you may actually have ignored it because it’s right at the end after the big climax, and it goes so quiet you have to turn up your stereo to hear it properly. Anyway, at that point, the house lights dropped away completely apart from a single spotlight on the centre guitarist, clearly relishing those 40 seconds or so with the audience in the palm of his hand, delicately picking his way into silence before the roaring standing ovation which immediately followed.

Finally, to close, the inevitable Sailors Hornpipe. It was fine. Again, something that sounded naive and joyous on the original record, but faintly kitsch here.

And that, as they say, was that.

The audience:

As I’ve said, in the section where I was sitting, it seemed like a lot of people who were vaguely familiar with the name Tubular Bells and just wanted a night out at the Royal Albert Hall with Brian Blessed and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra.

It made me think..

Is there any other “rock” album that would get this kind of treatment? I don’t really think there is. This is one of three “50th anniversary” Tubular Bells shows doing the rounds at the moment (probably the most prestigious of the three). None involve Oldfield or any of his collaborators from the time and none are “official” as such. It’s probably reflective of the fact that Tubular Bells feels like just as much symphonic music as rock music. It’s probably unique in that respect.

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