I’d loved Tubular Bells in the 1970s until the great punk purge told me to cast aside all the old farts and embrace the new way of thinking.
I hadn’t been nearly as taken with Oldfield’s subsequent work, but suspect I picked this up for a quid, after revisiting the original having seen, on YouTube, the BBC live performance, featuring Steve Hillage, Fred Frith and many more veterans of Virgin’s early days.
This starts with Sentinel, a variation on the TB theme, which sounds nice, until the vocal accompaniment comes in and gives it an airline advert feel, and it kind of ambles towards a conclusion, nodding to TB1 a couple of times. Dark Star does much the same, and it’s now becoming a game of ‘spot the reworked bit of TB1’, but his insistence on vocal accompaniment irritates. Sadly, this approach leaves the whole thing fragmented in a way that TB1 wasn’t.
The Bell reprises Vivian Stanshall’s introduction of instruments, but Alan Rickman’s Shakespearean tones don’t have the playfulness of Stanshall’s.
The whole thing is an attempt to recreate and update TB1, and it doesn’t work. Altered State even revisits the Caveman theme, without the charm. TB1 was the work of a young man getting years of angst and musical ideas out of his system. TB2 is the work of a middle aged multi-millionaire, and whatever the motivation for doing it, it doesn’t have the soul and depth of its predecessor.
2* - it’s listenable, but can’t be judged without comparison to TB1, and it’s a pale imitation.
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