Mike Heger

Although it features the beautiful recorder of Leslie Penny and the Chieftains' Paddy Maloney playing the uilean pipe, Ommadawn didn't gain Mike Oldfield the success he was looking for. The album was released in the same year as the David Bedford-arranged Orchestral Tubular Bells and nine months after Oldfield picked up a Grammy award for the original Tubular Bells album. The most pleasing attribute of Ommadawn is its incorporation of both African and Irish music in its symphonic rock & roll mainframe. Boosted by a hearty amount of different horns, piano, cello, trumpet, and synthesizer, the album has its moments of rising action, but the whole of Ommadawn fails to keep its lovely segments around long enough, and there are some rather lengthy instances that include bland runs of unvaried music…

They made precious little impact at the time, but Brighton based quartet the Mike Stuart Span have been lauded by collectors for at least a couple of decades now as one of the finest British psychedelic bands of the era. Licensing restrictions ensured that a definitive, all-encompassing Mike Stuart Span compilation remained an impossible dream.Until now, that is, because Children Of Tomorrow represents the Mike Stuart Span motherlode. Featuring every MSS studio recording known to have survived, it includes their brace of mod-soul singles for EMI and their notorious but little-heard stab at pop stardom with Fontana together with that superlative psych-pop 45 on Jewel and a host of demos in a similar vein…

Released in 2002 after a series of high-toned concept recordings, Tres Lunas is a bit of a return to straight-up, new age mood music for Mike Oldfield. The musician/composer once again spins carefully layered guitar and keyboard performances into a seemingly endless stream of space-age lullabies supported by the faintest of beats – most of which rarely exceed the intensity of a weak pulse…

Mike Oldfield's groundbreaking album Tubular Bells is arguably the finest conglomeration of off-centered instruments concerted together to form a single unique piece. A variety of instruments are combined to create an excitable multitude of rhythms, tones, pitches, and harmonies that all fuse neatly into each other, resulting in an astounding plethora of music. Oldfield plays all the instruments himself, including such oddities as the Farfisa organ, the Lowrey organ, and the flageolet. The familiar eerie opening, made famous by its use in The Exorcist, starts the album off slowly, as each instrument acoustically wriggles its way into the current noise that is heard, until there is a grand unison of eccentric sounds that wildly excites the ears…

Based in an Arthur C. Clarke novel, this album really makes you dream, travel through the stars and imagine this weird and diverse history. And this is along with Tubular Bells III, the last great album that Oldfield made…

Mike Oldfield's groundbreaking album Tubular Bells is arguably the finest conglomeration of off-centered instruments concerted together to form a single unique piece. A variety of instruments are combined to create an excitable multitude of rhythms, tones, pitches, and harmonies that all fuse neatly into each other, resulting in an astounding plethora of music. Oldfield plays all the instruments himself, including such oddities as the Farfisa organ, the Lowrey organ, and the flageolet…