Mike Oldfield’s seminal 1973 album Tubular Bells is being reissued for its 50th anniversary and amongst the formats is an SDE-exclusive blu-ray audio which features a brand new immersive Dolby Atmos Mix along with other rare spatial audio versions, a new stereo mix and an unreleased demo of a planned – but scrapped – Tubular Bells 4, which was made five years ago!
Back in 1973, the largely unknown 20-year-old Mike Oldfield released his debut album, the first release on brand-new label, Virgin Records. Tubular Bells became a phenomenon, topping the UK charts, winning a Grammy and it was famously featured in William’s Friedkin’s film The Exorcist, which itself became a global sensation in ’73.
This 50th Anniversary celebration of Tubular Bells, overseen by Mike Oldfield, is available on SDE-exclusive blu-ray, 2LP half-speed mastered vinyl and on CD.
Though Broken Bells featured two of the bigger names in indie and alternative music – the Shins' singer/guitarist James Mercer and producer/multi-instrumentalist Brian Burton, aka Danger Mouse – the duo managed to keep their project secret for a relatively long time. The pair were inspired to collaborate when they met at 2004's Roskilde music festival in Denmark, where they discovered they were fans of each other's work. However, they didn't start writing and recording together as a band until March 2008, when Mercer holed up in Burton's home studio in Los Angeles. The duo took a different approach to their work together than they had with their other projects: Burton avoided the sample-heavy style he used on The Grey Album and Beck's Modern Guilt, and played only live instruments, while Mercer broadened his vocal style to include falsettos and deeper registers. Mercer and Burton announced they were Broken Bells in fall 2009, and late that year they released their debut single, "The High Road." Their self-titled debut album arrived in spring 2010.