Tal y como apunta nuestro compañero Guitar Tune hay un artículo muy interesante en el que Mike repasa sus discos favoritos.

http://thequietus.com/articles/21611-mike-oldfield-interview-favourite-albums?page=2

Como cuenta algún chascarrillo me ha parecido que tenía enjundia para un topic.

Gabriel Fauré - Requiem

I was at a church school for the last two years of my schooling, in Essex. I left school on my 15th birthday - I couldn't wait to get out of there. But our teacher used to play us little snippets of classical music. So I had heard bits of Beethoven and Bach from quite an early age. Anyway, out of this I discovered Requiem. In fact I’ve recently uncovered some old vinyl records and I’ve still got my original copy.I just love the clarity of the voices; I love the sopranos. Also, the peace that it gave me was very important. I was really quite wound up as a teenager, very prone to anxiety in those days. I would listen to Requiem to calm those anxieties - it had a very real calming influence on me.

MAurice Ravel - Piano Concerto in G

Why choose this? Well, it's beautiful. The way it arpeggiates and tumbles around while there is another, slower melody happening: quite remarkable. I tried to use that methodology in some of my music, with varying results. It’s not easy. At the start of Tubular Bells, there's an arpeggio that develops and builds, and this melody starts to work its way around another slower melody. It's a complex technique and it’s one I tried to learn and tried to use to benefit my own music.

Sibelius - Symphony No 5

The clever trick here is that the main melody in the first movement is actually happening in the bass line but at a quarter of the speed of the bass. You think there's something wrong with the bass - it's not actually following the chords. But it is. It's just at a different speed. It's so innovative. Again, I’ve tried so often to use it in my work. In fact at the start of Tubular Bells side two, there's a whole cycle of tunes that are all in different time signatures and all happening at once. There’s piano, there are a couple of guitars, and they eventually all come together but only after about two minutes. I'm sure nobody's ever noticed that! Maybe somebody will notice it in about a hundred years. I love the idea of hiding things in music - you know, secrets to be discovered. Have I done much of that? Oh yes! In Incantations, there's a melody that reappears later on but in reverse. It's a beautiful melody in itself, but it's also quite good played backwards!

Satie - Gymnopédies

I have a real love for this whole period: the early 1900s up to about 1940. And not just music - I love so much of the art as well. I really like the Impressionists. I love Dali too, love all of that stuff. And I think Gymnopédies fits in really well with much of the work of that period. I've always gained a great deal of pleasure from so much of the art of that era. I visited Renoir’s house and I went to the Monet museum. Can I play it myself? Oh yes! Well, I used to play what we'll call a version of it. I don't actually read music, you know. But yes, it was a great inspiration to me. As were the movements of the period as a whole: just wonderful people. A really exciting time for music and art.

Mahler - Symphony No 5

The Satie is so light and the Mahler is so dark and heavy. I love the area in the Alps, you know, around Lake Constance and the Rhineland. Such a beautiful part of the world. In fact, I lived around there in the 80s when I was recording Discovery. You may recall I recorded a piece called ‘The Lake’ - it was inspired by the landscape in this part of the world. The landscape was an inspiration and so was the Mahler. Like much of the music on this list, I haven’t listened to it, really, of late. But when I was starting to make my own music, it’s a piece that inspired me very much.

John Renbourn - The Lady & The Unicorn

I started off in the folk clubs in Reading. There was one in particular called The Rising Sun and people would advertise in the window looking for musicians to play with. I played in a few duos at that time. And anyway, people like John would often play as a guest at the local clubs. There was Bert Jansch as well but John Renbourn was the real star at that time. I just made it my mission in life to be able to play like them. I would play this record for just a few seconds, lift the needle and try to play that bit on my guitar. And eventually I was able to play much of his work. Not with the same fluidity, of course. I mean, I was only about twelve! But it enabled me to develop my own technique, and from that I was able to learn how to make my own music. It was actually quite a complex technique, Renbourn's: the way that thumb and fingers were required to play together. But, yes, it was from being able to play Renbourn's music that I learned how to write.

Led Zeppelin - IV

I loved Led Zeppelin. Of course, this album is such a very good example of British rock & roll of the era but I could, really, have chosen several others. The second album, for example. There was a red electric guitar in the Exchange and Mart in Reading and, after having played acoustic guitar quite a while, I really wanted to play electric. So I persuaded my dad to buy it for me. And I only had this tiny little amplifier so I bought a fuzzbox and learned to play using distortion, which is a totally different thing from playing folk guitar. And I would marvel at the sound Led Zeppelin made - how were they doing that? Such incredible guitar playing. Jimmy Page had this really deep talent. Look at a song like ‘Stairway To Heaven’, where he plays such beautiful acoustic folk guitar and then switches to very accomplished electric playing. I never did get to see Led Zeppelin play. I always wanted to but I was just never in the right place at the right time.

Cream - Disraeli Gears

And it wasn't just Led Zeppelin, of course. Cream, too. For a three piece, they made such a rich sound and they could really replicate that sound when they played live. I played Disraeli Gears a lot, as did  pretty much everyone. And I used to love Eric Clapton, of course. A very, very gifted player. I loved how he would play two solos at once - you know, a question and an answer? There’s this piece on the Piltdown Man part of Tubular Bells where I have two guitars playing solos and they interweave like that. And that was hugely influenced by Eric Clapton and Cream.

Hair - OST

When Kevin Ayres and the Whole World split up in the early 70s, I was at a loose end, and my agent phoned me and asked me if I would like to join the Hair musical band. Now, Alex Harvey was playing guitar in the live band for the show at the Shaftesbury Theatre and sometimes he needed a guest to do his part when he couldn't do it. So I had to play all the guitar parts and I really found it quite challenging. There's a lot to learn. But I remember always looking forward to getting to ‘Let The Sunshine In’ because the guitar starts it off. If you think, the end of part one of Tubular Bells [hums bass riff] is a much more elaborate version of the ‘Let The Sunshine In’ riff. It's probably where the idea came from because ‘Let The Sunshine’ In builds and builds. I do like things that start off small and get bigger and bigger. Ravel's Bolero: that should be on the list. I used to love that. So I owe a lot to being in the musical Hair, just for just the fact that I got bored and started improvising a lot. I think it put the singers and dancers off.

Ravi Shankar - Sound Of The Sitar

I loved this album and I loved his album Portrait Of A Genius, too. I don't know where that all came from, really, but I did listen to them a lot at the time. He was very popular and rightly so. The thing is, there was no real distinction between music then. It was just music. There was no "Oh I like this but I don't like that". We used to listen to everything. If it was good, we didn’t care what type of music it was. Bob Marley. Isaac Hayes. It was all just music, you know? And so we loved Ravi Shankar. His sitar playing was incredible but the tabla solos were wonderful, too. They were very inspiring - they were how I got the idea for the drum section which I used in the original Ommadawn.

The Dubliners - A Drop Of The Hard Stuff

Being half Irish myself - my mother was from Cork- I loved Irish music. And it wasn't just the Dubliners. There's so much fantastic Irish music and so many fantastic Irish musicians. The Chieftains were very traditional and then you had Planxty, of course, and The Bothy Band. The Bothy Band were just superb! So yes, I've chosen a Dubliners album for this list but, really, there were so many albums of traditional Irish music I could have chosen. And, again, there are some strong influences of that in the original Ommadawn I think.

Centipede - Septober Energy

When we were on the road with Kevin Ayres and the Whole World, everybody was talking about Centipede: "Oh, have you seen Centipede?" They were this band led by Keith Tippett. Robert Fripp produced the album. And at one point, we ended up on the same bill as them. Amazing. They had this huge orchestra - 40, 50, 60 people. There were classical strings, jazz saxophone, electric guitars. They had singers, there were just so many people up there. The drummer was Robert Wyatt. He was Kevin's friend from Soft Machine and the whole thing was just incredible. Such a great band, Centipede, and it became my mission as a young musician to be able to do something like that myself one day. It probably led me to Tubular Bells: that idea of having one long piece of music played on lots of different instruments with lots of changes. It was a tremendous influence.

David Bedford - Star Clusters, Nebulae and Places In Devon

I got to know David when we were both playing with Kevin Ayres. His hobby was flying model aeroplanes and mine was, too. So we would go flying planes together. He was a great avant-garde composer. He was also interested in astronomy and he was fascinated by this whole concept of the light from stars taking hundreds of years to reach us and the notion of the light connecting us to these Bronze Age settlements from that time: the light being concurrent with the time at which these settlements were active. To put that into a piece of music was just so odd and so fantastic. We were on the road together for two or three years with the Kevin Ayres band. We were constantly on the road, in the same transit van going all over the place. It was exhausting. I didn't actually work with David on his recording of The Orchestral Tubular Bells. I didn't approve of that. I really didn't want there to be an orchestral version. That was Richard Branson. He wanted me to go on tour to promote the album and I just wasn't up to it. I had done this one concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall but he wanted me to tour the world. His answer to that was to make an orchestral version so that so that the album could tour, be played by different orchestras. So it was him who hired David and I wasn't involved. Of course, I got my own back eventually with Amarok. [Oldfield, in response to ongoing lack of promotion for his work, inserted a section of morse code into his 1990 album that spelt out: "Fuck off RB."]

Salud

23 Enero 2017, 18:02:56

 Hay unos cuantos que no conozco, así que habrá que ponerse con ellos! Gracias!

Casi me he emocionado con que Mike haya recordado a David Bedford, precisamente el primer y único disco que llegó a sacar Oldfield Music como tal.

En Star Clusters...  Mike no tocó nada, pero se supone que se encargó del sonido de la edición. Mike lo publico en 1983, a la vez que estrenaba su marca Oldfield Music, y se trataban de dos grabaciones de 12 años atrás de David Bedford, más clásicas, nada de rock progresivo. Quizá nunca hubiera visto la luz si Mike no lo hubiera publicado. ¿Cuántas grabaciones de David Bedford no habrán quedado para el olvido al no tratarse de un autor puramente comercial? Porque, aunque los discos de los 70 en los que participó Mike fueran magistrales (The Odyssey o The Rime of the Ancient Mariner me parecen increíble, e Instructions for Angels, soberbio; la única marcianada dura fue Star's End), fueron discos que en aquel momento tenían su tirón, al igual que Mike. Cualquiera de esos discos encajaba en una estantería en la que estuviera Ommadawn y Hergest Ridge. Pero Star Clusters era otro rollo, y Mike se lo publicó años más tarde.

Siempre he admirado muchísimo a Bedford y en los últimos años me daba una cierta pena que Mike apenas lo mencionara... ni siquiera cuando le preguntan por cuáles han sido sus colaboradores preferidos. Así que me encanta que lo haya recordado en esta selección musical.

Insisto, si alguien no ha tenido ocasión de escuchar los discos de los 70 de David Bedford, ya está tardando!!

En otro orden cosas, parece que a Mike no le ha dejado huella ni un sólo disco en más de 30 años...

Me ha encantado este artículo. Muy buena idea crear este hilo Killing Bell! Efectivamente, no hay demasiada información sobre los músicos/discos favoritos de oldfield; lo encuentro de lo más valioso.

Sin duda este artículo se puede completar. En Man on the rocks, confesó haber escuchado antiguos discos de los Rolling Stones que le inspiraron. "Irene" podría bien ser una canción del Exile on Main Street.  "I give myself away" también me recuerda al "Losing my touch" de los rolling, pero en este caso supongo que es coincidencia de inspiración: Keith Richards y Mike Oldfield que, ya en sus años, se dejan llevar...

En algún video, creo que del aniversario de tubular bells, dijo también inspirarse en algún músico vanguardista de finales de los 60 que utilizaba sintetizadores, pero no me quedé con su nombre (lo buscaré). Y por, supuesto, está Bach: en alguna entrevista de la TV reconoció haberse inspirado en la fuga de la "tocata y fuga en re menor" para el inicio de Tubular Bells.

Jodo... El Tito tiene como uno de sus favoritos el Septober Energy de Centipede.... Lo tengo en vinilo porque nunca se editó en cd. Hay que echarle muchos huevos a ese disco... Me alegra que algo de mi queridísimo Robert Fripp haya inspirado a Mike.

NOSOYESTO dijo:

En algún video, creo que del aniversario de tubular bells, dijo también inspirarse en algún músico vanguardista de finales de los 60 que utilizaba sintetizadores, pero no me quedé con su nombre (lo buscaré). Y por, supuesto, está Bach: en alguna entrevista de la TV reconoció haberse inspirado en la fuga de la "tocata y fuga en re menor" para el inicio de Tubular Bells.

Creo que a veces ha hablado tanto de Steve Reich como de Terry Reily. Creo que sin A Rainbow in Curved Air nunca habríamos tenido al Mike que conocemos!

Justo! Ese es, gracias!! He tenido que quitarle el sonido al ordenador; en casa se creían que estaba jugando a los marcianitos XD

fairlight dijo:

 

NOSOYESTO dijo:

En algún video, creo que del aniversario de tubular bells, dijo también inspirarse en algún músico vanguardista de finales de los 60 que utilizaba sintetizadores, pero no me quedé con su nombre (lo buscaré). Y por, supuesto, está Bach: en alguna entrevista de la TV reconoció haberse inspirado en la fuga de la "tocata y fuga en re menor" para el inicio de Tubular Bells.

Creo que a veces ha hablado tanto de Steve Reich como de Terry Reily. Creo que sin A Rainbow in Curved Air nunca habríamos tenido al Mike que conocemos!

A añadir:

- Abba, evidenciado por su versión de Arrival, y el guiño de la portada del single.

- Chill out del Café del Mar de Ibiza.

- Los Shadows

...

Gracias Killing por redirecionarme, yo también estoy muy sorprendido por la entrevista, incluso llegue a pensar que era un fake  . Pero parece que es verdad y me alegra mucho leer que tiene tan buen gusto musical y la importancia que le da a su ascendencia Irlandesa y que tan buenos resultados ha generado en sus composiciones. Como no conocía a John Renbourn lo busque en YouTube y pude oír íntegramente y en muy buena calidad el álbum que Mike menciona que por cierto me encantó. Me llama la atención que nunca antes haya hablado de esto y que lo comente con tanto detalle cómo si hubiese ocurrido hace un par de años apenas. Eso de Hair no tengo idea a qué se refiere, existe material al respecto?

saludos

fairlight dijo:

 

NOSOYESTO dijo:

En algún video, creo que del aniversario de tubular bells, dijo también inspirarse en algún músico vanguardista de finales de los 60 que utilizaba sintetizadores, pero no me quedé con su nombre (lo buscaré). Y por, supuesto, está Bach: en alguna entrevista de la TV reconoció haberse inspirado en la fuga de la "tocata y fuga en re menor" para el inicio de Tubular Bells.

Creo que a veces ha hablado tanto de Steve Reich como de Terry Reily. Creo que sin A Rainbow in Curved Air nunca habríamos tenido al Mike que conocemos!

 

 

!

me mola!!

simonchess dijo:

Gracias Killing por redirecionarme, yo también estoy muy sorprendido por la entrevista, incluso llegue a pensar que era un fake  . Pero parece que es verdad y me alegra mucho leer que tiene tan buen gusto musical y la importancia que le da a su ascendencia Irlandesa y que tan buenos resultados ha generado en sus composiciones. Como no conocía a John Renbourn lo busque en YouTube y pude oír íntegramente y en muy buena calidad el álbum que Mike menciona que por cierto me encantó. Me llama la atención que nunca antes haya hablado de esto y que lo comente con tanto detalle cómo si hubiese ocurrido hace un par de años apenas. Eso de Hair no tengo idea a qué se refiere, existe material al respecto?

 

saludos

¿Hair? El musical hippie. Hay película de Milos Forman, del 79:

http://www.filmaffinity.com/es/film826058.html

 No tenía idea, gracias Morpheus

 No hay de qué. Te lo recomiendo: no he visto el musical en teatro, pero la película a mí me gustó mucho. Es muy de su época, y tiene una banda sonora fabulosa. 

 Y

Morpheus dijo:

 No hay de qué. Te lo recomiendo: no he visto el musical en teatro, pero la película a mí me gustó mucho. Es muy de su época, y tiene una banda sonora fabulosa. 

Y si detrás estuvo Milos Forman con mayor razon valdrá la pena verlo!

El tito  ha preguntado en facebook sobre guitarristas favoritos y ha colgado un vídeo refiriéndose a sus gustos cuando tenía 10 añitos...

19 Noviembre 2017, 17:42:06