Mike Oldfield

Mike Oldfield, a Reading native born in 1953, picked up the guitar at ten, quit school in his teens, and spent 1967 to 1970 playing folk as the Sallyangie with his sister Sally. A stint playing with Kevin Ayers followed, and in 1971 he started on the project that would define him: Tubular Bells, a long, mostly instrumental piece. Richard Branson liked it enough to make it the first release on his brand-new Virgin Records in 1973, its opening turned up in The Exorcist, and it sold over 2.7 million copies in Britain alone. In 1975 he picked up a Grammy for Best Instrumental Composition.

Hergest Ridge, Ommadawn and Incantations kept stretching that side-long form, spinning guitars, keyboards, percussion and folk melodies into slow-building tapestries. Then, as the '70s wound down, Oldfield did the unexpected and started writing songs and hitting the road. Platinum and QE2 pointed the way, and Five Miles Out in 1982 made the shift stick: the title track is a rattling, propulsive piece of prog-pop that trades the old meditative drift for urgency.

Crises followed in 1983, his biggest album of the period, carrying the worldwide hit "Moonlight Shadow" with Maggie Reilly on vocals. He later went back to the well with Tubular Bells II and III, played the opening ceremony of the London Olympics in 2012 and signed off with Return to Ommadawn in 2017.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.