Totally Tubular!

Mike Oldfield’s “Tubular Bells” became a sensation in 1973, helped in part by its use in “The Exorcist,” a genuinely scary movie that I saw as a college freshman with a very nice girl named Mary Wilson.

I’d always assumed that “Tubular Bells” existed only as spliced-together overdubs, until I watched this amazing live BBC performance by a very young Oldfield and his equally young friends. The narration towards the end by Viv Stanshall was pre-recorded, and it’s sort of a variation of his Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah band track, “The Intro and the Outro.”

https://youtu.be/l7MY_cdUL1E

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