There have been stranger releases in the history of rock and roll, admittedly. The fact that Roland Rat once made an album is alarming proof of that. But 'The Best Of Tubular Bells' proves that Virgin aren't scared to venture where rodent puppets once roamed the record racks.
The premise is simple, if utterly baffling: get Simon Heyworth (the producer of the original release of 'Tubular Bells' back in 1973) to work his way chronologically through Mike Oldfield's back catalogue, picking out suitably Tubular-esque passages and piecing them together on a 'Best Of...' package. Hence 'Tubular Bells - Part 1' - the spooky keyboard-led passage of The Exorcist infamy - is on here in five bits, flitting from the original to the orchestral (from 1974), back to the original, on to the 'Exposed' live version (circa '79), then back again to the original. Confused? Even with a press release in front of you, you will be.
The actual pleasure-versus-pain ratio is far easier to comprehend: the epically peculiar and peculiarly epic 'Tubular Bells' made Richard Branson's nascent record company, maddened a generation of punk rockers and crossed the student hippy/coffee table chill-out divide to staggering effect decades before The Orb and Orbital oozed into being.
The fact that 'The Caveman Song' is mental and that the third original part of the fifth segment of 'Tubular Bells - Part One' (hang with us here, kids) has been merrily ripped off by an undergound act as current as Lemon Jelly is mighty food for thought for credibility conspiracy theorists the world over.
Alas, multi-million sales the world over ensured that 'Tubular Bells' was never going to be permitted to rest in slightly cosmic peace. And so the rest of 'The Best Of...' rushes through Oldfield's lesser known updates of his own theme, 'Tubular Bells II' and 'III' with mixed results.
True enough, 1998's 'Far Above The Clouds' sees the clock hand swing full circle, with Oldfield appropriating the sumptuous techno sounds of his youthful imitators, but 'Sentinel' is horribly mawkish and 'The Millennium Bell' is about as heartfelt and as endearing as a BA advert.
Throw into the melting pot the fact that the 20th anniversary of 'Tubular Bells' itself is not but two years away and you are left none the wiser as to what bizarre games are played in major label marketing meetings. Now, what did I do with that Roland Rat record...
