Now Available: Four Mike Oldfield Vinyl Reissues

If you’re a Mike Oldfield fan who prefers LP releases to CD or digital versions and your favorite Mr. Oldfield’s back catalog is the very specific era of 1992 through 1998, boy, is this your lucky week: it just so happens that we’ve issued 180-gram vinyl editions of the four albums he released during that particular window. That’s such a nutty coincidence that we’d hit your precise sweet spot like that, right? It’s, like, what are the odds it’d play out that way? It’s such a crazy old world we live in…

Now that we’ve played this situation up to make it seem far more statistically unlikely than it really is, allow us to offer a bit more detail about these four albums.

• Tubular Bells II (1992): It shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that Oldfield decided to deliver a sequel to an album that’s viewed by many as his signature effort, but given his low profile on the US charts, most Americans were probably really surprised, likely thinking that he hadn’t released anything since the original 1973 Tubular Bells. How embarrassing. Meanwhile, in the UK, the album hit the top of the charts, giving Oldfield the third #1 album of his career.
• The Songs of Distant Earth (1994): Based on Arthur C. Carke’s sci-fi novel of the same name, Oldfield’s The Songs of Distant Earth came about after a suggestion from Warner chairman Rob Dickins, and Clarke – a fan of Oldfield’s score for The Killing Fields – not only approved of the idea but ultimately enjoyed the resulting album.
• Voyager (1996): Unofficially known to many as Oldfield Goes Celtic, Voyager started out as an acoustic endeavor, but he reportedly bulked it up a bit after the daughter of a Warner exec indicated that she felt it was a bit boring. By the way, if you listen to the song “Celtic Rain” and can’t figure out why it sounds a bit familiar to you, perhaps it’s because Snoop Dogg sampled it for his 2008 song “Why Did You Leave Me.”
• Tubular Bells III (1998): Yeah, that’s right, Oldfield did do another Tubular Bells album. You got a problem with that? The man wanted to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the original Tubular Bells album, so he did Tubular Bells III. Unfortunately, many critics felt that III was one too many, but if you liked the first two, there’s simply no reason to suspect that you won’t like the third one as well.