Chart entered : 13 July 1974
Chart peak : 31
Number of hits : 18
Here's the decade's most reluctant superstar; like Pink Floyd the singles chart doesn't give a true reflection of his status.
Mike is a doctor's son from Reading born in 1953. He was a teenage guitar prodigy playing in folk clubs from an early age, In 1967 he formed the folk duo The Sallyangie with his older sister Sally who by happy chance had gone to school with Marianne Faithful. She enlisted Mick Jagger to help them record some demoes. They were signed to Transatlantic Records and released their only album "Children of the Sun" in 1969.
"Children of the Sun" is very much a product of its time. The duo's blend of Tyrannosaurus Rex , Fairport Convention and Simon and Garfunkel is a quaint product of the late 60s British folk scene. All the songs were composed by the siblings giving full rein to Sally's romantic medieval bent which at times makes it unbearably fey. Nor is she as good a singer as she thinks and some of the high notes are physically painful to hear . I think Mike would be the first to admit that he hasn't got much of a voice and his harmonies and occasional solo lines are barely adequate. Yet there is something there beside his liquid guitar playing and at times it captures that very English pastoral bent as well as anyone else. They also released "Two Ships ", a Mary Hopkin-ish pop song not written by the duo and produced by Shel Talmy, on which it's hard to detect any input from Mike at all. That was it apart from the release of a more typical outtake "Child of Allah" in 1972 , three years after their split and on a different label. I don't know what the story behind that is.
Mike then formed a short lived duo Barefoot ( not the same band who had a single on Pye in 1971 ) with his brother Terry. often wrongly assumed to have been the flautist on Sallyangie recordings. They didn't record anything before Mike joined a group called The Whole World who were put together by ex-Soft Machine vocalist Kevin Ayers to tour his first solo LP. Mike was mainly employed as a bassist but did some guitar work as well. The tour was actually cut short because the bon viveur Ayers didn't enjoy the grind of touring but Mike hung around to play on two of his subsequent albums , "Shooting At The Moon" in 1970 and "Whatevershebringswesing" the following year. He is the author of the music on "Champagne Cowboy Blues " on the latter though not credited as such. It's a dreary dirge as a song but the guitar solos are worth hearing.
Mike was also doing session work and fatefully made first contact with Richard Branson's fledgling Virgin operation when he went to the Manor Studios near Oxford with soul singer Arthur Lewis in September 1971. He found two guys there who liked the instrumental opus he was putting together and they came back with an offer of a week's free studio time to complete it.
I've already written about Tubular Bells ( a long time ago now ) TB. The album was originally released a year before this single and to awaken American interest parts of the first eight minutes of Side One were excerpted by staff at Atlantic for a three minute single including the bit used by The Exorcist which made it a big US hit ( his only one ). The editing was poor and Oldfield hadn't been consulted about the release. Although he was already working on the follow-up album "On Hergest Ridge" he told Virgin that if they wanted a single to further promote "Tubular Bells " in the UK he'd sort it out himself.
This single ( Virgin's first actually ) is a development of a brief waltz time section on Side Two of the album. It works very well as an evocative instrumental in its own right and having heard it before I bought the album, I was slightly disappointed that the melody passes by so briefly on the latter. I'm sure the part in brackets must have caught some people out who wanted the music they'd heard in the horror film and confusion may have depressed its chart position.
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