Mike Oldfield now has his own station on Exclusive Radio.
Mike is a British musician, songwriter and producer best known for his debut studio album Tubular Bells (1973), which became an unexpected critical and commercial success. Though primarily a guitarist he plays a range of instruments which includes keyboards, percussion and vocals. He has adopted a range of musical styles throughout his career, including progressive rock, world, folk, classical, electronic, ambient and new age music.
Mike took up the guitar at age ten and left school in his teens to embark on a music career. From 1967 to 1970 he and his sister Sally Oldfield were a folk duo, The Sallyangie, after which he performed with Kevin Ayers. In 1971 he started work on Tubular Bells which caught the attention of Richard Branson, who agreed to release it on his new label, Virgin Records. Its opening was used in the horror film The Exorcist and the album went on to sell over 2.7 million copies in the UK. Oldfield followed it with Hergest Ridge (1974), Ommadawn (1975) and Incantations (1978).
In the late 1970s Mike began to tour and release more commercial and song-based music, beginning with Platinum (1979), QE2 (1980) and Five Miles Out (1982). The last of those featured the single Family Man which was subsequently covered by Fleetwood Mac. His most successful album of this period was Crises (1983), which features the worldwide hit single Moonlight Shadow with vocalist Maggie Reilly.
After signing with WEA in the early 1990s, Oldfield’s most significant album of the decade was Tubular Bells II (1992) and he experimented with virtual reality and gaming content with his MusicVR project. In 2012, he performed at the opening ceremony for the 2012 Olympic Games held in London. Altogether Mike has released 26 studio albums, nine of which have reached the UK top-ten. His most recent album is Return to Ommadawn (2017).