Changeling: The Autobiography by Mike Oldfield

Author:Mike Oldfield
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2015-06-27T16:00:00+00:00

9. THE BEACON – 1974

ONE DAY, I went to Virgin’s offices above the record shop on Notting Hill Gate to meet a photographer called Trevor Key. I’d first met Trevor on Richard’s boat: he used to take black-and-white pictures of chromium objects. He loved chrome. I do remember he had lots of pictures in his portfolio, and they were works of art, though some of them were a bit weird. Richard was asking what we were going to call the album – Opus One was only ever going to be the working title – and everybody was getting very angry at me because I couldn’t think of a name. One of the pictures was of an egg, which looked like it had blood coming out of it, weird but beautiful at the same time. Richard was exasperated. He was saying, ‘I’m going to put this egg on the cover and call it ‘‘Breakfast in Bed’’!’

I asked Trevor to come out to Harold Wood so we could talk about some ideas. I remember walking back down Redden Court Road to the station with him, saying, ‘So, what are we going to put on the cover, then?’ We still didn’t have a title for the album at the time, but in my mind I was really happy with the idea of the bell. It wasn’t just the sound of it; I remembered what had happened in the studio and I was imagining what it would be like to hit it so hard that it shattered completely. I asked, ‘Can you get a picture of a bell being smashed to pieces?’ He didn’t think he could do that, but maybe he could get a bell and make it look like it had been destroyed in some way.

Back in Harold Wood, I thought to myself, ‘Well, Viv Stanshall says ‘‘Tubular Bells’’ and it sounds wonderful, and if we’re going to have a bell on the cover, how about we call it Tubular Bells?’ I rang Richard up and asked him what he thought. Everybody said OK, so the name stuck.

A few weeks later I saw the actual cover idea. Instead of a bell being destroyed, it had been bent into this beautiful shape. Trevor was a very talented man. He’d obviously built a model of it: I don’t think it ever existed in its entirety, only the front. He’d gone down to somewhere on the south coast, got bones from the butcher and set fire to them, then superimposed the two images together. From the first minute I saw the composite image, it looked exactly right. I couldn’t find anything wrong with it, it was just perfect.

A few days later, Richard Branson and Simon Draper came to see me. They said, ‘Look, we need something to launch this new album, you’ve got to do a live concert.’ My heart sank when they said that. I didn’t know how the heck I could do it all live: every second there were twenty different instruments, each doing different things.

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