1989-1991 End of the Virgin era

In 1989, Mike created a seven-minute version of Tubular Bells to be performed on the Nicky Campbell show on the BBC Radio One radio network. This helped to rekindle the idea of creating a follow-up to his great album, reworking its themes with 1990s music technology Tubular Bells II had been on the agenda for many years. Executives at Virgin Records had been eagerly awaiting it and in 1982 the New Musical Express ran a big story declaring that TB II was imminent! Now Mike was preparing himself to produce that follow-up album.

Before that was to happen, he released three more recordings. The first was Earth Moving in 1989 which featured no less than seven lead vocalists among its nine tracks. Maggie Reilly returned to sing Blue Night while former Manfred Mann's Earth Band member Chris Thompson was lead vocalist on two tracks.

Amarok (1990) was a return to the format of the great trilogy of 1973. Like Tubular Bells, Hergest Ridge and Ommadawn it was a single symphony-length composition. Amarok reunited Mike with Tom Newman who had engineered Tubular Bells. In many ways it is the later work that most resembles Tubular Bells itself. The bells themselves make a reappearance as does the Caveman.

Amarok is a 52-minute unbroken piece of music which shifts styles from English folk music to Spanish flamenco to African and it fuses the latest studio and musical technology with typical Oldfield devices. It is interesting to contrast the sound produced by 1990s "state-of-the-art equipment" with that created at the newly-opened Manor studios on Tubular Bells. But in both cases Oldfield shows his mastery of all the latest advances and his ability to incorporate them into the creative process.

Heaven's Open was issued in 1991 and followed the structure familiar from Platinum: a major composition plus some conventional songs. For the first time these Side 2 songs were all sung by Mike himself with no guest vocalist in sight. He told an interviewer, "I'm feeling much more at ease with my voice now. I'm pleased to have discovered I'm not as bad a singer as I thought." The band accompanying Mike included saxophonist Courtney Pine, Simon Phillips and pianist Mickey Simmonds. The big piece on Heaven's Open was the 20-minute opus Music From The Balcony.

Having completed his contractual obligations to Virgin Records, the label which he had helped to launch in 1973, Mike made preparations to record Tubular Bells II. A new management team opened negotiations for a new recording deal and after 18 years and 14 albums, Mike Oldfield's days as a Virgin recording artist had come to an end...