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Topic: Earth Moving to Amarok, How?< Next Oldest | Next Newest >
qjamesfloyd Offline




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Posted: May 04 2012, 08:22

It has always amazed me that in the sequence of Mike's albums you have in 1989 Earth Moving, the often least liked of his albums, and an album very unlike him, to 1990 Amarok, viewed by many fans the pinnacle of Mike Oldfield powers, and totally like him. I know about the ending of the Virgin contract stuff, but it is going from one extreme to the other, Earth Moving to Amarok. Now I adore Amarok, and I'm not one of those people who hate Earth Moving, I think it has some nice moments, I really like Blue Night, great acoustic solo in that, but was it a case of Mike having a lot of songs laying around he didn't think much of, so put them on Earth Moving, or were they all written for that album? Because Amarok has so much in it, that surely he was thinking about/working on it around the same time as Earth Moving.
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larstangmark Offline




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Posted: May 05 2012, 04:22

To me it seems Mike likes to work in "projects". He doesn't seem to accumulate songs or ideas. He seems to be more like "Let's make a song-oriented album with guest singers" or "Let's make a sixty minute instrumental with no sequencers".
If one works like that it's easy to think "Enough of that, let's make something totally different".
Some see this as cynicism, as he is testing the market for various types of music. And I think it became later to some degree; "Let's try the celtic thing", "Let's do that pop-classic Adiemus-type thing".

And I recall reading somewhere that he was working on Amarok and Heaven's Open more or less simultaneously. Perhaps he was thinking "Here's one for the spanish and here's one for the germans..."?  :O


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"There are twelve people in the world, the rest are paste"
Mark E Smith
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qjamesfloyd Offline




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Posted: May 05 2012, 08:26

Good point, I guess he did something similar again, going from Light & Shade in 2005 to his next album, the completely different Music of the Spheres in 2008.
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Cavalier (Lost Version) Offline




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Posted: May 06 2012, 05:51

I just had a look for the clip of Mike and Anita performingInnocent on TV-am. [Olivier's link in the Video/Interviews forum may need updating]

I saw it live, must not had time to put a video in the recorder as I don't recall rewatching it over the next few years as with my other dedicated clips.  The rest of the interview I've not spotted on YouTube yet, but we have a very useful source close at hand...

http://tubular.net/articles/1989_07/

Next question; how did we ever get confused about Amarok and Tubular Bells II? :laugh:  :laugh:


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Holger Offline




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Posted: May 06 2012, 09:11

Last time I listened to Earth Moving (which was a while ago...), I noticed that some of the guitar sounds on that and Amarok are exactly the same. Not sure what, if anything, that contributes to the discussion at hand, just thought I'd point it out as I thought it was pretty interesting.
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larstangmark Offline




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Posted: May 06 2012, 09:50

Interesting to read that interview again. It seems that after completing Earth Moving he started working on TBII. He must have changed his mind again. Perhaps he tried to re-negotiate his contract but with no success and therefore postpone what he knew would be the big seller.

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"There are twelve people in the world, the rest are paste"
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