Ugo
Group: Members
Posts: 5495
Joined: April 2000 |
|
Posted: Aug. 29 2012, 20:25 |
|
@ Delfín: you've just reminded me of a very amusing period in my early youth, when everybody who'd heard "Moonlight Shadow" (which of course had hit big, down here) told me how good this Mike Oldfield was, and what a good voice she had. It was useless explaining to people that "Mike Oldfield" was not the lead singer's name.
Re. the Parsons/Cross song, I know that Alan Parsons didn't write it... he wrote very little on the On Air album, just one instrumental track and some lyrics. Ian Bairnson did most of the composing work. But that particular song, which (I agree) is very good, is not even remotely close, from a strictly stylistical point of view, to anything Alan did with Eric W. Even if he didn't write "So Far Away", I'd have expected Alan, as a producer, to put some sort of stamp on the song. He didn't, and unfortunately he didn't on the rest of the album as well. He managed to find himself again only on his next album, The Time Machine. All of this is always IMHO, of course.
Re. Mike O. collaborating with famous people, I don't think that Mike will ever risk suffering any "damage" to his fame by working with famous people. The only risk he'd face, as I was saying before, is that someone who is currently more famous or more popular than him may overshadow him - people would look at the famous guy or girl and not at Mike Oldfield. This is what, to a certain extent, happened with "Islands": Mike got a great lady, Bonnie Tyler, to sing it; she was very big at the time, and as a result the song (of course) was a fair-sized hit. But it also got inextricably associated with Bonnie Tyler, and people who found and enjoyed that song outside of its original context (e.g. on various artists' compilations) generally tended to give all the merit of its success to Bonnie Tyler, and they tended to forget Mike O.'s importance in the song as the writer, composer and main instrumental performer of it. This, I think, is what could possibly happen if a very famous vocalist gets to sing on Mike's new album.
-------------- Ugo C. - a devoted Amarokian
|