Like any true, blue-blooded Englishman of a certain age, I have long been a fan of the music of the amazing Mike Oldfield. On this side of the "Big Divide" - i.e. the North American side of the Atlantic Ocean - Oldfield is most well known as the writer of the theme tune for The Exorcist. The fact that the theme tune for The Exorcist is actually the first movement of Oldfield's first album, Tubular Bells, is largely overlooked over here. I will have more to say about Tubular Bells and its many incarnations in a later post - my quarry in this write-up is one of Mike`s later albums - The Songs of Distant Earth.
I would suspect a lot of people have heard of Arthur C. Clarke, the science fiction writer whose most famous work is 2001: A Space Odyssey. The Songs of Distant Earth is one of Clarke`s later novels, developed from a short story of the same name, and published in 1986. At the suggestion of his record company, Oldfield wrote an album based on the book, and in consultation with Clarke himself. The result is a collection of amazing music that ties closely to the scenes and the storyline of the book, and which Clarke was very pleased with.
I bought this album when it first came out in 1994, and found it to be one of Mike`s most accessible and coherent albums. Although I read in the album notes about the novel by Clarke, I did not read it until much, much later (like - 19 years later!), and developed a deep appreciation of the music in the absence of the story it was designed to represent.
The way the music is broken up follows a process similar to that Oldfield employs on many of his albums, like Tubular Bells, Ommadawn, Incantations, etc, with a continuous theme running through a number of tempo and instrumental variations, but this time delivered in smaller, named packets, each representing part of the book's storyline. Listening to the album the way I did, it is easy to follow the progression of the music as a story in its own right, leading you through to its mighty climax and the new beginning it represents. The music mapped easily to my own stories and imaginings, like all of Mike's best works, and fulfils at the artistic and inspirational levels. Even though I did not have the background of Clarke's story to work with, Mike's compositions are rich and satisfying in their own right - music for the spirit to conjure with. It is an album I return to periodically, when I am either looking for inspiration, or merely for peace and tranquility. As with the Tubular Bells albums and Mike's other long works (see above), The Songs of Distant Earth works as a complete rock symphony that is a musical masterpiece in its own right.
But this album achieves a greater meaning and success when it is tied back to the book by Arthur C. Clarke. Then you begin to see what the subsections of each piece of music represent, and when you read the book then listen to the tunes, you begin to feel the underlying emotion and hear the wonderous beauty that Oldfield is describing. It can be an incredibly moving experience, relating tracks like Supernova back to what it represents - book spoiler here - that the Supernova in question is our own Sun, and the explosions within the music represent the planets of our Solar System as they succumb to the exploding star. Or the vision and hope represented by Magellan - the massive Quantum-drive powered Starship, as it rides out the cosmic tsunami with the selected remnants of humankind. Or the Ascension at the culmination of the album and the book as they set out for Sagan 2 to restablish human civilization.
If you love science fiction, and love wonderful, transcendental, soul-inspiring music, you cannot do better than Mike Oldfield's The Songs of Distant Earth.
