Ommadawn

Day 9 album:
Mike Oldfield - Ommadawn
Those musical foundations. Everyone romantically thinks of those prised LPs on vinyl when around the turn of the 70's into the 80's, it was tapes.
"Home taping is killing music" and the scull and crossbones on the inner sleeve of the album. How we ignored that.
The sound of the 70's was a Garrard "all in one". A sturdy record deck, an FM/MW radio and speakers wired with thin bellwire.
Most crucially it had a tape deck. Autolevel so it compressed everything - especially dynamic records.
It was thus that I get exposed to Tubular Bells, Jean Michel Jarre's Oxygene and Vangelis. I'm not alone in that generation.
What did they have in common? None of the above could be considered pop stars, rock stars or even particularly identifiable as personalities. It's not what pop music set out to do.
The three were also instrumentalists, two self taught and were responsible for all of the sounds on their records. It's the beginning of a change from four guys in a band.
It's also a favourite of my Dad. The 60's largely bypassed him. Not everything was swinging 60's if you're a working class man from Tottenham. It just wasn't as inclusive as history likes us to believe.
It's the 70's and Dad has three noisy kids and he's mostly working night shifts for just enough money to feed us. We creep around the house just to let him get some sleep.
He's a fishing and football guy and I'm a skinny weedy kid with an aptitude and interest in neither.
What we both have is a deep emotional response to instrumental music.
In Ommadawn there is an Uillean pipe solo from Paddy Moloney of the Chieftains. Neither of us can make it through it without being in bits but because we're men, we'll just look away for a bit.
So why Ommadawn? Look in my music room and there are guitars, basses, Mandolin, Dulcimer, Piano, Violin, Sitar, Phinn, Charango...
No Tubular Bells 😉
Ommadawn has African drums at the end of side one.
It's pretty much all there; an international palette of sound that's going to kick the doors open to everything I'll listen to from around the world.
It's a warbly tape in a Morris Minor with the sisters as we go on holidays or drive up to London to see the grandparents.
It's three channels on a TV, it's Sunday TV and Big Daddy. It's beige wallpaper and curry with raisins in it. But it's more important than pop music.