From The Raft, June 2001

The Best of Tubular Bells is coming out on June 4th, how do you feel about that?

I'm looking forward to it. It's hard to believe after all these years that its been deemed worthy to... not exactly be resurrected because it never went away, but you know shake the dust off it and put it together with the other things in the cupboard, with pieces of music from that series. It's great. I'm looking forward to it.

How much work was required on the editing to get it to feel like an album?

Simon Heyworth did that as he was one of the engineers involved in the original recording. I saw him the other day in a magazine - he hasn't changed much. I remember him because he used to look after the enormous Irish Wolfhound we used to have at the manor called 'Bootleg' who used to spend most of the time at our feet under the mixing deck. He'd hang out either end because he was enormous. I think 'Bootleg' should have got a credit on the album as our foot warmer. He never batted an eyelid and sometimes we'd really crank up the volume!

Is Bootleg anywhere on the recordings then?

Well there are people who say there's a bit on the 'Caveman' part where I get talking with some people and they're going 'Bootleg Bootleg' because there was this whole thing about bootleg albums at the time. But that's something we don't talk about!

Are there any bits you'd have liked to include on the Best of Tubular Bells but didn't?

Well, yes but there's such a lot of it. It would have been lovely to put it all on but we couldn't do that. It was quite nice the way Simon edited from the original version to the live version then to the orchestral version then back again because you get a picture of all the different versions that do exist.

So is it true that you broke the Tubular Bell in the original recording?

Well it certainly made a big dent in it. You're supposed to hit it with this little wooden hammer - but I wanted a big hammer so they got me one from the workshop. I actually ran from one end of the studio wheeling this hammer and smashed it into them. It went flying and it made a big dent in it. Years and years later we tried to find the original set but we discovered there's about half a dozen people who claim that they have the original set! So we looked at all of them and it turns out that none of them were the original set. I think I threw them in the skip when I'd finished with them!

When you were recording you had to record in a week. Was that hard?

Well they gave me a week and they said that at the end of the week 'If we don't like what you've done, you're out!' And there was me down to my last baked potato! In fact I didn't have enough money to eat or anything so it really was 'make or break' week. I worked like a slave for that week; I hardly slept at all. There was so much to get done in that week on Part One so we basically were working twenty hours a day. I had to be finished because the Bonzo Dog Band were coming in on the last day and they were ready to get going straight away - I was completely obsessed by it. I didn't even notice if was stressful or not. But luckily it came out pretty good even though there were masses of mistakes on it... loads of fluffs... there was the guitar out of tune and sometimes the whole thing seems to be on the verge of falling apart then it comes together again like magic, so spontaneous. It was like a marathon really - we were running a musical-playing marathon the whole week long.

So over the years when you refer back to it do you think this music has changed in the way that you view it?

No, it's frozen in time exactly like that. In my mind... I try to explain it like... if you think of a big ocean liner like the Queen Mary, it's magnificent if you see it on the ocean, but if you zoom into one of the rooms you see all the laundry and the washing - but in its entirety it's superb. Tubular Bells is like that because if I get too close to it it's like... God, how did I get that note out of tune, why didn't I play that perfectly? But in its entirety it's lovely.

Do you think having a constrained amount of time helps the brain to focus?

No, I've spent longer, much longer working on something. A constrained time? I don't think it concentrates the brain... almost the opposite as the brain just gets on with what its got to do and then the inspiration and the real essence of it - the soul, the spirituality of it - comes out more. It's like these people who lie on beds of nails and they can feel very spiritual. It wasn't the most relaxing week I've ever had in my life.

I take it you were asleep when you weren't recording!

Yeah, well if you call it sleep because I was working out in my brain what I had to do. I had that beginning theme going round and round and round until I was out of my mind.

So what was the Caveman song all about?

It mystifies me when people say it's like new age music, you know, meditation and all that stuff... you have a caveman screaming his fucking brains out on that track!

I was quite scared!

The thing about 'Tubular Bells' is that it's got this aggression but it's also got this peaceful beauty, a calmness. It's got nervousness, its got silliness, stupidity, you know, a bit like Monty Python used to be. You go for something completely different, from one end of human emotions to the other. Some of it's beautiful, peaceful... some of it's ecstatic... some of it's rocky, crazy guitars. I'd had that 'Caveman' tune... well it was a riff, a set of chords... going round in my head for years. I was probably about twelve when I wrote that, and I wanted to include it on 'Tubular Bells'. So one night I got together with a drummer - I was really a bass player at the time - and we laid down the backing track of just drums and bass. It was so good and we played really well together. Simon Heyworth was the engineer at that session. So I had this track and the next day I put it on the piano with the guitar and it was wonderful, so I thought what am I going to do with it? I didn't want to put lyrics on it; they're fine for a folk song but... I didn't like lyrics. So we came back from the pub one night and I hid a bottle of Jamison Irish whiskey. We just went into the studio, I said 'Give me a microphone' and I just screamed my brains out. I couldn't talk for a week afterwards. I really damaged my vocal chords!

Looking back did you ever think that it was a bind that the original album was so successful?

No, not really. The thing I didn't like about it was that they wanted me to make a Part Two there and then. It was number one almost everywhere in the world and I was getting hassled that I had to do more and I just didn't want to. I was very shy at that time and I had a lot of psychological problems... I used to suffer terrible panic attacks, terrible. At that time I was living on the Welsh border with lots of sheep around and I didn't want to make music, I just wanted to tootle around a bit and make something very peaceful. I had Richard Branson constantly on the phone and the world's Press wanted to talk to me and I had to bury the phone under piles of cushions. And then Richard would come in his car to my house drive me out of my mind. I felt obliged, so I did make another one which everybody hated so that was the only painful thing about it. People asked me why I wrote Tubular Bells and I've got no idea, I was born a musician and I express myself through sound and that's what came out at that time of my life.

You say that you were born a musician, do you think that one day they will isolate the musical gene?

I think that's possibly right. I think that there are people who are musical and people who have tone deafness - it's definitely something genetical so I think that there will be an isolated gene for music.

Do you actually know anything about your genealogy?

A little bit, but it's something that's been a big mystery in my life because my mother was a mysterious person... she was Irish. I knew nothing about her history, where she came from and she died unfortunately quite a few years ago. So I hired a detective agency in Dublin to try to find out who she was and her history. They spent three years trawling down the South of Ireland, around Cork, speaking to the vicar, checking the records and it was difficult to find because there was a big fire in the library that destroyed all the records in 1928. Eventually they came back with this book and it turned out that she came from this enormous family of 11 children and her father went to West London for the First World War. He was press-ganged into it - he went to the pub to have a Guinness and came back three years later shell-shocked from being in the trenches. I asked him to track down my relatives and after one of the concerts at the Albert Hall, this coach load of Irish people arrived. There were old ones and little children, and cousins... there was about fifty of them! It was weird - they were all my relations!

What do you think you would be doing now if you hadn't had the success that you have had; would you still be writing music or is there anything else you would be doing?

I don't know. It was an extraordinary piece of luck running into Virgin and Richard and all those people around at the time. I couldn't escape being a musician so I'd have to pursue some kind of music even though I might not have been as successful as I have. I've just been really lucky.

There will be some people, young people, that know the theme to the Exorcist or remember you doing Blue Peter - does that bother you that people may only know you from those things?

Well not really, it depends where you are. It's very nice to be respected. They've just really discovered my music in the eastern block in Poland and Czechoslovakia. Spain is wonderful, they know more of the recent albums than they do Tubular Bells... it depends where you are. It's a wonderful position to be in. I don't need to come up with a new single, or present myself. I don't need to be anything more than I am. I wouldn't change anything.

You were one of the first artists to incorporate CD ROM material on one of your releases. Now there's the music VR. Is it important to you to keep up to date with technology?

Well, no it's always been a case that it's never done what I wanted it to do. I either get things built and designed by an engineer or get software redesigned so it does what I want it to do. It's even like that with the original 'Tubular Bells'. There were a couple of engineers and I said 'I want a guitar that goes 'wowowo''. They'd say what do you mean - and I'd explain and so off they went to their work shop and were sawing up transistors until they came up with this box that didn't quite go the right way. With this project using VR the software costs as much as a house and it didn't do 5% of the things I wanted it to do. Luckily, I knew a very clever software programmer and we did it all ourselves and we started with nothing. We just had a blank picture and a flat thing and it took us six weeks to be able to fly around it and every day you get a new button, a new function. That's a wonderful way to work because nobody's trodden down that road before and you're thinking 'what can we make it do?' We tried to connect the speed of the music to the speed of your travel and the pitch to your height. You can't just go out and buy that - you've got to make it. I just love doing that... it's more a question that I enjoy it rather than I need to have the latest technology. It's like my guitar sound, the main one on this red guitar. I bought a (mixing) desk which we made Tubular Bells out of. It sounded so good for this one guitar I got two of the modules from the original mixer mounted in a rack. You have to treat them carefully and blow them because they get hot now and again. Sometimes the older things are wonderful, you can't get better. It's a big mixture between modern and digital stuff, computers and old technology. It's just the one I feel fits my music best.

What's the essential concept for driving the VR game?

This calls for a cigarette! Can you explain what a concept is? I used to be accused of making concept albums but I don't know what that means. I've constantly got music going round my head even when I sleep I've got something going round my head. I live in a musical world and when I saw the first flight simulators, virtual reality quite a few years ago I though it would be great to make a virtual world where the music changed depending on where you were and what you encountered. There would be different kinds of animals for example, you could change the weather and make it rain, you could make it night time and it responded to your movements so you weren't stuck there watching something someone else had given you on a plate. It's the difference between going to a restaurant and eating a meal and being the chef and cooking your own food so you can have what you want. I don't know how to explain it. It's always difficult to talk about a piece of music. Someone said it was like singing about football... you have to play it, you've got to try it out. Once you're actually in there late at night when it's dark its magic. It's lovely.

Who do you think it will appeal to?

I don't know. The youngest who has had a go on it was four and I couldn't get him off it. The worst were the games publishers. They said that normal game players want to shoot things and that slightly older children want to get through a game as quickly as possible because they're so used to games being fast. In new games, 'Black and White' for example, it is more cerebral - you get to do something positive rather than just destroy things. I remember 'Mist' for the Macintosh which was very complicated but very atmospheric. I wanted to do something like that but 3D and more about music. There were lots of things behind it. I saw virtual reality simulation about six years ago - it was on a big silicone graphics machine about the size of a car and I thought that when that got affordable for everybody in their home it would be great. I'm a complete 'trekky', I love Star Trek and so I was thinking of the holo-suite environment and they go in there and they're part of a real thing made of holograms. Something like this is a step towards that kind of immersive entertainment. I don't know whether you'd go there physically or you'd just plug your brain in. There will be multitudes of people who are going to make violent games that could do a lot of bad in the world; there has to be someone doing the opposite. I don't understand why killing on games is thought of as being cool, the easiest thing in the world is to pull a trigger of a gun.

It's been six years since the idea. How long until it comes out?

I'm making an album of the music from it - it might come with the album so when you buy the album you will get the virtual reality experience with the album as a double package. We may be able to fit it on the one CD. There is already a free demo on the Internet which 18,000 people have already downloaded. You'll be able to get the whole thing in three parts, the first part will be free and it takes thirty minutes to download, then the second part plugs into that and the third part will plug into that, so you'll have the whole lot. So to answer your question, you can see a very cut-down version of it now but the finished thing won't be ready for another few months. You can play it at each stage that you get. I think within one or two months we'll have finished part one but to finish it all will be six months to a year.

Will you be playing live?

We can do it live and I've got my agent looking into a live concert. We've got the engineer working on a system where you have a video wall at the back and we'd have two photoelectric censors either side of the stage. It wouldn't be the whole show it would be a section of it. As it would be fairly dark we'd give the whole audience torches... let's say there's 3,000 people... they would vote with their torches by shining their light to either side of the stage. It would be connected to the PC and their virtual environment would move and take you to wherever the audience collectively pointed to. And we would have to play whatever they voted for... wherever we went to. That's something I'm looking forward to.

That sounds very complicated?

Well there will have to be a bit of improvisation or we could get the computer to do it. It does that already, it goes to a certain zone and plays that music. It doesn't play the lead line but I could play that on top of the music. We're just looking for a really nice place to do it. We've looked at 'La Alhambra Palace' in Granada and Morocco is another possibility but it would cost a lot of money to get everything down there.

On the websites there's a bit where you have a vote where you will play live next - is this a bit of fun?

Oh is that on Dark Star web-site (yes) they must have put that on recently.

Have you got any more promotions on for Tubular Bells?

Q magazine, that's a good one. I'll do whatever comes along. It's lovely to think that something I did when I was 19 is coming out now and people are taking an interest in it. It's lovely.

And what about the man behind the music - your likes, dislikes, philosophies?

I don't really listen to any music. I spend my whole day making music so I just want to be silent when I've finished.

Was that true when you did the original Tubular Bells?

I was playing music because I was a working musician going up and down the M1 in a transit van. So I suppose I listened to a bit more music then, mostly classical music. I don't think many authors read books either. I hear a lot of music in my head but it's nobody else's, it's just stuff I'm working on... what I did yesterday and what I'm going to do tomorrow.

Have you ever taken lessons in music?

No I taught myself. I just picked up the guitar and played it for a few years.

Are you music 100% of the time?

It's wonderful for my brain to be thinking about virtual reality. I have some silence now, which is lovely, so I'm thinking about texture or colour, an angle or shape or a logical possibility of how I can make something happen in a virtual world.

So it's a relief from sounds you have something visual to focus on now?

I had a lot of trouble in my life getting free of music. I learnt a few disciplines like meditation and Tai Chi, which was a beautiful thing to do. I'm going to be working here and living in a house by the Thames, which will be lovely. I already have a collection of swans and ducks and cygnets, geese. I'll breed swans - Things that are not to do with music really. That's what I'd like to do with the rest of my life. Also to be able to delegate things. I'm gradually getting a nice team of people so it would be good to have a little bit of free time.