Mike Oldfield
English musician (born 1953)
Michael Gordon Oldfield (born 15 May 1953) is a retired English musician, songwriter and producer best known for his debut album Tubular Bells (1973), which became an unexpected critical and commercial success. Though primarily a guitarist, Oldfield played a range of instruments, which included keyboards and percussion, as well as vocals. He had adopted a range of musical styles throughout his career, including progressive rock, world, folk, classical, electronic, ambient and new age music. His discography includes 25 studio albums, nine of which have reached the UK top ten.
Oldfield took up the guitar at age ten and left school in his teens to embark on a music career. From 1967 to 1970, he and his sister Sally Oldfield were a folk duo, the Sallyangie, after which he performed with Kevin Ayers before starting work on Tubular Bells in 1971. The album caught the attention of Richard Branson, who agreed to make it the first-ever release on his new label Virgin Records. Its opening was used in the horror film The Exorcist, and the album went on to sell over 2.7 million copies in the UK. Oldfield followed it with Hergest Ridge (1974), Ommadawn (1975) and Incantations (1978). Like Tubular Bells, these albums consist of longform, mostly instrumental pieces.
In the late 1970s, Oldfield began to tour and release more commercial and song-based music, beginning with Platinum (1979), QE2 (1980) and Five Miles Out (1982).
“Mike Oldfield” enters the record as english musician (born 1953). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Mike, Oldfield and English can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Mike Oldfield” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Mike, Oldfield and English provides the most credible route into that argument.
The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3008. VIAF identifies the subject as 17408408. The Library of Congress control number is nr89009927. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1953, 1973, 1967 and 1970.
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This entry incorporates text from “Mike Oldfield” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.