Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells Live in Concert

A debut that paid for a record label

Mike Oldfield was born in Reading on 15 May 1953, took up the guitar at ten, and from 1967 played folk clubs in a duo with his sister Sally called the Sallyangie. That partnership ran until 1970, after which he took the bass chair in Kevin Ayers's band the Whole World. The long instrumental piece he had been assembling in that period became Tubular Bells, recorded at the Manor studio in Oxfordshire and released on 25 May 1973 as the first catalogue item Virgin Records ever issued. He was 19, and he overdubbed nearly every instrument himself across the record's two movements.

Sales were slow until December 1973, when William Friedkin used the opening piano figure in The Exorcist. The album reached number one in the UK in October 1974, has sold around 2.76 million copies in Britain — placing it 42nd on the list of the country's best-selling albums — and won the Grammy for Best Instrumental Composition in 1975. It was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2018.

The composer has retired; the music has not

Oldfield made 25 studio albums. Moonlight Shadow, sung by Maggie Reilly and taken from Crises in 1983, reached number four in the UK and is still the nearest thing to a hit single in the catalogue. His last public performance was the opening ceremony of the London Olympics in 2012, where he played excerpts from Tubular Bells. His label announced his retirement in 2023, and he lives in Nassau in the Bahamas. He does not appear at these concerts, and the promoters state that plainly in the listings.

What tours instead is a sanctioned continuation run by Robin A. Smith, Oldfield's musical director for more than 25 years and his collaborator on Tubular Bells II and III. Smith studied composition at the Royal College of Music and was principal pianist of the National Youth Orchestra. Because Oldfield does not read music, a large part of Smith's job was transcribing his ideas and relaying them to other players; he also arranged the folk-leaning Voyager. Oldfield gave the live project his blessing and handed Smith the creative lead. Smith had already conducted live performances of the first album in 2021 and 2023 before the anniversary run.

Three albums in one sitting

Tubular Bells II followed in 1992 and Tubular Bells III in 1998, with The Millennium Bell in 1999 and a digitally re-recorded version of the original in 2003. The current programme, billed as The Best of Tubular Bells I, II & III, keeps the 1973 album whole and draws extended sections from the two sequels, with Moonlight Shadow added. Smith's stated aim is to put the technical distance between 1973 and 1998 in front of an audience in a single evening.

Earlier versions of the tour were looser in the first half. The 50th-anniversary shows opened with a medley pulling in Ommadawn, To France and Summit Day, and made room across the run for Family Man, Women of Ireland, Far Above the Clouds and The Gem, a Smith original that is also earmarked for a soundtrack release.

Eight players and a wall of percussion

The band is eight strong: Smith at piano and keyboards, Kwesi Edman on cello, Daisy Bevan on vocals, Lisa Featherston on bass and vocals, two guitar and mandolin chairs — Maxime Obideau with Jay Stapley in Manchester in 2024, Obideau with Ruben Alvarez on the 2025 European dates — and Will Miles and Jack Davis on percussion. The bells themselves stand upstage centre among the massed drums and tuned percussion, in view all night.

Smith's line on the arrangement is that every note belongs to Oldfield. What he added was a cello and a trained classical voice to carry lines that were originally synthesised or multi-tracked, plus a much larger percussion section; the guitar parts stay close to the record. Yaron Lifschitz of the Brisbane circus company Circa is credited with movement for the anniversary production, and Sam West's recorded voice handles the instrument roll-call in the closing minutes. The volume of work behind it is substantial: 32 UK performances in September 2024 alone, and by early 2026 Smith put the running total at about 160 concerts.

Where it stands in autumn 2026

The 26-date UK tour was announced on 3 June 2025 and ran from Oxford New Theatre on 7 February 2026 to Portsmouth Guildhall on 12 March, taking in Usher Hall in Edinburgh, Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, Perth Concert Hall, the Glasshouse in Gateshead, York Barbican, Liverpool Philharmonic Hall, the Bridgewater Hall, Sheffield City Hall, Cardiff New Theatre and Bath Forum along the way.

An Australian leg was announced on 20 January 2026 with tickets on sale from 22 January: seven shows between 3 and 13 June, opening at Hamer Hall in Melbourne and closing at the Sydney Opera House, via Adelaide Entertainment Centre, His Majesty's Theatre in Perth, QPAC in Brisbane, Newcastle Civic Theatre and Canberra Theatre.

The European autumn leg opened in Eindhoven on 8 September 2026 and has already played Prague on 13 September, an Austrian run through Innsbruck, Graz, Linz and Vienna from 15 to 18 September, and Ghent on 20 September. Haarlem falls on 26 September and Bern on 27 September, with Stockholm on 1 October and Tampere on 4 October still to come.

What reviewers and audiences report

A five-star review of the Bridgewater Hall show on 22 October 2024 described the players entering one at a time behind Smith at the piano, standing ovations after both halves and again after the encore, and singled out Bevan's wordless singing and the cinematic weight Smith's arrangement adds without departing from the original. A report from the Gopass Arena in Bratislava on 26 March 2025 praised the sound mix and argued that Part Two gains from Smith's restructuring, becoming more hypnotic and less repetitive because melodies are handed from one instrument to another; the same review noted that the grunts from the caveman section have been dropped.

Reaction is not uniform. A review of the White Rock Theatre in Hastings on 30 October 2024 called the performance mesmerising and said the eight players sounded like three times that number, but the comments beneath it came from people who had wanted the album reproduced as recorded. On the 2026 UK leg, ticket-site reviews from York and Cardiff were warm, while one complained that a lead guitarist's cable failure cost several solos and that the vocal microphones were pushed too far forward in Moonlight Shadow.