Going back to the early 1970s I had taken a giant leap of faith in my personal life and had moved 250 miles away from my family to set up home in Bristol and ultimately get married. I won't bore you with the day to day but suffice to say that while I was there a friend from Cheshire used to visit regularly.
One weekend he arrived with girlfriend and as usual a few Newcastle Brown Ales were quaffed, guitars were played in a style ranging from good to complete rubbish the more alcohol we consumed. He then said in a moment of extreme clarity - "tomorrow when we go to Weston I will play you a new 8 track I have bought"
Sure enough on that journey to Weston John played this 8 track and it was an instrumental piece called Tubular Bells by some guy called Mike Oldfield. That was the start of a love affair with that album - i bought the album, bought the cassette, bought Tubular Bells 2 and various other incarnations over the years. Alison my wife also fell in love with Tubular Bells over that weekend, but only the original version.
Now let us leap forwards 40 years to the year 2013 and I was contacted by a friend who suggested that I might like to make noises to a chap called Tom who had set up a record label called Viral Discs and Downloads. The draw was the fact that Tom had revisited Tubular Bells.
My initial reaction to this was "hmmmm something to think about!"
So I put my radio head on and steeled up the courage to send an email asking this guy if he would be interested in taking part in an interview concerning the Tubular Bells remake.
Much to my surprise he replied that he would love to do an interview and we arranged the date and there follows the gist of the interview taken from an article published online by Go Articles.
Tom Newman interview with Dave Baxter of Cauldron FM and Capstone Radio
Tom Newman just wanted to be a rock star. Elvis Presley and Lonnie Donegan were two of his greatest influences. He joined a skiffle band in the late 50s and then in the 60s he graduated into a psychedelic rock band called July This band split up in 1969 and they lost all their equipment because their record label Major - Minor went into liquidation
A girl friend introduced Tom to a 19 year old guy who was creating a magazine for students and Tom admits that he thought this guy was gullible enough to want to start a record label. The young chap was one Richard Branson.
Richard went for the idea and Tom was given the task of buying a studio worth of 4 track recording equipment. They were going to use an old church in Holland Park, London but then Richard met George Martin (Beatles producer) who said that he was using 8 track, so Richard then told Tom to buy 8 track equipment. In a few months George had gone to 16 track and so Tom was told to follow.
After a while they found a place in Oxfordshire that was to become The Manor Recording Studios and Tom, as resident engineer, was working on a project with a young band that contained another 19 year old musician called Mike Oldfield.
Mike presented Tom with a 3inch reel of quarter inch tape that he had recorded on a tape deck borrowed from Kevin Ayres and this tape contained some fragmented instrumental pieces that were to become that basis of Tubular Bells.
About a year later Tom happened to play these pieces to Richards brother Simon and he was totally blown away by what he heard. The decision was then taken to persuade Richard that this could be the music to herald the new record label.
The Tubular Bells remake actually started to come together about 15 years ago because of a Bosnian cello player Vedran Smailovic later dubbed The cellist of Sarajevo who performed an amazing tribute to the victims of a massacre in one of the squares in Sarajevo.
An idea was formed that it might serve towards the peace movement if Vedran could record an album with a Serbian keyboard player. Tom Newman was asked to produce this album by Tommy Sands and whilst it began in a very amicable fashion it eventually deteriorated into a fight.
But the idea of world peace through the medium of music would not go away, and one day over a pint of whiskey it came about that Tom, who owned a decommissioned minesweeper should sail it to Ireland and that he and Tommy would set up a broadcast studio with the idea of making radio programmes, on a ship in neutral waters, with children from Protestant and Catholic backgrounds and from both Northern and Southern Ireland.
However, the political temperature prevented that from happening and so they decided that they would attempt to get the children together in their schools and make some music.
They approached the Northern Ireland Schools Board who liked the idea and got behind it, they even provided some funding for the project.
The whole process to create the recordings took from 2004 - 2012 for various reasons and along the way they found that there were schools that would not co-operate
Eventually once the project was on the way to completion Tom began the process of trying to secure interest from record labels but every one they approached turned them away, including Virgin. They all said that they could not see the project being a commercial success and that there was no interest in this sort of project now etc etc etc.
So Tom and Paul Brett decided that they would go it alone and set up their own record label - Viral Discs and Downloads (much as Richard and Tom did in the early 70s) to release the project.
Tom contacted Sir Richard Branson directly and explained the project to him and he immediately saw the potential of the concept - getting schoolchildren together to re-create classic albums in their own particular style.
And - Children of Irelands Tubular Bells is potentially the first of many revisited classic works.
At the time of writing this article I am preparing a broadcast of an interview with Tom Newman and his partner in Viral Discs and Downloads, Paul Brett, a musician with an impressive pedigree.
So without further ado, let me provide the links to the interview with Tom and Paul that followed this article and the full version of Tubular Bells by The Children of Ireland.
The interview is in two parts and this is the link to part 1 http://bit.ly/1fVTdRD
And this is the link to part 2 http://bit.ly/1bbw1qy
I hope that you enjoyed listening to that - and will now understand why I am so blown away by making this contact.
However, this is NOT the end of the story ................................
One weekend he arrived with girlfriend and as usual a few Newcastle Brown Ales were quaffed, guitars were played in a style ranging from good to complete rubbish the more alcohol we consumed. He then said in a moment of extreme clarity - "tomorrow when we go to Weston I will play you a new 8 track I have bought"
Sure enough on that journey to Weston John played this 8 track and it was an instrumental piece called Tubular Bells by some guy called Mike Oldfield. That was the start of a love affair with that album - i bought the album, bought the cassette, bought Tubular Bells 2 and various other incarnations over the years. Alison my wife also fell in love with Tubular Bells over that weekend, but only the original version.
Now let us leap forwards 40 years to the year 2013 and I was contacted by a friend who suggested that I might like to make noises to a chap called Tom who had set up a record label called Viral Discs and Downloads. The draw was the fact that Tom had revisited Tubular Bells.
My initial reaction to this was "hmmmm something to think about!"
So I put my radio head on and steeled up the courage to send an email asking this guy if he would be interested in taking part in an interview concerning the Tubular Bells remake.
Much to my surprise he replied that he would love to do an interview and we arranged the date and there follows the gist of the interview taken from an article published online by Go Articles.
Tom Newman interview with Dave Baxter of Cauldron FM and Capstone Radio
Tom Newman just wanted to be a rock star. Elvis Presley and Lonnie Donegan were two of his greatest influences. He joined a skiffle band in the late 50s and then in the 60s he graduated into a psychedelic rock band called July This band split up in 1969 and they lost all their equipment because their record label Major - Minor went into liquidation
A girl friend introduced Tom to a 19 year old guy who was creating a magazine for students and Tom admits that he thought this guy was gullible enough to want to start a record label. The young chap was one Richard Branson.
Richard went for the idea and Tom was given the task of buying a studio worth of 4 track recording equipment. They were going to use an old church in Holland Park, London but then Richard met George Martin (Beatles producer) who said that he was using 8 track, so Richard then told Tom to buy 8 track equipment. In a few months George had gone to 16 track and so Tom was told to follow.
After a while they found a place in Oxfordshire that was to become The Manor Recording Studios and Tom, as resident engineer, was working on a project with a young band that contained another 19 year old musician called Mike Oldfield.
Mike presented Tom with a 3inch reel of quarter inch tape that he had recorded on a tape deck borrowed from Kevin Ayres and this tape contained some fragmented instrumental pieces that were to become that basis of Tubular Bells.
About a year later Tom happened to play these pieces to Richards brother Simon and he was totally blown away by what he heard. The decision was then taken to persuade Richard that this could be the music to herald the new record label.
The Tubular Bells remake actually started to come together about 15 years ago because of a Bosnian cello player Vedran Smailovic later dubbed The cellist of Sarajevo who performed an amazing tribute to the victims of a massacre in one of the squares in Sarajevo.
An idea was formed that it might serve towards the peace movement if Vedran could record an album with a Serbian keyboard player. Tom Newman was asked to produce this album by Tommy Sands and whilst it began in a very amicable fashion it eventually deteriorated into a fight.
But the idea of world peace through the medium of music would not go away, and one day over a pint of whiskey it came about that Tom, who owned a decommissioned minesweeper should sail it to Ireland and that he and Tommy would set up a broadcast studio with the idea of making radio programmes, on a ship in neutral waters, with children from Protestant and Catholic backgrounds and from both Northern and Southern Ireland.
However, the political temperature prevented that from happening and so they decided that they would attempt to get the children together in their schools and make some music.
They approached the Northern Ireland Schools Board who liked the idea and got behind it, they even provided some funding for the project.
The whole process to create the recordings took from 2004 - 2012 for various reasons and along the way they found that there were schools that would not co-operate
Eventually once the project was on the way to completion Tom began the process of trying to secure interest from record labels but every one they approached turned them away, including Virgin. They all said that they could not see the project being a commercial success and that there was no interest in this sort of project now etc etc etc.
So Tom and Paul Brett decided that they would go it alone and set up their own record label - Viral Discs and Downloads (much as Richard and Tom did in the early 70s) to release the project.
Tom contacted Sir Richard Branson directly and explained the project to him and he immediately saw the potential of the concept - getting schoolchildren together to re-create classic albums in their own particular style.
And - Children of Irelands Tubular Bells is potentially the first of many revisited classic works.
At the time of writing this article I am preparing a broadcast of an interview with Tom Newman and his partner in Viral Discs and Downloads, Paul Brett, a musician with an impressive pedigree.
So without further ado, let me provide the links to the interview with Tom and Paul that followed this article and the full version of Tubular Bells by The Children of Ireland.
The interview is in two parts and this is the link to part 1 http://bit.ly/1fVTdRD
And this is the link to part 2 http://bit.ly/1bbw1qy
I hope that you enjoyed listening to that - and will now understand why I am so blown away by making this contact.
However, this is NOT the end of the story ................................
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