All Creatures Great and Small star Samuel West helping celebrate 50 years of Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells with new role

All Creatures Great and Small star Samuel West has a special relationship with Mike Oldfield’s ambient prog album Tubular Bells.

“I was seven in 1973 when my big sister, who was 10 years older than me, played me Dark Side Of The Moon and Tubular Bells – those two great 1973 albums,” says the star, who plays Siegfried Farnon in the Yorkshire-set and filmed Channel 5 remake of All Creatures Great and Small.

“And for a seven-year-old they remained unlike anything I had ever heard before, really. They were responsible for giving birth to my ears at that age!”

West may be best known as an actor on stage and screen, but the 55-year-old – the son of actress and actor Prunella Scales and Timothy West – also enjoys a sideline in narration.

He has lent his voice to a BBC documentary series about the Second World War, educational miniseries The Planets and a performance by the Sheffield Philharmonic Chorus, to name just a few.

As a self-confessed Tubular Bells super-fan, it made perfect sense for him to take on the role of master of ceremonies during a special performance celebrating 50 years since Oldfield began work on the album.

“It is a coming together of those three things – the music, the acrobatics and circus, and the projections and lighting – that make that rare thing: a piece of total theatre,” he says.

The performance debuts at London’s Royal Festival Hall and sees Circa Contemporary Circus, who are based in Brisbane, Australia, interpret the music through dance and acrobatics.

West is taking on the ‘master of ceremonies’ role Vivian Stanshall, of 1960s psychedelic pranksters Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, played during the original recording.

“You don’t want to copy Stanshall when we do it,” he says of his pre-recorded part. “But at the same time it is such a classic performance and basically the only way of doing it.

“We don’t want to change them too much either. It is like raising a glass to him. That is what I tried to do.”

The story behind Tubular Bells is as incredible and unusual as the music itself – a combination of classical influences, progressive rock, psychedelic sounds, jazz, world and folk.

Recorded in a week, it was the first album to be released by Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin label and its success helped launch the Virgin empire,

which is now ferrying individuals to space.

Its opening theme was used for the soundtrack to 1973 horror classic The Exorcist and sales soared.

Danny Boyle’s much-praised and still fondly-remembered opening ceremony for the 2012 London Olympics featured extracts of the album alongside other British cultural icons such as Sir Paul McCartney and JK Rowling.

As of 2019, the album had spent close to 300 weeks on the UK albums chart.

“The great thing about Tubular Bells is that it is loved by a lot of people who don’t like that sort of thing, whatever that sort of thing is,” West reflects.

“Is it a concept album? Is it a piece of classical music? It should certainly exist in the concert hall but it is also a piece that could never have been made without a modern recording studio.

“In fact, it sort of made the modern recording studio. Before it nobody had done an album like that. It would make a brilliant Prom concert for instance.”

The 50th anniversary show comes only weeks after so-called Freedom Day, when live performances of all kinds were finally able to play to full houses as Covid restrictions on social distancing were removed.

West, who shares two young daughters with his partner, playwright Laura Wade, has not been unaffected.

His production of Wade’s The Watsons, adapted from the unfinished novel of the same name by Jane Austen, was due to open in the West End when the first lockdown struck.

“It has been such a terrible time in the last 18 months for music,” he says, sounding downbeat.

“It is important to say that touring musicians have been hit very, very hard by the end of freedom of movement and there has been very little to celebrate about live music in the last six months since Brexit was finally confirmed.

“There is a lot of bad news to make up for so if we can get together and make beautiful music and beautiful theatre and beautiful art then that is a really important thing to see at the moment. It is lovely to be part of it.”

Unsurprisingly, West has mixed feelings over the Government’s handling of the arts sector during the pandemic.

“We were all very grateful for the Culture Recovery Fund which has been beautifully managed by the Arts Council,” he says.

“It has done its best to keep the bricks and mortar of the infrastructure in this country alive.

“That is very much in the positive column. In the negative column it is important to say that the support for freelancers has been nowhere near as good.

“The simple fact is that you can save the crown jewels if you think that the crown jewels are the places where you put this stuff on.

“But if you don’t look after the people who mind the jewels, you aren’t going to have any new crowns.”

The 50th anniversary of Tubular Bells is also a chance to reflect on the album’s legacy.

So, what exactly is the key to its longevity down the decades?

“Extraordinary tunes,” West offers without a pause.

“Mike Oldfield had a week to record it but it had been going around his head for two years before then.”

He adds: “1973 is the official release date but we are celebrating 50 years since he started writing it.

“A bit like Stravinsky writing The Rite Of Spring, he had been hearing it in his head for ages but it took him three years to work out to write it down.”

West also cites “fantastic production” as another factor in the album’s enduring success, before diving into an anecdote about how Oldfield used special claw hammers to achieve a specific sound on the record.

He describes it as a “proper symphony”.

“It has so many beautiful, haunting tunes,” he adds. “It never disappoints me. It is always a... I was going to say a guilty pleasure but I don’t really agree with the concept of guilty pleasures.

“It is simply a pleasure. Whenever I put it on I just love listening to it again.

“It reminds me of being seven and listening to it for the first time.”

Oldfield's joy at album's longevity

Mike Oldfield has said it is emotional to consider how much Tubular Bells still means to people - five decades after he began work on the seminal album.

Speaking in advance of this week’s concerts, he said: “It’s amazing to think that it’s 50 years since I started writing Tubular Bells, and I am touched that my music has reached so many people, all over the world, during that time.”

He added: “I am sure that the 50th anniversary live concert experience of Tubular Bells will be spectacular, theatrical, fantastical and thrilling.”

The performances currently taking place in London and involving Samuel West are being described as “a unique prelude to the celebration of the masterpiece’s 50th anniversary in 2023”.

Tubular Bells: Live in Concert runs until August 15 at London’s Royal Festival Hall.

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