Mike Oldfield - Platinum Collection

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Track List: Platinum Collection

Disc 1:

Disc 2:

Disc 3:

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Album Details: Platinum Collection

Release Date:: 04/11/2006
Label:: Emi Int'l
UPC:: 094635493627

Pro Reviews: Platinum Collection

EXPERT RATING:

From AMG Reviews

Mike Oldfield is a bit of an enigma. On the one hand, you have the artist who almost single handedly ushered in the genre of New Age music with his epic masterpiece Tubular Bells and then followed that with several albums, Hergest Ridge, Ommadawn and even Tubular Bells volumes II and III, all with tracks that invariable meandered for half an hour or more through various musical ideas and soundscapes and no doubt would have gone on a lot longer had it not been for the constraints of vinyl and the restrictions on the length of musical compositions that would physically fit on two sides of a piece of plastic with micro grooves. And on the other hand, he was a successful short form singles artist with three minute or less tracks, ranging from the instrumentals In Dolci Jubilo and Portsmouth to the traditional folk songs like On Horseback and the outandout pop songs Moonlight Shadow and Family Man. So when it comes to compiling a greatest hits collection, what does his record label Virgin concentrate on? They've had plenty of practice for as early as 1976, just three years into his career, the triple album Boxed came along which was the first three albums, boxed together plus the singles released to date. Then in 1985 as the CD age was still in its infancy, came The Complete Mike Oldfield, a double album with short excerpts from the various album length compositions, plus again, the hit singles to date. In 1993, this was updated and replaced by Elements 19731991 which featured the full length Tubular Bells, excerpts from Hergest Ridge and the original side one only of Ommadawn, and yet again the single hits to date. This was his most successful compilation, peaking at no.5 in the charts and apart from Tubular Bells vol II, from the previous year, his first top 5 album since the three LPs that began his career. Still not satisfied, Virgin updated the compilation again in 2006 bringing out a three CD set called Platinum Collection with 46 tracks spread right across his career from the opening excerpt of Tubular Bells to The Millennium Bell and To Be Free from the 21st century. It is doubtful that Virgin Records would have been totally happy with this release. Firstly it crawled into the charts at no.36 spending just three weeks on the lists and then it was gone, waiting for the next greatest hits to be released and secondly, it did rather attempt to cram too much into what was undoubtedly value for money (three and a half hours of music for little more than the price of a standard single CD. All the famous hit singles are there intact, In Dulci Jubilo, Portsmouth, Blue Peter Theme, Family Man, Moonlight Shadow and Sentinel, some taken from the extended 12" single versions, but the album product that best sums up Mike Oldfield's body of work is poorly served with two excerpts of Tubular Bells at only 12 minutes between them, 9 minutes of Hergest Ridge, 10 minutes of Ommadawn and a rather miserable 4 minutes of Incantations. It would be extremely difficult to please everybody with a greatest hits collection from a man with 35 years of chart success behind him, mostly famous albums that serve as one piece of music. The best that Virgin could hope for from this compilation is that it whetted the appetite for a superb artist and served as a starting place for new fans to go out and buy all of the individual albums (even the more recent Warner Brothers ones).

- Sharon Mawer, All Music Guide

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Mike Oldfield Biography

Composer Mike Oldfield rose to fame on the success of Tubular Bells, an eerie, album-length conceptual piece employed to stunning effect in the film The Exorcist. Born May 15, 1953 in Reading, England, Oldfield began his professional career at the ag...Full Mike Oldfield Biography

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