Given that most of Oldfield's best work has nothing to do with those long thin metallic tube things, the idea behind this compilation seems to me quite dubious at best, Tubular Bells being very much the staple purchase of the early 70s equivalent of the Dido generation, and at least one moody misunderstood zitladen teenager in the late 80s. Still, one advantage to online shopping is that no indie-aware record shop attendant is going to sneer at you for buying something so mind-numbingly naff. (Hey, at least it's not Moby.) So it was I'm able to hear how the the concept of the best bits of the various Tubular Bells albums stack up. Not that bad, actually.

For a start, it excises most of the naff bits of the original work, and patches other parts with corresponding excerpts from the Orchestral ... and Exposed versions. I never much liked the former, as it's all rather a bit kitsch. The rocking out in the live bits is a massive improvement on their substitutes, however, and as they're also the best bits of Exposed as well, you can just about not bother with that album as well.

"The Caveman Man" obviously gets a guernsey, but it is a pity that they didn't include the hilarious version of "Sailors Hornpipe" from Boxed where a drunken Viv Stanshall stumbled around The Manor describing the scenery accompanied by the also quite sodden Mike and Tom Newman, instead just opting for the less weird rendition.

As for the rest, well, the two excerpts from Tubular Bells II, "Sentinel" and "The Bell" with Alan Rickman doing the roll call are obvious inclusions, for all their hermetic production, courtesty of Trevor Horn. The best bit on the compile, "Far Above The Clouds" rocks probably because it borrows as much from Ommadawn as the motherlode. As for "The Millennium Bell" from the rather patchy album of the same name - where oddly enough, the most stupifyingly pretentious parts (such as "The Doge's Palace", heh) were also the highlights - well, it's just as well that at the completion of III, Mike had decided he'd had more than enough of the Ibiza scene and fled back to England.

With The Best Of Tubular Bells being indeed the highlights of a mediocre series, that means you can just get this and not have to bother with the rest, thereby killing about five birds with one stone, as perhaps only Tubular Bells III merits a separate purchase. It's worth remembering that Oldfield's best albums tend not to mention dem bells in the title.