User blog:MemberD/6,900 pages

Don't know what happened to 6,800 but anyway here we are at 6.9K - created 'accidentally' as usual, although happily, the subject is one of my all time favourite tunes Guilty (song and single) by Mike Oldfield. It's one of those singles I wished I'd bought back in the day, but for some reason I didn't, possibly because he was considered 'untrendy' during those heady post-punk/new wave days, and so I probably spent my pocket money on something else I could show off at school.

I only quite recently 'discovered' for myself that the tune for Guilty is based on a chord sequence (it probably has a more technical musical name than that but..) from Incantations part 1, making it effectively a "disco-version" of that theme/album, so very tongue-in-cheek and also very Oldfield! Apparently he was forced by Virgin to come up with some a bit more commercial after the double-album dinosaur that was Incantations (a masterpiece in my opinion) and so he just took it and made it fit for the disco-dancefloor. A successful and very pleasing result, which got him into the charts and on the telly quite a bit Europe-wide. He also integrated the song into his 1979 live concerts, which were happening when the single was released (coincidence - not), often tagging the piece onto the end of a souped-up version of Tubular Bells Part One finale, a musical combination which I've always liked very much (there are several official recordings of it about).

Elsewhere on the Wiki - I've been posting a lot of songs/singles from more recent years (eg. 2023!) and even started posting up the current No.1 singles, plus the Top 40 and Album charts again. That's because I've found a lot of the current hits to be quite good, and tunes which even I can listen to. Don't know how long it will last (the dreaded Christmas-songs streaming season is upon us again) but I suppose the music of any year since 1964 is worth documenting, at least in part.

Speaking of 1964, this week is the Doctor Who 60th-anniversary year...yes, I know that means it started in 1963 although was being broadcast when our pop-culture era begins, and in fact the first series (or season as they say nowadays) was in full swing during the end of winter-into-spring-into-summer-up-to-September (!) of 1964, with season two starting up again in October, so, again, 1964 proves to be a pivotal year for pop-culture.