Mike Oldfield - Amarok

35th anniversary half-speed double-LP reissue of Oldfield’s 13th album - one of his personal favourites

Release Date: 31 October 2025
Pre-order now from here

Following the acclaimed 50th anniversary releases of Mike Oldfield’s ‘Tubular Bells’ and ‘Hergest Ridge’, we jump forward 15 years to celebrate the 35th anniversary of Oldfield’s much loved 13th album ‘Amarok’.

Available only as a double-LP, half-speed remastered by Miles Showell at Abbey Road studio, it will be released on 31 October and is available for pre-order now from here. 

Originally released in 1990 and presented as a sixty-minute suite of music, ideal for the CD age, Amarok was split into two halves on single vinyl. Here, with the full approval of Oldfield, the album is now divided into four 15 minute edits, in order to optimise audio fidelity, with expanded artwork.

After increasingly embracing the latest technology as the 80s progressed, here Mike returned to a more granular approach, playing almost everything on this most beguiling of albums, including “Long Thin metallic hanging Tubes” as listed on the sleeve; a punning reference, of course, to ‘tubular bells’. Many saw this as a 90s update of his seminal debut and a dry-run for his chart topping Tubular Bells II in 1992. Amarok is a personal favourite of Oldfield: on its release he said that he “let it all come out without any interference… I felt I was getting ideas from somewhere inside me, and six months later I had a whole album.”

Mike Oldfield is one of Britain’s great artistic minds. A musical polymath, his vision has always been singular, uncompromising and unique. His introduction to the wider world was Tubular Bells in 1973 at the age of 20 after a five year period of touring in his own and other bands. ‘Tubular Bells’ was unlike anything else of its time, released by the brand new Virgin Records: the whole process was daring and against the norm but ultimately phenomenally successful globally.

Now retired, Mike Oldfield's artistic vision and process has never wavered: unswayed by music trends of the day or celebrity, he is an ultimate example of an artist who let his music do all the talking – his 26 studio album catalogue is a groundbreaking body of work like no other.

Track Listing:
Side One - Amarok Part One
Side Two - Amarok Part Two
Side Three - Amarok Part Three
Side Four - Amarok Part Four

Format: 2LP
UPC: 602478375545
Cat Number: V2640-35lp