The chaotic brilliance of Tubular Bells For Two has to be seen to be believed

Take, for example, Tubular Bells For Two.

Daniel Holdsworth and Aidan Roberts came up with the idea of recreating the classic Mike Oldfield album while listening to records and enjoying a glass or three of red. 

Composed by Oldfield in 1973, Tubular Bells was the first release on Richard Branson’s fledgling record label, Virgin Records. It went on to sell more than 30 million copies and became the soundtrack to The Exorcist.

“This show came about by accident. Basically we were playing around with the album, having a bit of fun with it, a bit of a jam, as we hadn’t heard it for a long time,” Holdsworth tells Weekender.

“We weren’t necessarily big Mike Oldfield fans but we knew it was an important album. We had a lounge room full of instruments at the time and we thought wouldn’t it be fun to set them all up in a circle and run around and play them? We never really intended on performing it. 

“We got a bit carried away with it all and wondered if we could play the entire album from start to finish, just the two of us. Yes, there may have been one or two bottles of red involved.”

Oldfield harnessed – what was at the time – the latest in multi-track recording technology, playing a multitude of instruments one-by-one in the studio. In Tubular Bells for Two two men perform every part of the album, live. They are literally run off their feet as they navigate a sea of instruments. It is an intricately choreographed, thrilling piece of tightrope theatre. Things can go wrong at any moment, and the slightest mistake or misplaced limb can bring the entire show crashing to a halt.

“We were just going to do a one-off concert for family and friends at a little theatre restaurant in Katoomba. It sold out and we weren’t expecting that,” Holdsworth explains. 

“Anyway, word got around and we were invited to the Sydney Fringe Festival in 2010, I think it was, and it just took off. We got invited to the Arts Centre in Melbourne then to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. We sold out our first-ever season in Edinburgh and it just kept going. We’ve been performing Tubular Bells for years now.”

He is still surprised by the show’s enduring popularity.

“I’ve been in music my whole life. It is my life. I’ve played in bands and different theatre projects and I completed degrees in composition and music technology. I also write music for film and television. I think that’s the reason that this took Aidan and I by surprise. There were so many other projects that we were taking very seriously and this one, for some reason, took off when we least expected it.”

Roberts stopped performing last year to become the show’s creative director. Tom Bamford took his place on stage and proved himself worthy of the challenge.

“When you put limitations on yourself it forces you to be more creative,” Holdsworth says.

“In the early stages we had to come up with weird and wonderful ideas as to how we were going to play all the instruments and make it sound like the album. We discovered that one of the things that made it work as a show was that it’s not just about the music, it’s about the performance.

“The show has a theatrical, almost circus-like, element. We’re pushing ourselves to the limit and it can fall over at any moment, and I think that’s really exciting for the audience. We run around, playing one instrument with the left hand and another with the right. But we take the music seriously. We want to perform it the best we possibly can.”

He likens the rehearsal process to learning choreography: “Once you start you can’t stop, you’ve just got to keep going. You have to trust yourself and what you’re doing. The second you start thinking about it everything starts going terribly wrong.”