"With a stunning combination of new age, progressive electronic and soft pop music, composer/instrumentalist Mike Oldfield has made a lasting impression upon England's music scene; so much so, in fact, that the eclectic musician has taken his neo-classical style of music and crossed multiple boundaries, even emerging with a Grammy Award for Best Instrumental Composition (other than Jazz) in 1974.Oldfield may have taken the high road into fame and success, but he started out way down the path of trial and error. A Reading, England native, Oldfield began experimenting with music around age 14, when he jumpstarted the folksy duo Sallyangie with his sister Sally. By age 16, Oldfield started playing bass with the Whole World alongside classical geniuses David Bedford and Lol Coxhill, and a successful solo career quickly developed. The great musician's masterpiece Tubular Bells was first released as Opus 1, a demo album produced with the help of Richard Branson. Not catching any bites with the demo, Branson started his own label and in 1973 Tubular Bells became the very first release of Branson's Virgin Records. An album full of different instruments (about 30 total, most of them played by Oldfield himself) Tubular Bells was a release that couldn't be characterized by one specific genre or musical style. The album went to number three on the pop charts in 1974, and its follow-up Hergest Ridge (1974) was also a hit, sealing Oldfield's fate as a famous musician.Exploring ambient beats and world music through the ‘70s, Oldfield eventually got into the club scene, shifting into pop with a cover of ABBA's ""Arrival."" Albums like Crises (1983), Discovery (1984) and Islands (1987) all sauntered into a mainstream path, and Oldfield kept producing pop music into the ‘90s with albums like The Songs of Distant Earth in 1994, and has since released other brilliant new age albums such as 2008's Music of the Spheres."