Five years ago, Aidan Roberts and Daniel Holdsworth came up with the preposterous idea of arranging the classic 1970s album Tubular Bells - an album performed by more than 30 players - for just two players. Five years later they found themselves at a Mike Oldfield conference in Reading, England, where Oldfield told them "Look I think you're mad! I can't believe you worked it all out by ear and I think it's great!"
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The idea started out just as a laugh, and there are several versions of the story of how the project came about. "But the seed of it," says Roberts, "Was, Danny and I were just hanging out, and I had Tubular Bells on the record player, and I was quite impressed by it again. We'd heard there was a German duo of classical guitarists who had done a version of it and Danny went home and thought, 'I'm curious to see if I can make a guitar arrangement of maybe just the first 10 minutes of Tubular Bells, just for me and Aidan to play, just as an exercise, and then I'll be curious to see how it matches up to what these German guys have done."
Once the ball started rolling, the pair started to get carried away. "We thought maybe we can rearrange them and not just use two guitars. Maybe we can use a bunch of instruments. And then we really got carried away and we thought, 'You know what, I reckon we can get it sounding pretty close to the original if we work our butts off and bring in all sorts of stuff like loop pedals!'."
It took about eight months from the first seed of an idea to having it in some sort of shape that the pair could perform it. "And then to take the plunge I booked a show at a theatre restaurant in Katoomba. Do it once and see if it works. It was really nerve-racking and we weren't expecting a lot of people but it sold out!
"It worked! And we've gone around the world with it! It's bizarre!"
Something that surprised them was how funny people find the show. "I'd kill for the chance to sit in the audience and watch it from the audience's perspective. We didn't realise how amusing it is to watch. It's pretty white- knuckled a lot of it because we're just trying to do so much at once, the lightning-fast changes of instruments we have to make and all that sort of stuff must be quite entertaining to watch!"
Fans of the record are the people who Roberts and Holdsworth expected to see at the shows.
"They are usually the first to come to it because there's a nostalgic element attached to it for them." But whenever they do a long run in a city, they notice there's a pattern. "The audience starts to get younger because word of mouth spreads that it's not just something that's a nostalgic trip for people from the '70s but then word spreads around town and the crowds get a little bigger and younger. And it's great," laughs Roberts, "Because I think there are lots of people who've never heard the album come to see it and get a lot out of it."
TUBULAR BELLS
When: April 10-12
Where: The Street Theatre, Acton.
Tickets: From $39 available from thestreet.org.au
