Magnum opus

Hergest Ridge (50th Anniversary) UMC

Tubular what? Long overshadowed by its illustrious predecessor, Oldfield’s 1974 hymn to the British landscape gets the belated Golden Jubilee treatment – and it’s never sounded so brooding or beautiful.

Taking flight: Mike Oldfield prepares to launch his ...

Eleven years after his first ambitious homage to Mike Oldfield, Robert Reed is back with the long-awaited fourth instalment in his Sanctuary series. With a little help from Oldfield collaborators Les Penning, Tom Newman and drummer Simon Phillips, the Magenta and Cyan mastermind tells Prog about his mission to keep long-form music alive.

The instrument that featured on the cover of Dire Straits’ Brothers In Arms is still very much in use.

To celebrate the imminent arrival of Tracks II: The Lost Albums , Uncut takes a revelatory trip inside the archives of BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN . There, we piece together the stories behind an unexpected and expansive alternate discography not even the most devout Bruce fans could have imagined – from garage sessions and solo experiments to film soundtracks, pared-down dustbowl dramas, Vegas swing and more. “If you want to understand how Springsteen works creatively, he’s never shown you more of his cards than he does here,” one collaborator confides to Peter Watts