When this album was being recorded Mike Oldfield was desperate to fulfil his contract and escape the clutches of Virgin Records. For this final outing, Oldfield returned to the tried and trusted formula of putting songs on one side of the record and a longer complex piece on the other.
However, to break the monotony, Mike attempted something new: he decided to sing. Despite not being known as a vocalist Mike's singing is reasonably accomplished and is certainly no worse than some of the guest singers on his previous albums.
The songs themselves are all pretty good and only the faux reggae of
"Gimme Back" sounds a bit clunky. Mike devotes one measly page of his
autobiography to this album and the
best he can say of it is that the title track "wasn't too bad". This summary is something of an understatement as "Heaven's Open" is a great song and Virgin even saw fit to release it as a single. I also like the drama of "No Dream" and the withering critique of "Make Make" is hard to resist.
On the second side the track "Music from the Balcony" is one of the weakest pieces Oldfield ever wrote. This song sounds like he simply found a sample disc and decided to go to town with it. Terrible, terrible stuff. On the whole this isn't a bad record, but it definitely runs out of ideas after the first side. Still, once the album was delivered, Oldfield was free...2/5
