Children of the Sun

Long before Tubular Bells became an international hit, and the soundtrack to The Exorcist, Mike Oldfield and his sister Sally had a folk duo, The Sallyangie. Their only album, 1968’s Children Of The Sun, is a period piece, but a rather beautiful one, at that. It’s very much a late sixties production – ornate, swathed with strings and other intricate things, with a vague hippie-twee sensibility – but the Oldfields prove themselves to be good, sometimes great, songwriters. It’s easy to be cynical about music like this, that risks (and sometimes indulges) feyness, but it’s hard to resist the charms of airy, blissed-out crystals of melancholy like “River Song” or the playfulness of “Love In Ice Crystals.”