QE2
Mike Oldfield
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Album Review
QE2 is the sixth record album by Mike Oldfield, released in 1980 on Virgin Records. The album was named after the ocean liner Queen Elizabeth 2.
The album contained both original Oldfield compositions as well as two cover version of pieces recorded by other bands (''Arrival'' by ABBA and ''Wonderful Land'' by The Shadows).
The longest tracks on the album are ''Taurus I'' and the title track, ''QE2'', lasting 10 minutes and 7 minutes respectively. Some years later The Shadows responded to Oldfield's cover of ''Wonderful Land'', by releasing a cover of Oldfield's ''Moonlight Shadow''. The cover songs were released as singles; and the helicopter cover for ''Arrival'' was clearly a reference to ABBA's Arrival album cover.
The album was the first Oldfield album to feature Maggie Reilly as a collaborator. Some tracks on the album feature vocals sung through vocoder. ''Conflict'' has an excerpt from J. S. Bach's ''Badinerie'' (the last part of Bach's Orchestral Suite No. 2 in B Minor). The lyrics for ''Celt'' were written by Tim Cross.
''Molly'' was made for his daughter, Molly Oldfield, who would later play keyboards on The Songs of Distant Earth and play a part in the Songs for Survival project. She went on to work on the BBC Two programme, QI as a ''QI Elf'', a researcher.
The European Adventure Tour 1981, which ran from March to August of that year, was in promotion of the album.
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![Mike Oldfield - QE2 [Epic / Virgin Records FE 37358] (31 October 1980)](http://sonic-recreation.com/images/lpart2/mike_oldfield_SR-EPFE37358_front.jpg "Mike Oldfield - QE2 [Epic / Virgin Records FE 37358] (31 October 1980)")