Back in 1975 Mike Oldfield should have been on top of the world. But behind the scenes he was suffering. Mike’s
debut album ‘Tubular Bells’ was an acclaimed multimillion seller out of
left field, and its successor, ‘Hergest Ridge’, sold prodigiously too,
despite a critical backlash which Mike took hard. More eclectic than
ever — featuring the African drums of Jabula, Chieftains piper Paddy
Moloney and so much more — his third album ‘Ommadawn’ was recorded in
Mike’s new home studio on the Welsh borders in the teeth of technical
difficulties, the personal stress of industry demands and unwanted fame,
and then the sudden death of his mother Maureen. Deeply reflective
yet also joyful, ‘Ommadawn’ was yet another massive hit album,
completing what has become the trinity of pieces of music closest to
their creator’s heart — and that of his fans too. Four decades later,
Mike found life’s troubles recurring. In 2012 he was thrilled to be
asked to reorchestrate some of his best-loved compositions for the
soundtrack of the London Olympics opening ceremony as devised by Danny
Boyle. Visually and musically, the event was a massive global success,
and a personal success for Mike as well. “The Olympics ceremony was
such a high, giving me such a sense of validation that the music I made
back in the ‘70s was good, that there was only one way to go. Down. “The last four years have been bad for me: a long legal battle; my son Dougal died [aged 33 of natural causes]; my father died.’ But out of tragedy and struggle, once more beautiful music is born — ‘Return To Ommadawn’. “Looking
on social media, the first three albums 40 years later are everybody’s
favourite, and Ommadawn more than Tubular Bells even. I think it’s
because it’s a genuine piece of music rather than production: hands,
fingers, fingernails. It didn’t have a goal; it was not trying to
achieve anything nor please anybody. It was spontaneous music making,
full of life. “The original Ommadawn was such a success that I was
put under pressure to keep making records, and I found myself making
music that wasn’t really me. It was a bit forced. I sort of lost my way.
Doing Return To Ommadawn is like a return to my true self. “It’s a
long time since I’ve done an acoustic, stringed instrument-based album. I
could still play all those instruments, and I thought, why not make
another album like that, something along the lines of Ommadawn? So I
floated the idea and even the title on the internet fan sites and the
demand was overwhelming. That helped cement it in my mind as a thing I’d
like to do. “The first thing I did was rebuild the original
instruments I played on Ommadawn, starting with the bodhrán which I
learned to play back in the ‘70s, and then the mandolin. Then I got a
wonderful handbuilt guitar which features heavily, then a flamenco
guitar. While Ommadawn had a recorder, I can’t play it, so instead had
penny whistles in different keys. I played a Gibson SG electric guitar
on the original album, and got a new one, but after trying loads of
plug-ins could only get almost that same sound again by playing through a
Boogie acoustic amplifier. And I played the acoustic bass guitar and a
ukulele, which I love, and the African drums myself, and a Celtic harp. I
find it very easy to play these things — not properly, of course, but
enough. “As for keyboards, living out in the Bahamas I couldn’t get a
real Mellotron, a massive thing, nor a Solina string synthesizer, nor
the organs, a Vox Continental and Farfisa Professional. Luckily people
have recreated virtual reality versions of all these things as plug-ins,
even the Clavioline, the main instrument on Telstar by The Tornados,
one of the first singles I ever bought. And I had to have a real
glockenspiel. “I’m put off by an electronic click track so to set the
tempo I got an old-fashioned wind-up metronome which I recorded on a
microphone. Some sections I didn’t want a click track at all so played
them free so they speed up and slow down. There’s no sequencing at all
on it. At the same time, only in the last three or four years has the
process of recording onto a hard drive rather than tape or disk actually
got up to scratch, reliable and sounding good. In my studio I have a
big, 4K high-definition screen, which means I can get an entire big
piece of work onto the screen in one go — the whole big picture rather
than lots of little bits. “When making an album you use every tool
available. I thought there should be a few little things of the original
album in there so took some vocal bits of the original Ommadawn, cut
them in pieces, sound effects treated them, reversed them and edited
them back together, and gradually over an afternoon a new melody
appeared with a strange otherworldly sound. “Even the artwork fell
into place beautifully when, after a Game Of Thrones binge-watching
marathon, I suggested to the record company doing something epic in the
snow. They made a lovely cover. The album is being released on vinyl
with a proper sleeve which you take out and play with ceremony, like a
restored vintage Rolls Royce coming out of the garage with its walnut
dashboard and smelling of oil. From the metronome on, it’s a handmade
experience. “That kind of music is me, rather than much of what came
afterwards when I tried to fit in with the music going on around me. I
don’t take myself so seriously as I used to, and recording it was a very
easy, enjoyable experience. “But I’m very fortunate that I can
release the emotions into the music. It’s not some guy strumming away on
guitar with his legs dangling, happy as Larry with life. This music is
emotionally supercharged. Life’s circumstances can give your music
emotional depth and power, as it did back in the ‘70s. And now a similar
thing has happened, like fuel for the creative fire. But whoever heard
of someone happy and content creating something really good? It doesn’t
work. You have to suffer for your work. I’m very fortunate I have some
way of expressing it rather than bottling it up.” Born in Reading the
son of a family doctor and nurse, and younger brother of Terry and
Sally, young Mike immersed himself in music. Coinciding with moving to
Harold Wood in Essex, by the age of 13 he was also moving out of a
Shadows phase and precociously following in the fingertips of the great
generation of British guitarists, his sister getting Mike into folk, “a
fashionable thing then. I used to sing in those days and joined a couple
of different duos in Reading; we used to do Irish rebel songs, and
everyone would join in on the chorus — it was great.” Though beset by
stage fright — “In my solo guitar spot at the folk clubs, my knee was
shaking, trembling so badly the guitar was jiggling up and down, and I
had no patter” — he had decided on a career in music, networking via his
sister’s old Reading friend Marianne Faithfull to meet her boyfriend
Mick Jagger: “Charming beyond belief. A lovely, lovely man.” Leaving
school at 15, Mike cut an album with his sister, then passed through a
rock band, Barefoot, with brother Terry before finding his path when in
March 1970, Mike joined Soft Machine legend Kevin Ayers’ new band, the
Whole World, on bass (a new instrument to him). Introduced by a fellow
band-member to American serialist Terry Riley’s Rainbow In Curved Air
album, Mike began working on musical ideas of his own. Further
inspired by the music of Bach, Sibelius and the jazz-rock orchestra
Centipede, Mike began to record his ideas on a jerry-rigged two-track
tape recorder using his own homemade musical notation system. Fate
smiled when he found himself at Shipton Manor near Oxford which was
being converted into a residential recording studio by friends of its
owner, the youthful Virgin record shop and mail order founder, Richard
Branson; they heard his music and so Mike became the first artist to
make an album for the Virgin Records label. That album, released in 1973
to critical acclaim and cult sales before becoming a commercial —
selling 17 million copies to date — blockbuster thanks in part to its
use on the soundtrack of the movie The Exorcist, was ‘Tubular Bells’. With
‘Hergest Ridge’ and ‘Ommadawn’ following within two years, Mike had
created an enduring trinity of classic albums that overlapped rock and
classical and, before the terms were even coined, new age and world
music. These albums remain the musical statements Mike feels are
truest to him, and he has revisited ‘Tubular Bells’ two times as sequels
and a rerecording. He has also enjoyed a prolific recording career
away from long-form pieces of music as soundtrack composer for the
classic 1984 film ‘The Killing Fields’ and creator of such beloved hit
singles as the Christmas classic ‘In Dulci Jubilo’ and ‘Moonlight
Shadow’, plus several hit albums of songs including ‘Man On The Rocks’.
In 2008 Mike released his first classical album, the hugely successful
‘Music Of The Spheres’, and he has also created music for virtual
reality-based computer games. MIKE OLDFIELD ‘RETURN TO OMMADAWN’ WILL BE RELEASED ON 20th JANUARY 2017 ON VIRGIN EMI