£20m in the bank and why I had to look
for love in the Lonely Hearts

by Jane Kelly

When I arrived, the grand house in Buckinghamshire seemed stonily silent. suddenly Mike Oldfield, creator of Tubular Bells, multi-millionaire and serial advertiser in the Lonely Hearts columns, appeared before me, wearing nothing but tiny trunks, waving his spindly arms and roaring with laughter.

He beckoned me into the room that houses his indoor pool and plunged into the water. "I have to stick to my routine," he explains, swimming hard. "Every morning I swim, run twice round the garden, have a game of tennis and meditate for 15 minutes."

His most famous work, the astonishingly successful Tubular Bells, which went straight to the top of the charts in the UK and the US in 1973 and still sells 100,000 copies a year, made Mike Oldfield a household name.

Even today, his record sales amount to £25 million he estimates, leaving him about £20 million in the bank.

More recently, however, Oldfield has become better known for his failed attempts at finding love, advertising in Lonely Hearts columns in national newspapers.

"Being so lucky with music, but so unsuccessful in my personal life, drove me crazy," he says.

The adverts have, for now, ceased. For the past seven weeks Oldfield has been living with a French girl he met in Ibiza, who, we can reveal, is already pregnant with his child. But for more than a year he scoured the national newspapers in both Britain and Sweden in his tortured search for emotional harmony.

He began by advertising in October 1998, unsatisfied with living with his German girlfriend Miriam. His older sister, Sally, wrote the advert which, lying about his age, read: "Very successful, good-looking musician and composer, 43, fun-loving with occasional artistic moods, seeks lovely affectionate lady, 25-35 to share extraordinary life of romance, travel and mutual interests."

It brought hium 50 replies and an immediate relationship with Amy Lauer, and American jewellery designer. He continued to search for other women through the personal columns, though, and after five months, Amy was devestated to be replaced by actress Emma Rolph.

"I don't care what people think about it," he says, laughing. "I never read the advert and I don't regret it at all. I was living with someone but it was only on-and-off and I wanted to cast a very wide net to see what came up."

"There were no grudges with the girls. In fact, I can't really remember them. I sent Emma off to Hawaii for three months and gave her money to start a new life."

Where she is now, he has no idea. Instead of then settling for one of the girls from the ads, who seemed as expendable as fish and chip paper, for the past seven weeks Oldfield has been living with Fanny van de Kerchov, 22, a French girl he met when he moved to Ibiza, in 1996y, for what turned out to be two years of raging debauchery on red wine and the rave drug Ecstasy.

Fanny, then 18, worked in a local hotel. When he returned to the UK in April 1998, they kept in touch by phone and fax.

"We tried to get it together several times," he says, "but I was too fascinated by neurotic women. Then I thought: "There is this wonderful girl who wants to be with me. Let's give it a try.

"Things have come together for me now. Fanny is mature, she doesn't argue. She fits in well with my life."

There is an extraordinary quietness in the house, as if calm is being deliberately imposed, while underneath there is a curren of terrible tension. Fanny talks like a Miss World contestant she's rather uneasy and detached - and it is hard to get any understandable words out of her.

"I don't think about the others who have been in his life," she says. "I trust him, of course. Without that, you don't have a relationship. I never check up on the personal ads, no." At the very idea, she began pouting.

"I am committed to her," Mike says hastily, "although I won't marry again."

"Why change things when we are so happy?" she asks winsomely. "This baby is all about love, not marriage."

"We intend to have the birth here," he says. "I will probably deliver it myself. I have been at the births of all my children."

Oldfield already has five by two different women. In 1978, he married New Age guru Diana Fuller, whom he met on a self-development course, but it ended a month later. In 1980 he met PR girl Sally Cooper and they had three children.

Daughter Molly, 20, is now at Oxford studying history and Spanish, Dougal, 18, and Luke, 13, are at Harrow School and Oldfield takes them out for tea once a week.

Then came an affair with Norwegian singer Anita Hegerland; their two children Greta, 12, and Noah, nine, live with their mother in Norway and visit him every two months.

"I don't think I've hurt my children," he muses. "There have been problems. They've missed me and I've not been with them. Women just want to have children with me, I don't know why. I only wanted one, but they are all adorable. This time it's different."

All seems idyllic at present. Fanny may not care about his convoluted past, or crave marriage, but she is up against another child, unseen but potentially deadly. This is the one that Oldfield carries deep within him.

"Everyone has a child inside them," he says. "I keep thinking I should be happy now, but inside me the child is saying: 'No, you are not happy because no one really loves you.' I have been in therapy for years, to help me not to listen to the child or see life through his eyes."

Oldfield, now 46, is convinced he was a normal boy, with a heathy emotional life until the age of five, when there was a sudden, devestating change.

He had begun life as the son of Raymond Oldfield, a dedicated GP in Reading, and his Irish wife Maureen, a nurse. In the lounge he shows me a childhood photo.

It is of Maureen, an attractive Fifties mother, with her children, Sally and Terry, on either side, and her younger son, mike, on her knee.

Life was comfortable and secure until he was five, when his mother gave birth to a Down's syndrome baby. "They told us it had died," Oldfield recalls, "but later we discovered it had survived for a year in an institution.

"My mother effectively disappeared. she had a hysterectomy, couldn't sleep so she was given barbiturates, then she became addicted to them. She was no longer interested in me.

"My father was not allowed to treat her and she would beg him to give her more drugs. It created terrible tensions at home, and she became increasingly depressed. It soon came to the point where she was being taken away to hospital every two months, usually ikn the middle of the night. She would be away for 30 days."

His mother also took to alcohol. His father was constantly busy.

"My father was always working," Oldfield says. "Eventually, the stress told on him and my sister Sally took over looking after us all. I became withdrawn, and I discovered music."

From the age of seven he was escaping into the fifth symphony of Sibelius, and the pulsating music of Ravel. At eight he first heard the Shadows and became excited by the sound of the electric guitar. His father bought him one for £6.

Not long after, he formed his first band, The White Knights, performing in village halls.

Although he says his childhood was disastrous, his father seems to have supported him well. "He knew I would never get a proper job," he says, "so he bought me a guitar, amplifier and later, a transit van."

At 15 he joined the Kevin Ayers Band. Most members were in their 30s and 40s. While his contemporaries were doing O-levels, he was on the road, doing three or four shows a night. "I was shy, but I played amazing guitar and people would say 'wow!'" he says.

For a time, the adulation from audienced made him feel whole, but his emotional problems kept surfacing as panic attacks. "It was the worst possible torture," he says. "It could happen any time."

At 19, while he was still living from hand-to-mouth, and working on Tubular Bells, his mother came to see him.

"She was in a terrible condition," he says, "drugged or drunk. I told her about my anxiety attacks and she said: 'You know what it's like, don't you?' I realised that she had been through the same as me. I identified with her, but I couldn't help her at all. I felt a lot of guilt."

Soon afterwards, his mother returned from anight shift as a care worker, ate some porridge, fell aslepp and choked to death. Or it might have been suicide; he's not sure.

"The shock of her death was like a huge inflated balloon inside me," he says. "The guilt and the anger. Think of every bad thing possible that can happen to you, and that was it. It used to come out as panic attacks and I could never relax. It took me years to get over it."

Never good at making friends, his sexual relations with women were highly stressed.

"My mother's behaviour and death certainly affected my attitude to women," he says. "I saw women through a kind of lens of confused ideas about my mother.

For a long time I could only be attracted to short, dark women, who looked like my mother, and they had to be neurotic.I wanted to save them, but I never could. And I feared abandonment very much. I used to reject people first, before they could do it to me."

He agrees that his newspaper adverts probably started as a way of rejecting his girlfriend at the time, Miriam, flagging the fact the relationship was not working. He says that things will be different from now on - because of Fanny.

"I get tetchy, angry, say horrible things," he says. "But I explain to Fanny that what I say and do isn't personal, and she is very tolerant."

But when he talks about the future he doesn't immediately mention her at all.

"I've got a new kind of artform going on," he says, "musical virtual relaity on the computer."

He has also just released a new CD, The Millennium Bell, which will be performed live in Berlin on New Year's Eve and broadcast on TV worldwide.

But what about Fanny and the baby? "If I am relaxed in my work I will be relaxed in my private life, too," he says, which sounds a bit like a threat to her. The tamosphere must be kept tranquil - or all hell will break out.

He can roughly forecast his own moods. "I am having a break from therapy at the moment," he says, "but after the concert in Berlin there will be a terrible vacuum to fill and I will go back into therapy.

"There are alway things I need to discuss. I am bursting with all kinds of emotions. A lot good and a lot bad. I need someone professional to help me deal with them."

I wondered how he would advertise himself now, if he felt the urge? "Loving, successful musician, sometimes crazy but never boring," he says. "A good bet for the right woman."