Mike Oldfield and the psychedelic skies of his Music Virtual Reality game. "I hate violent computer games. I wanted this to have some kind of elegance, some respect for the beauty of life, instead of a mission to kill."

The Times April 2001

 

 

The great escapist

Mike Oldfield changed pop music with Tubular Bells; now he hopes to do it again via his computer, he tells Richard Morrison
You have to feel sympathy for Mike Oldfield. Oh, all right, you don’t. But it helps to pass the time more congenially when you are sitting in his enormous Buckinghamshire mansion (it’s only his “office”, he says; he has a “home” mansion by the Thames at Marlow), drinking his tea, and playing his new computer game - surrounded by banks of speakers, giant screens, computers, synthesizers, guitars and mixing desks that probably tot up to more than the gross domestic product of Belgium.
What does a man do with the rest of his life, when by the age of 19 he has acquired critical acclaim, worldwide fame and a huge fortune? (It’s £25 million and still counting, say the people paid to know these things.) How do you top an out-of-the-blue smash hit like Tubular Bells, the epic 1973 instrumental album that inaugurated New Age touchy-feelyism in pop music and has now sold more than 16 million copies? The answer is that you can’t. “I know that I will never do anything better,” Oldfield admits. “And it doesn’t worry me that I will always be known for Tubular Bells. It’s a classic. Some of the harmonies still thrill me. I’m amazed I could write them at that age. I wouldn’t compose anything so complex now. I prefer purity, simplicity.”

The words “purity” and “simplicity” do not immediately spring to mind as one surveys Oldfield’s torrid life in the 28 years since Tubular Bells. True, he has kept on turning out polished albums - 20 of them now - to the delight of his loyal (if now rather wrinkly) fans and the general disdain of the music press. “Somewhere in here,” he says, his twitchy hands gesturing nervously in the direction of his brain, “is an unending supply of creative energy.”

But there have also been hedonistic binges and “three-month hangovers” in Ibiza, long periods of more-or-less total dependence on drugs, an endless string of one-night-stands, one-month-stands and all possible durations in between, and five children by two partners. Plus all those therapists and assorted shrinks whom Oldfield, rather touchingly, trusted to exorcise the demons of a childhood that was scarred by an alcoholic and manic-depressive mother. Plus those well-publicised excursions into the lonely-hearts columns of British and Swedish newspapers to search for love-mates.

“Because I was so young when all that success hit me, and so obsessed with music, I didn’t really have an adolescence,” he says. “So I had a little bit of a midlife crisis, and it all came out in Ibiza. I got it out of my system. At least, I think I did.”

Well, perhaps Oldfield has at last found a sort of inner peace. For one thing, he believes that he has invented a high-tech art form that is so calming, so pleasing, so beneficial to the psychological wellbeing of mankind, that it could have the same impact as Tubular Bells had all those years ago. Oldfield calls it Music Virtual Reality - Music VR for short. And I have been summoned to this opulent corner of Buckinghamshire to be inducted into its virtual charms.

It is indeed a pleasant way to pass a few hours. As with an ordinary computer game, you explore a landscape. But this has no thugs or monsters lurking to zap you if you don’t zap them first. “I hate violent computer games,” Oldfield says. “I wanted this to have some kind of elegance, some respect for the beauty of life, instead of a mission to kill everything in sight. I wanted to create a virtual environment that is relaxing, life-affirming. It’s non-toxic; it won’t damage your mind. It’s somewhere calm where you can escape to. Somewhere that makes you feel good, because there are enough things in the world that make you feel terrible.”

Gosh, talk like that takes one right back to the summer of ’69. But not so long ago, I observe, Oldfield would have got all of that stuff by pumping various chemical substances into his bloodstream. “Yes,” he replies, with the primness and sudden zeal of a reformed sinner, “but drugs have side-effects. They make everything much worse in the end. Whereas I want Music VR to reduce your stress level, and maybe take away your aggression and frustration as well.”

It certainly does that. You waft gently through his magic virtual-landscape by clicking on to beautiful butterflies, or swarms of psychedelic fireflies, or galloping white horses that sprout wings and whisk you through caverns measureless to man. A flying saucer transports you deep into space; or you can visit a surreal desert where you play a kind of croquet - but using pianos instead of balls and mallets.

There are ruined temples to explore, underwater expeditions to look at exotic fish, and journeys to enigmatic Modigliani-like statues. Along the way you collect gold rings - and as you collect them, you discover that you are gradually and mysteriously helping to fertilise a desert.

Groovy, as we used to say. And also quite revealing of Oldfield’s post-midlife-crisis state of mind. For instance, what would a psychiatrist make of the strong and sexy blonde whom you encounter early on? She whispers: “You are the most perfect being that has ever existed. There is nobody like you in this universe. You are unique, magical and irreplaceable.”

Or of the game’s strange ending, when you hurtle through a black tunnel towards a blaze of light? “Like one of those near-death experiences,” Oldfield explains. Indeed. Just as Richard Wagner reinvented all his personal hangups as epic myth for the 19th-century opera house, so Oldfield seems to have drawn on his own complicated psychological history (he did once undergo “re-birthing” therapy) to create a 21st-century computer game.

And just as Wagner transformed classical music in the process, Oldfield may just possibly be pioneering a way forward for a pop music industry stuck in a rut. For it is the ingenious use of music that is the difference between Music VR and ordinary computer games.

As you approach the various objects in Oldfield’s virtual landscape, different musical elements or styles come into play: a guitar solo; a burst of tinkly synthesizer chords; pounding African drums; or racing piano arpeggios. So by varying your route round the landscape you can overlay the sounds in different ways - creating your own “mix” of original Oldfield. It is this interactive marriage of video and music, it seems to me, that represents the real innovation.

Oldfield says that he has been trying to develop the concept since the early 1980s, but that only recently has computer technology made it feasible. He works with a graphics designer and a software writer, but essentially all the images - sound and visual - are his.

So now all he has to do is sell his concept to some entertainment corporation. But that is proving vexatious to the tubular maestro. Because it’s not a conventional album (although a CD of the music can be issued) no record company is interested. But because it’s not a typical computer game - or at least, not one that allows teenage boys to shoot people or blow things up - games companies don’t “get it”.

At present Oldfield is putting out a demonstration on the Internet, and hopes that this will entice punters to download the whole game, which would take around 40 minutes for each of the four episodes. But he has also recruited the veteran radio DJ, Nicky Horne, to drum up interest in the corporate world.

“Trying to explain this to games companies is exactly like trying to sell Tubular Bells to record companies in 1972,” Oldfield says. “I was so depressed then that I actually thought of emigrating to the Soviet Union, where I had heard that musicians were supported by the state. In those days all I got from record companies was: ‘But it doesn’t have drums or vocals; nobody will buy it.’ Now, all I get from games companies is: ‘But you don’t get to kill anybody!’ ”

Back in 1972 the originality of Tubular Bells was finally recognised by a thrusting young entrepreneur called Richard Branson, and the album’s huge success fuelled the rise of Virgin. Oldfield subsequently became very bitter about being “used” by Branson. Today he ruefully acknowledges Branson’s vision. “This new project could do with a Branson figure,” he says. “Someone who will stick their neck out and take a risk with something completely different. Otherwise what will the music business do? Go on recycling old melodies from the Sixties and Seventies for ever?”

He has a point. And his magic butterflies and winged stallions are very beautiful, very calming, - just as he promises. But whether today’s kids want to drift through a kind of virtual hippy hippy shake is another matter.

Details of Music VR can be found on www.mike-oldfield.com