TECHNOCHILD

Punk killed Mike Oldfield's career and he cannot thank Johnny Rotten enough. But after years in the wilderness, the Tubular Bells creator has tuned in and turned on to a high-tech musical wonderland.
Alan Franks meets a talent reborn.

When Rock stars talk about being reborn, they usually mean that they have found God, a new audience, or better still, both. Not Mike Oldfield, the Tubular Bells man. He means it literally and physically, recounting in detail the screaming, the wetness of his hands and the strange novelty of the air. By my calculation, this means he became a father well before puberty, but then he always liked to do things differently.

Re-birth, he says, enabled him to complete the past and start again. He need hardly have gone to such lengths, because the process was taking place anyway.

His endlessly popular 1973 album, which outsold all British rivals of the decade, was finally swept from the shelves by the punks, who in turn gave way to the clean and short-lived studio stars of the Eighties. Richard Branson, who made a fortune from the LP, (and then another one from the punks) got out of music and into aeroplanes, while Oldfield got out of Virgin and into Warner, celebrating his freedom with Tubular Bells II which went to the top of the album charts. Twenty years on, the tape-loop of taste had done a full revolution.

Even his house, where he has lived for seven years, is typical of the kind that intelligent rockers bought on the back of first-album fame in the years of vinyl and flares.It is a huge, sensible place in Buckinghamshire, where Betjeman's favourite Tube line runs into some fairly convincing countryside crossed by private roads with rhododendron linings. Even old money looks new in these parts. There is the essential swimming pool with high-tech running and rowing machines on the side. And there is the studio, a safe, dark compound with hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of recording equipment and instruments.

The environment beyond is irrelevant, for the whole of his auditory world can be encompassed by the walls of this technocrat's bunker. Being alone is not a new condition for him, and until his odd experiences with the group therapy movement (now disbanded) called Exegesis, his capacity for non-communication was alarming. He was once married, but only for three months, and has five children.

This studio is simply the fantasy attic of every morose teenager who has ever sought refuge from his family in rock 'n' roll. And the young Oldfield was in the mainstream of such boys, cowed and bewildered by a Reading household which would now be called dysfunctional. Being technically 41 is no reason to tear yourself away from the music womb. The big difference is that where most grown-up kids in this condition rail against their parenting, Oldfield has another object of rebellion, his Bransoning; the presence of his first patron still looms figuratively beyond the drive. It is like an overbearing father from whom he never thought he would pull clear. "These days I think of him as a bit of a clown," he says. There are brief walks around the leafy lanes with a small animal called Compact Dog, but the really significant strolls are into the bright mysteries of the hardware, on whose surfaces obsolesence gathers silently like a quick lichen.

The only reason he is now swivelling round from the 64-track sound desk to talk is that he has a new CD out. Even before you hear The Songs of Distant Earth, it has at least two talking points. The first is a nice little controversy in the music industry over whether it should be disqualified from the conventional album charts because of one track's interactive element when played on CD-Rom technology. The second is the authorship of the sleeve notes. If you are going to get a professional writer to pen these, you could do worse than land Arthur C. Clarke, the veteran science-fiction writer and expat resident of Sri Lanka.

A Clarke book, also called The Songs of Distant Earth, was the inspiration for the new Oldfield opus. It started life as a 12,000 word novella rapidly hammered out at the dawning of the space age in the late Fifties, and not expanded into a full length book until last year. "Welcome back into space, Mike," he writes, with the sure hand of someone who could have been doing this sort of thing from the early days of David Bowie. "There's still lots of room out here."

Distant Earth the CD is clearly from the same stable as Tubular Bells One and Two and some of the dozen albums which he ground out for Branson's Virgin label with various degrees of grace in the years between. Some good honest tunes floating on the synthesised thermal currents; vaguely Celtic stuff wafting through the galactic otherness; repetitions as shameless, and as effective, as a Taize chant; a sense of motif that persuades the listener this is something more than a collection of tracks. First Landing, Tubular World, The Sunken Forest; they come by like surprisingly pleasant friends. As innocent as Bambi, as canny as Branson. As modern as tomorrow, as dated as Sputnik. The thrill of the new is for all the world unchanged since Hank B. Marvin of the Shadows first stepped on his wha-wah pedal.

The music bespeaks the person, and Oldfield is as much an unregenerate Sixties man as he is a techno-mag junkie. Remove the casing and there remains a misician steeped in the English folk tradition. But dare to call him, as many have done, the house minstrel to the New Age, and he will go beserk. Like so many rock survivors now in their forties, the inevitable truth is that he is in large part a tough little customer, and always has been. If he were not, he would never have hawked his very basic Tubular Bells demo tape from one indifferent company to another for a whole year.

"Being a world-famous musician didn't mean a lot to me," he says. "In fact it didn't mean a bean. I was so unhappy in myself that nothing was going to please me or fulfil me until I had examined the problem deep within myself."

These problems, he explains, had to do with his family, and in particular with the alcoholism of his mother. In Reading, and later, when his family moved to Harold Wood in Essex, he became chronically withdrawn, as he was to remain, and witnessed what he will only describe as "some terrible things" as a result of his mother's condition. Already music was the place of safety, and he was performing in clubs at the remarkably young age of ten.

A combination of circumstances made him seek help from psychotherapy. "We had just gone through that period where punk had arrived," he explains. "I was being totally blasted by the music press. It was as if, after all that success with Tubular Bells I was now incapable of putting a foot right. The record company had lost interest. No one there seemed remotely interested in these hour-long instrumentals that I kept coming up with. Everyone around me was miserable. I was drinking too much.

"I still believe that if I hadn't got a stomach ulcer while I was so young, the drink could have turned into another bad problem. I felt totally bypassed and driven out by the punk movement. I started speaking to people working in the shops, and I realised it was a conscious decision to take my stuff off the shelves and put the Sex Pistols there instead. Looking back, I realise that everything that happens, even the bad things, can be a stepping stone, and therefore something positive. So thanks, Johnny Rotten, you saved my life. You deserve a knighthood."

He then came across the encounter group Exegesis, the "self awareness movement" run by former actor Robert D'Aubigny. It was a controversial organisation, and much publicised at the time because of its technique of confining members for long periods together until they managed to speak openly about their difficulties. One participant claimed that his main difficulty was in being excused to go to the lavatory, and there were even questions asked in the Commons about the group's methods.

Oldfield believes that Exegesis, like himself, received more than its fair share of criticism. "I think I felt rather responsible for all the exposure it had," he says, "but I do believe that the leader was a clever and well-meaning person. All I know is that it gave me the courage to face these terrors that I had and see what was on the other side of them."

And this he was enabled to do by simulating his own birth?

"I wouldn't say simulating. I became, realistically, a new-born infant and, as I say, feeling the wetness and experiencing the journey from my mother's womb. I was a screaming baby."

Did this last long?

"About five minutes, I think. And then the realisation came over me: is that all it was? The root of the problem was something as simple and logical as birth. And it carried on from there, really. I think if I had had two happy parents and a stable family, I would have been able to get over the trauma of birth." Since then, Oldfield has founded an organisation called Tonic, which sponsers about 200 people who are benefiting from psychotherapy but who might not be able to afford it by themselves.

Rock stars of this vintage come in one of three categories: dead, spent or rehabilitated. In belonging to the third, Oldfield is in the best of company, along with Eric Clapton, Elton John, Ringo Starr, and Pete Townshend, to name but a few. Almost all in this category have acknowledged the help they received from support groups, and almost all have experienced a rebirth in some aspect of their creative lives. Whether this means they are better than before is quite another matter. When Tubular Bells II was released two years ago, some critics went sniffy and suggested that if this was a triumph, it was a triumph only of recycling. The public saw differently and put it at the top of the album charts.

Even at the pinnacle of his success, there was always something grudging about the adulation. TB was praised for being as eclectic and influential as any pop record of its day, with only Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon in the same league. Yet as its presence in the album charts hardened into a residency, a kind of fashion fatigue set in, from which he has only lately recovered. TB was laudable, but it was everywhere, like sleeping policemen, or GIs in the Second World War. An extract from it became the theme music for The Exorcist and got into the US Top Ten as a single. Eventually Oldfield narrowed the gap between himself and the establishment by receiving the Freedom of the City of London after composing music to celebrate the Prince and Princess of Wales's wedding. In the same year he also became only the second rock musician, after Paul McCartney, to merit an entry in Who's Who.

Yet the making of that landmark album had been quite as unorthodox as the later remaking of Oldfield himself. The demo was run up on a small two-track tape recorder, with one over-dub after another, and the wires snipped from the erase head. After a year of rejections, he took it back to Branson, who installed Oldfield for a week at the young company's country studio. As the album soared to success, the composing prodigy gave no interviews, and was seemingly incapable of doing so. He also gave just two performances of the work; before one of these he was so paralysed by nerves that he could only be persuaded to take to the stage when Branson offered to give him his coveted Bentley. He then took himself off to live on a remote hilltop in the Welsh Marches, Hergest Ridge, where he wrote the album which bears that title. As rock 'n' roll recluses go, he was thorough. Even the music press came to see that this was not a pose, but the result of true fright. It did not stop them beating a path to his door.

Today's version is a wholly different man, bent on demonstrating that there is life after birth. He looks just how you expect someone to when they have first cracked the big time: smooth-faced and expensively casual; full of good humour on the youthful struggles, and generous about all his early influences. All that is, except one, Branson: "I realise it doesn't matter to him what he's involved in, so long as he is making money out of it.

"I don't think he is sufficiently advanced in a spiritual way to know what is of real value. He thinks money is valuable. But the richer he has got as I have met him, the sadder and more empty he looks when you see behind the smile."

The two still have their own views about the 17-year contract that Oldfield signed with Virgin at the age of 19. Branson has said that he (Oldfield) twice renegotiated his royalty rate, using the best specialist lawyers, but chose to make more albums for Virgin in return for more money. This is not the issue for Oldfield; like George Michael at Sony ten years later, he was irked by what he saw as the company's reluctance to back his music adequately. He says that in 1983 he very nearly went the same route that Michael was to go, but was deterred by his QC from taking Virgin to court for the simple reason that he would lose. His resentment for Branson remains remarkably strong. During our conversation he waves the topic away with his hand, but comes back to it later as though by complusion. It is reminiscent of the way divorced people speak of their ex-partner.

He speaks of Arthur C. Clarke, however, with the same reverence that his own first fans had for him. "I have always read him avidly. I never thought I would get the opportunity to meet him. But then, when I had the idea of making an album inspired by the book, my new manager (Clive Banks, formerly head of Island Records) said 'Why not ring him up?'" And he did so, there and then. "I said I wanted to come over and visit him, and asked him if he wanted me to bring him anything. He said he would like some clotted cream, because he's from Somerset.

"When we got to Sri Lanka, he sat us down in front of a video which showed him answering all the sort of questions you would like to ask him yourself. One has to understand that he has a great many visitors, and they always ask him the same things. He gave me a list of the kind of music he listens to and then, at ten to five, he left to play table tennis, which he does every day at that time. He is very good, and sneaky at it."

When Oldfield set about writing The Songs of Distant Earth, he used the CD-Rom for the intermediary stage. The words suggested images, which in turn suggested music.

His hardware is so sophisticated that it virtually cuts out the element of error, or even foible, that is a part of human performance. He can call up each line of music and have it presented across the screen in the manner of a cardiograph - each pulse of percussion a dilating blob, each silence a gap. He can focus ever more tightly on these lines until he is looking at one 48,000th of a second's worth of musical sound. If an instrument is rhythmically one jot out of kilter, then it can be visually aligned into perfection. In other words, if the ear got it wrong, the eye can put it right.

That's not the half of it. On the coffee table, in a pile not much bigger than a toast rack, are a few CDs which, between them, contain "just about every sound known to man." When played through the keyboard, these sounds can be moulded to any desired pitch and rhythm. Within the music business, such facts are old hat, and some of the hardware has been around for all of two years. Yet much of the record-buying public remains unaware of how far and fast the march of production technology has proceeded. It, no less than he, has been reinvented to the point where it bears scant relation to what it was. In the pre-digital days of the early Eighties, you still recorded onto tape; each system, each studio had its own idiosyncrasies, its own aural thumbprint. So this new perfection brings a kind of destruction with it, doesn't it?

"No," Oldfield replies briskly. "It is not a danger, because you will never have perfection. You will only get as close as you can."

When Oldfield played the guitar with his first professional band, the cult group Kevin Ayers and the Whole World, he was just 16, and the year was 1970. They recorded at Studio 2 in Abbey Road, where all the Beatles' instruments were lying around. He would arrive two hours before the rest and tinker around with whatever he could find: huge Steinway pianos, every conceivable piece of percussion and, yes, tubular bells. Just as he doodled with these, so he now doodles with millionaire micro-circuitry. In that sense, nothing has changed. "I still need a tune," he says, a little woundedly.

His next aim is an entire "album" of interactive software which would give the CD-Rom user a series of computer-generated graphics to accompany the music. What most preoccupies him is the search for a word to describe such a thing. Trying to be interactive, I suggest "Interalbum", but he gives this the look it deserves.

Where is popular music going, I ask. He shrugs: "There are the Collinses and the Claptons who just carry on doing their thing, but it is not innovative. There is the dance craze, and acid house; if I were young I would be right into that, just as when I was young we used to go and spend all night at the Round House. I want to part of the cutting edge of whatever is going on."

But what about the punks, whom he so reviles? They were at the cutting edge.

"Really? What edge did they cut? It only lasted a few months and anyway, the producers did all the work."

But perhaps not as much as they do now. One of Oldfield's great heros is John Renbourn, and acoustic virtuoso regarded as a giant by fellow musicians of many stamps. Surely, one of the beauties of such playing is its evidence of string and wood moving the air, and even the presence of human fallibility. Does not too much technology drive emotive musicianship into the margins?

"Well, I agree with you. Or rather, I used to. But you can't turn the clock back. Besides, the aim is not to cut out the human performance, just to optimise it...now then, what about something like 'Interactive Video?' Or 'Interactive Video Album? I.V.A.'"

"What, pronounced like Eva. Little Eva. Remember her?"

"Yes, that's not bad."

I.V.A. it is then. Remember, you read it first in the nation's oldest paper.

The Times Magazine, November 26 1994