Oldfield's Odyssey

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Oldfield played almost all of the instruments on Tubular bells

Oldfield at his home in Gloucestershire

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My meeting with Mike Oldfield does not begin auspiciously. I have come to his mansion in Gloucestershire to talk about his autobiography, Changeling, which details his slow, painful recovery from the mental health problems that underlay his lucrative, 40-year musical career.

But when I arrive early, Oldfield, dripping wet from a stint in his indoor pool, eyes me suspiciously past the chain securing his front door, then tells me to go and stand in his drizzly garden for half an hour. Is he really better?

Well, up to a point. Thirty minutes later we are sat companionably enough in his studio-cum-conservatory. The 54-year-old is still not entirely at ease. He rolls, lights, then prematurely discards a series of cigarettes and doesn't often meet my eye. He is, though, remarkably frank. "I still don't like socialising," he concedes. "And the demons are still there, but when I feel them coming on I can deal with it."He gives one of the rare but exuberant barks of laughter that punctuate our interview.

He says he wrote the book for two reasons. first, every time he gives an interview, he's asked about the 1978 seminar he did with the borderline-cult Exegesis, where he experienced a "rebirth" that he feels set him on the road to recovery: so he thought he'd explain it once and for all.

Second, he hopes that others like him who have bottled up grief or anguish might learn from reading the book. "When I was young, it would have been wonderful to have someone explain it all," he says. "People who are prone to stress sometimes don't survive. They get into crime, drugs, commit suicide ... "

Oldfield believes anxiety may be inherited, that he may still be suffering from the horrors his Irish grandfather witnessed at Ypres. He also believes he is a "mutant, or an experiment of nature", somehow incapable of normal social relationships, hence the book's title.

He was born in 1953, the third child, after sister Sally and brother Terry, of Raymond, a Reading GP, and Maureen, an Irish nurse.

Initially, it was a happy, if solitary childhood. "I didn't like other children and they didn't like me," he says, "but as a kid I wasn't afraid of anything." That changed when he was eight. Then his mother disappeared briefly, and when she came back his father explained she'd had a stillborn child. In fact, Oldfield later discovered, the boy was born with Down's syndrome and was put in a home, where he survived for a year.

"That's a huge secret for a family to keep," he says. "My mother got depressed, and they prescribed barbiturates - I think they're illegal now - and got addicted." She also began to drink, something Raymond Oldfield bore with stiff upperlipped implacability, even when his wife would beg him for medication he couldn't prescribe.

"She became this dopy, half-anaesthetised creature," says Oldfield. "She lost her dignity." At one point, a Catholic priest was called in to exorcise the bad atmosphere in the house. Having first been sectioned in 1962, Maureen would return to hospital every three months or so, and come out apparently improved. Then her condition would quickly worsen again.

Oldfield says the cycle of regaining and re-losing his mother was almost worse than bereavement. "Music was my sanctuary," he says. Having taught himself to play the guitar, Oldfield was playing in local folk clubs from the age of 13, and left school at 15 with one O-level, in oral English.

He helped his sister Sally - then a promising folk singer with connections to rock royalty through her schoolfriend Marianne Faithfull - on her debut album, then formed a short-lived band with his brother Terry, before joining the Kevin Ayres band as a guitarist at 16.

There were, naturally for those times, drugs around, and at 17 Oldfield had a bad trip on LSD. He began to see humans as machines, felt that the vast, pointless incomprehensibility of the universe had been revealed to him. It triggered his first panic attack.

"The fear comes on you, your heart races and you feel certain you are going to die but you can't explain it," he says. Although he would never touch LSD again, panic began to underpin his life. He became moody and withdrawn, terrified of travelling and open spaces. The following year, on tour in Holland with Kevin Ayres, he suffered a collapse which he now recognises as a nervous breakdown, and retreated to the home his parents had moved to in Harold Wood.

He couldn't eat or sleep. "I thought I was possessed," he says, "that whatever had been exorcised from my mum had come back and attached itself to me." Booze, he found, helped dull the fear, and thus began a period of severe alcohol dependency. "My Irish side leads me to drink, but it's also where I get my music from, so I can't complain," he says.

As the Kevin Ayres band split up, Oldfield tinkered obsessively with a riff he'd been working on, overdubbing different instruments onto an old tape recorder, then went home and sat drinking with his mother at night. A man called Simon Draper passed those amateur recordings to Richard Branson, who signed Oldfield to his nascent record label, Virgin, and bankrolled the recording of Tubular Bells.

Although sales were slow at first, the album went to number one, and would eventually spend 250 weeks in the charts: it has now sold more than 16 million copies. Success brought its own problems. Oldfield was by now thoroughly introverted and paranoid, and after his first brush with the media, an interview with Melody Maker, he told Branson he felt as if he had been raped.

Branson persuaded him to perform Tubular Bells in concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall (by giving him his Bentley), but Oldfield flatly refused to tour. Instead, he bought a house on the Welsh border and began working on a follow-up album, Hergest Ridge, fuelled by brandy, and Valium he kept in his wallet to "nibble on". In 1975 his mother came to stay with him for Christmas, took one look at him and said: "You know what it's like, don't you, Mike?" The next month she died. The coroner suggested she had choked on porridge, but Oldfield thinks it may have been suicide.

At the time he felt an enormous, invisible umbilical cord had been severed. He wasn't speaking to his father at the time, was suffering constant panic attacks, and can barely remember the three years until his sister Sally persuaded him to try the Exegesis seminar run by Robert Daubigny (real name, Fuller).

"It's still very big in the States, although it's got a different name now," says Oldfield. "I went through a rebirthing experience where I felt all the panic flood out of me." He is aware of the bad press the organisation has since had, acknowledges that it had cultish tendencies, and admits that sheer exultation at being free of fear led him to an unwise, monthlong marriage with Daubigny's sister, Diana. He was still only 25.

And the demons weren't finished with him. Having embraced the rock star lifestyle, he found himself "cracking up" during a tour in 1980. "I couldn't sleep, so I was being given sleeping pills every night," he says. "It made me realise that although I'd got the big thing out in the seminar, there was still a lot of grief."

He started psychotherapy at a Harley Street practice. "I felt like my grief was a big balloon inside me," he says. " During therapy I just cried for months until I felt like it had reduced to a manageable size." He has been in and out of therapy for 25 years, and in 1990, when the panic attacks came back yet again, his sister Sally introduced him to transcendental meditation. That helps, as does tai chi, but Oldfield considers it a sign of mental stability that he got bored with therapy a year ago.

This outline, like his autobiography, leaves large parts of his life unaddressed. In 1980 he was in a relationship with PR girl Diana Cooper, with whom he had three children: Molly, Dougal and Luke. By the late 1980s he was with Norwegian singer Anita Hegerland, with whom he had daughter Greta and son Noah. That relationship ended acrimoniously ("lawyers were involved") in the mid-1990s. As the millennium loomed, Oldfield unceremoniously dumped his German girlfriend Miriam by embarking on a series of flings brokered through the personal columns of the Sunday Times.

He is now married to Fanny, a 30-yearold horse-breeder. They met in 1996 in Ibiza, where he had built a house and embarked on an ill-advised period of hedonism, living out, as he puts it, the teenage years he missed. But they didn't get together until 1999, after the small-ad dalliances that he described, back then, as failed attempts to "save" short, dark, neurotic women who reminded him of his mother.

He and Fanny now have a son, Jake, aged three, who is allowing him to enjoy fatherhood at last. "I go for a long walk every morning and Jake comes with me. I have started teaching him, not how to meditate, but how to enjoy being quiet. And he finds it hilarious when I do tai chi."

Oldfield does seem at peace these days. He admits that, with accumulated royalties, he doesn't need to work again. He's still a bit odd, telling me he has "visitations" from beings from other realities, but he is wryly aware of sounding like "an old hippy" or "a lunatic" (his words). And he is still working.

His latest project is called Music of the Spheres, which he's working on with the classical composer Karl Jenkins. Only that morning, the two had a disagreement. "It took me right back to my maths teacher telling me off at school," says Oldfield.

"Then I remembered a fight in the playground, then all sorts of other memories started to crowd in. In the past it would have overwhelmed me, but now I can step back and wait for it to recede. In some ways I feel writing the book has closed the chapter on that stuff."

Changeling by Mike Oldfield is published by Virgin Books, price £18.99. All profits for the first two years go to the mental health charity SANE (www.sane.org.uk).

 

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