Mike Oldfield, in an earlier incarnation the shy retiring boy genius behind Tubular Bells, pours me a very large glass of Rhine wine, staring deeply into my eyes as he does so. We’re sitting in the bar of Berlin’s Intercontinental Hotel, the night noisy around us, but Mike quite oblivious to its rowdy hum.
My glass full, Mike slides it across the table towards me, leans forward until he’s close enough to kiss me, which for a worrying moment I think he might. He smiles instead, mischievously.
“You’ve got lovely hair,” he says.
I thank him for this unexpected compliment and try to get the interview back on track. A couple of hours earlier, Oldfield had played Berlin’s Eissporthalle, a cavernous arena. He’s currently touring Europe, promoting his Incantations album, which may be the most uneventful piece of music I’ve ever heard, but which to perform nevertheless takes a 10-man rock band, a 24-piece orchestra, the Queen’s College Girls Choir and Maddy Prior, who takes the vocal lead on a preposterous arrangement (by Oldfield) of Longfellow’s epic poem, “Hiawatha”.
A couple of nights earlier, in Dusseldorf, a huge crowd had been reduced to a collective doze by its interminable length. Tonight, just as heads start nodding, the mixing desk blows up, waking everyone with a fright.
“That was my fault,” Mike tells me now.
Why?
“Because,” he confides, looking like he’s going to reveal some inner secret he’s kept to himself for years, “I had a very unhappy childhood. I made my parents reject me. I wanted them to fuck me up. So they did.”
He can see I’m bemused.
“This is all perfectly true,” he insists. “I’m responsible for everything that happens. The mixing desk blowing up, the audience being bored by the concert...”
Bored, why?
“Because I wrote Incantations.”
And you think it’s boring?
“I think,” he says, “it’s rubbish.”
Then why inflict it on these poor people?
“Because I want to bore them. I want them to reject me. Then I want them to understand why they’re rejecting me. And if they can understand that, we can all have a good time.”
He can tell I’m having trouble making sense of this.
“It makes perfect sense. It really does,” he says. “But I don’t expect you to understand. I think you’re probably an idiot.”
Thanks a lot.
“But that’s all right,” Mike adds quickly, splashing another half bottle of wine into my glass. “I’m an idiot, too. That’s the whole point. Incantations can only succeed if I can prove to the audience I’m an idiot.”
I look at him, blankly, it must be said.
“You don’t really understand what I’m talking about, do you?” he asks now, and starts stroking the back of my hand. “But that’s great. It means you’re probably fucked-up, too.”
And that’s a good thing?
“Certainly! I felt great when I realised how fucked-up I was. Because it meant I didn’t feel fucked-up anymore. I could feel happy without feeling guilty. The only way I could feel happy before was by making people feel sorry for me. Then I could hate them, and that made me even more fucked-up.”
This is certainly clarifying a few issues, Mike.
“I think so,” he says, giving my hand a squeeze. “You know,” he goes on, “before, I used to have these moments of blind panic – they were dreadful. I used to have to stop whatever it was I was doing and just scream. I used to be so frightened. I’d be incapable of doing anything for days. For months. I’d just stop. I just used to think ‘Why?’ I just couldn’t feel happy. If people said they liked me, I hated them.
“I remember when I played the Queen Elizabeth Hall just after Tubular Bells came out. I stood on the stage at the end of the concert and looked at the audience. And they looked at me. And do you know what they did?”
I didn’t.
“They actually applauded.”
Fuck me.
“I was amazed,” Oldfield says. “I hated that concert. I thought we were terrible. And people came backstage and said they’d loved it. I couldn’t believe it. The only way I could even begin to enjoy it was by reminding myself how bad I thought it had been. I used to feel bad about everything. The more they loved it, the worse I thought it was. And that was the only thing that made me feel happy.”
So in some way, you used to relish your own misery?
“Definitely!” Mike exclaims, excited, as if he’s made some sort of breakthrough here. “I used to love playing the martyr.”
But that’s behind you now?
“Yes. I simply realised that having a good time didn’t mean I had to feel miserable. It was about the time of Ommadawn. I realised what had been fucking me up was being born. So I decided I was just going to have to be re-born. It was the only answer. I had to recreate the circumstances of my own birth. It’s something I’d really recommend.”
I’ll think about it, I tell him, trying to slip my hand from his.
“You really should,” he says, flicking the hair out of my eyes.
“The end of side one of Ommadawn,” he says then, “do you know what that is?”
Again, I didn’t.
“It’s the sound, Allan,” he says, tucking my hair behind my ear, “of me exploding from my mother’s vagina.”
I’m briefly worried that Mike is going to go into even more gynaecological detail, and brace myself for what might come next, instead of which Mike suddenly announces he’s ready for bed and is quickly off, followed it must be said by my somewhat huge sighs of relief.
For years, of course, the notoriously press-shy Oldfield baffled and frustrated his record company by refusing to do interviews, encounters with journalists something he found nerve-racking. When Incantations comes out, however, he shocks Virgin by demanding interviews with anyone who wants to talk to him, Mike expressing to everyone’s amazement a particular yen to appear in the pages of both Penthouse and Woman’s Own.
What we have to thank for this new extrovert and unpredictably eccentric incarnation is Oldfield’s recent engagement with Exegesis, a course of psychological therapy he underwent to liberate him from his painful timidity and “bring him out of himself.” He even agrees to allow a party of music hacks to accompany him on tour in Germany, and that’s us, gathering outside the Dusseldorf Hilton, the morning after a show at the Philipshalle that drags on for so long I am sure I’ll be claimed by old age before it’s over.
Oldfield has already flown ahead to Berlin, leaving the rest of his vast touring party to travel across Germany in a convoy of coaches, a 13 hour journey ahead of us, by road to Berlin. We are a motley assortment. There’s me and laconic lensman Tom Sheehan from Melody Maker, Pauline McLeod from The Daily Mirror, Danae Brook, who has the slightly frazzled look of a Sixties wild child, from The London Evening News, photographer Jill Furmanovsky and someone with a beard and wearing a parka named Bob Edmands, who claims he’s from the NME. Oh, and that’s Virgin press supremo Al Clark, just stepping onto one of the coaches to tell us that we’ll be leaving shortly and that for the benefit of anyone who might fancy a drink en route – why he’s looking gimlet-eyed at me and Sheehan at this point, I can only hazard the wildest possible guess – we’ll be stopping briefly at a service station for suitable provisions before hitting the autobahn. Of course, we take full opportunity to stock up on what turns out to be some formidably strong local beer and then we’re back on the road. Three hours later, we’re still in the Dusseldorf suburbs, trapped in a massive traffic jam, moving very slowly in the direction of nowhere in particular, most of the beer already gone and some of us on our way to being very drunk indeed.
Al’s originally split us journalists into two groups. Me, Sheehan and Pauline McLeod start the journey on the coach with the gals from the Queen’s College Choir and their musical director, David Bedford, who I know from his string arrangements for Roy Harper and, earlier, as a member of Kevin Ayers’ band, The Whole World. The coach is fitted out with a video player, but Bedford announces there’ll be no films shown today. The girls are under a bit of a cloud after getting somewhat out of hand the previous day during a screening of The Ups and Downs of a Handyman, a soft-core feature about the sexual adventures of bored housewives that had them all screeching with laughter and making such lewd comments that a blushing Bedford had turned the film off. After we stop for a very late lunch somewhere on our way to distant Berlin, Al decides we should all now travel on the same coach, making the mistake of treating us to another couple of cases of highly-debilitating Schulteissbier. There’s a definite whiff of journalistic competition in the air now. Danae Brook interviews everyone in sight, including Tom Sheehan, who’s by now talking in an incomprehensible cockney esperanto. She disappears up the coach, armed with notebooks and a cassette recorder, as if she’s on some crucial mission in the field of human endeavour, a model of industry to us all, especially Ben Edmands, who’s fallen asleep – an early victim of the dreaded Schulteissbier. Pauline McLeod, meanwhile, spends about an hour discussing the intricacies of the tour’s sound system and its operation with Kurt Munkasci, a pony-tailed American engineer. She stares with increasing bafflement as Kurt spews out a torrent of mind-boggling data, statistics and stuff about advanced circuitry techniques, and just sort of slowly deflates when Kurt eventually ups and leaves to take care of business elsewhere.
“I didn’t understand a word,” Pauline says, fanning herself with a notebook full of indigestible facts.
Darkness falls and brings with it a moment of high drama! One of the girls in the choir has been taken sick. She had complained earlier of an upset stomach. Jill Furmanovsky, intending only to help, had given her an aspirin, but has succeeded only in aggravating the poor lamb’s condition. She’s now in considerable distress and Jill becomes terribly upset when I accuse her of thoughtlessly poisoning the afflicted chorister, who is even now being carried to the back of the coach, where she and her tortured intestines are laid out on the back seat. Much weeping and groaning ensues, embellished by some high-end lamentations from the stricken warbler’s distraught friends. After about an hour of their keening wails and the continued loud misery of the ailing missy, I’ve had enough. If she’s not going to make it to Berlin, why don’t we just wrap her in a blanket and dump her on the side of the road? There’s a river coming up. We could pitch her through a window, her travails ending with a splash. Curiously, only Sheehan thinks this is anything like a reasonable course of action, although Pauline looks like she thinks the idea might have some merit. Everyone else just glowers at me, including Ben Edmands, who’s just woken up, doesn’t have a clue what’s going on, but clearly thinks I’m to blame for something. Al Clark now confiscates what’s left of the beer and admonishes me for my insensitivity, like I even fucking care at this point. We continue on into the German night.
Many – many – hours later, we find ourselves at an East German border crossing. By now, we’re so far behind schedule we’ll be lucky to get to Berlin by dawn. Everyone’s tired and cranky, eager to get this trip over with. We hope, therefore, to breeze through this checkpoint and be on our way. The coaches are waved into a special security area. A low mist swirls around the jackboots of the East German border guards. Searchlights cut through the dark. There’s a lot of barbed wire. Sharp commands are barked out and echo through the night. There are big dogs, snarling, straining on their leads, eager for action. Machine-gun posts are lit up by tracking searchlight beams.
A couple of border guards, automatic weapons slung over their shoulders, get on the coach and tell us to hold up our passports for inspection, pliss. I try to get the people around me to quickly scribble little black moustaches on their passport pictures, but the humourless bastards don’t want to know. Anyway, here come the grim-faced goons with their guns, checking everyone’s passports. And here’s Tom Sheehan, frantically rummaging through pockets and bags. He’s looking for his passport, which he evidently can’t find. Where is it? In his suitcase. Where’s his suitcase? In the luggage compartment, in the very belly of the coach. Can he get to it easily? Of course not. He was the first one on the coach this morning. The entire luggage compartment will have to be unloaded. We’re going to be here for hours. No one speaks to us for the rest of the journey.
The next night, the UK press posse is gathered in a dressing room, backstage at the Berlin Eissensportshalle. Oldfield arrives with David Bedford, having spent an hour or so in a local bar. He’s clearly in what Al Clark describes as “one of his more disquietingly impish moods”. We are, in fact, to be subject throughout the evening ahead of us to a veritable Niagara of pranks and assorted japes, Oldfield liberated from his former uptight sobriety by his recent brush with Exegesis. He begins by accosting Ben Edmands.
“What frightens you?” he demands of the flustered Edmands, who Oldfield now attempts to embrace. “Affection!” Oldfield declares, hugging Edmands and kissing him – a big smacker, right on the lips – much to the NME man’s obvious distress. Bob tries to bat Oldfield away. Oldfield ruffles Bob’s hair and walks off, chuckling, no one keen to make eye contact with him if it means they’ll end up with his tongue down their throat. Anyway, here’s Al with news from David Bedford, with whom he’s been in rapt discussion. Al now tells us that according to what Bedford’s just been telling him, Oldfield wants the UK press contingent to join him tonight on stage. We’re apparently to join the percussion section during the “Sailor’s Hornpipe” routine at the end of Tubular Bells, which follows the complete performance of Incantations. Marvellous! I venture into the backstage corridor to discuss my potential contribution with the gifted young composer and his musical director, but there’s no sign of them. Looks like I’ll have to wing it.
What seems like a lifetime later, the gruelling Incantations mercifully out of the way, Oldfield leads the band and orchestra into Tubular Bells. David Bedford collects us from the dressing room where we are eagerly waiting our call. We now assemble in the wings, led by Al Clark, who’s determined to get in on the act. We ask Bedford if we can be introduced as The Hackettes. He ignores this and starts distributing various percussion instruments. I’m given something I take to be a Romanian mousetrap, handed out by Bedford in error. I don’t know whether to beat it, shake it or hit Al Clark over the head with it. Sadly, it doesn’t seem like the kind of thing upon which I might play an extended solo with my teeth before setting it alight in fiery sacrifice to the gods of rock ‘n’ roll.
But, hey, what’s this? Oldfield, the band and orchestra are going into “The Sailor’s Hornpipe”. Achtung! Time for action! Al Clark pushes his way to the front of the gathered hacks, barges past Bedford and rushes to the front of the stage. “Berlin! Are you ready to rock ‘n’ roll,” he’s shouting now, simultaneously banging two bits of wood above his head and shaking his hips like Elvis in Jailhouse Rock. Danae Brook goes quite berserk, gyrating wildly in the manner of Tina Turner and wailing in Pentecostal tongues. Despite an initial reluctance to participate in this fiasco, Bob Edmands launches into a rather free form improvisation. It brings him a look of stern rebuke from the increasingly exasperated Bedford, who takes this opportunity to inform me that I’m holding my mousetrap or whatever it is upside down, thus rendering my contribution to the unfolding spectacle quite redundant. Al, meanwhile, for reasons I can’t immediately fathom, has started shrieking in Spanish, which makes him sound like he’s being tortured by the Inquisition. Then it’s over. David Bedford grabs the instruments from us and tries to bundle us off stage, but Al and I are going nowhere fast, made giddy and star struck by our moment in the spotlight, savouring the applause of the highly-appreciative crowd.
“Good night, Berlin!” I shout. “You were great! See you soon!”
“For goodness sake,” Bedford says, seething now, “get off.”