So early in the year, Majorca belongs to its natives and the year-rounders among those who have settled here. The streets of Palma are quiet this evening; few tourists are in evidence and in other circumstances, Mike Oldfield, a recent emigrant from the UK, would not be here either. The plan is for his new family to spend summers on the island, but to winter in Monaco. Right now, though, his French wife Fanny is overdue with their second child (Eugene, a brother to three-year-old Jake, arrives safely 14 days later), so travel has not been an option. Understandably, he looks distracted when we meet at a bayside hotel and there are frequent checks of his mobile phone. “It could happen at any time,” he worries.

This will be a landmark year for the musician and composer, now 54. In personal terms, it has brought an addition to his family in their new hillside home high above the Balearic island’s capital. And career-wise it will bring not only the release of his first fully classical album, Music of the Spheres, but the return to his control of his first and most famous recording, 1973’s Tubular Bells. “I can still remember being in the kitchen of the Manor at Shipton-on-Cherwell [then owned by the fledgling entrepreneur Richard Branson], about to sign this two-page contract,” he says. “Someone pointed out that it was for 35 years, but I couldn’t get my head around the fact. I was just 19 and couldn’t conceive of 2008 ever arriving. Now, of course, it’s here.”

We are used to boy-band members and talent-show hopefuls being that young when they first glimpse success, but it is hard now to imagine someone coming up with a musical work (this whether you love, hate or are merely indifferent to it) as complex and ground-breaking when still shy of 20. The multi-genre composition (Oldfield played all 20-plus instruments on it himself) was the inaugural release on Branson’s Virgin Records, selling more than 2.5 million copies in the UK (a whopping 15 million worldwide) and spending

279 weeks on our charts. Its use on the soundtrack to William Friedkin’s controversial 1973 film The Exorcist further extended its shelf-life. Consequently, Tubular Bells is as emblematic of Seventies rock as Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon or Led Zeppelin IV.

In time, such initial success made Oldfield a rich man, but it could have made him a richer one. In an autobiography, Changeling, published last year, he told how by putting his signature to that two-page agreement, he tied himself in to a ten-album contract with a less-than-generous royalty rate (effectively, Branson was his record company, his publisher and his manager). Only after delivering that full quota of recordings was there a renegotiation of terms and, while a more favourable arrangement was reached for a further three years (in 1990 he left Virgin for good), he wrote that the two men then didn’t speak for some time. And now? Does he harbour bitterness?

“No. You have to get rid of all that. Can’t blame it all on others.” This bluff response is very Oldfieldian, I will discover. He doesn’t much like company and is happiest either tinkering with equipment (“I love machines, things I can control”) or pottering about in the marina below us. “I’ve got a yacht down there [a beautiful, British-made 50-something tonner], but perhaps my favourite boat is a small semi-inflatable. I go out into the bay and cut the motor. Just me and all that water, with the sun warm on the skin. Life doesn’t get much better than that.” As Changeling told, here is someone who has struggled for much of his life with feelings of alienation and depression, panic attacks and paranoia. It hasn’t always been easy, being him.

Oldfield’s book opened with an account of what was for him a life-changing event: his attendance in the summer of 1978 of a London seminar run by Robert D’Aubigny, founder of Exegesis, a radical personal-growth movement. There he experienced a rebirthing that was, in his words, anything but a gentle, New Age thing: “This is the real McCoy, like a real birth. It feels like Armageddon.” That he should have been there at all represented a major personal breakthrough, he admits. “I’m very much a product of Fifties Britain. Stiff upper lip. Sort yourself out. But I was so bottled up that I had to find a way of letting my feelings out. I could no longer function. I had to do something.” The positive effects of Exegesis lasted for several years, he says.

But what had brought him to that point? Oldfield was the third of three children (his brother Terry and sister Sally are also musicians) born in Reading to a GP father and his Irish nurse wife. Although he described his childhood as having left many happy memories, he told also of knowing always that he was different, lacking the social instincts that most of us take for granted. His parents’ marriage was an unhappy one, its slow unravelling punctuated by his mother’s mood swings, depression (at one point she was sectioned), prescription drug addiction and eventual alcoholism. They were divorced by the time she died in January 1974, eight months after the release of Tubular Bells. A coroner ruled “Accidental Death”. “In my mind it could have been suicide,” Oldfield wrote in Changeling.

The boy who grew up against this background of disharmony was, he tells me, a study in contradictions. “I was this strange mixture, terrified of everything, but also a daredevil. I was going to be an RAF pilot until I had an LSD trip and my life completely changed.” The Oldfield family had moved to Harold Wood, Essex, and he was regularly travelling up to London to meet friends. Of the introduction to narcotics, he wrote in his book, “My life as it is – Tubular Bells and everything else – I wouldn’t put down to my drug experiences, but they made me who I am, and made the music the way it was.” Tonight he says of the latter, “I put all my energies into it. The nuclear intensity of all my psychological problems turbo-charged my creativity.”

What drugs couldn’t do was prepare him for the avalanche of success triggered by that first album, let alone enable him to cope with the expectations of the record industry. “If it had happened ten years later, after I’d been through the therapy and the psychological training, then probably I could have been the person that Richard [Branson] wanted me to be: ‘OK, I’ll go out and flog my album to death, talk to everyone you want me to talk to, play concerts all over the world.’ But there I was instead, hunkered down among the sheep on Hergest Ridge [a hill on the border between England and Wales, to which he’d retreated], terrified of life, completely ill-equipped to do the things he wanted. Mental torture, let me tell you.”

Describing his feelings at that time, Oldfield speaks more colourfully than at any other point in our conversation. “I could have just anaesthetised myself with drugs and alcohol, I suppose, but I like so much to have a clear mind, a functioning brain. The trouble was, my brain was functioning a little too well. I can still remember being bombarded with sensations, almost like the stings of a jellyfish. Everything seemed turned up to maximum. My emotions felt too strong and powerful. It hurt. I hurt. And it wasn’t really until I learnt meditation and could accept it all – accept myself – instead of being scared, that I found any peace. That was a tremendous step and I’d love to do more in that direction if ever I get the opportunity and the quiet time. But life just now is all, ‘Daddy! Daddy! Wa-ke up!’”

This isn’t his first experience of fatherhood. In the early Eighties he had three children (Molly, Dougal and Luke) with his then partner, Sally Cooper. Some few years later he had a further two (Greta and Noah) in a relationship with a Norwegian singer, Anita Hegerland. In Changeling, Oldfield said of his daughters and three other sons, “Obviously, I adore them all and did the best I could for them… I am sad that I couldn’t be a real father for them all the time, but I am here and they are always welcome.” So, I wonder, does he have an ongoing relationship with them? “I don’t want to talk about that,” he says abruptly. “Besides, I’m dying for a pee, then a cigarette. D’you know where the bathrooms are?” He stands and walks away.

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