Smash hit

Minutes later I find him on the hotel’s darkened terrace, constructing a tiny roll-up from Amber Leaf tobacco. “If you want some time alone I understand,” I begin, but Oldfield gestures for me to join him at a table. Diffidently now, I ask about his father. “He’s incredible,” is the reply. “86 years old, or something. He lives in Germany these days.” And do they see each other often? “We speak maybe once a year by phone. I think ’cos ours sort of broke up when I was fairly young, the whole concept of ‘family’ got lost for me. Only now am I mature enough to understand what a family is. This little one I have now, I love it so much. Previously, I was too distracted, obsessed.”

I am well aware by now that Oldfield is by nature a deeply private man, one prepared to talk about those aspects of his personal life which impact only on him, but selective in discussing others (Changeling contains just a passing reference to his brief first marriage in 1978 to Diana Fuller, a relative of the Exegesis founder, and neither Anita Hegerland nor his children with her are mentioned by name). But I am surprised when he is offended by my remarking that his second and current marriage has clearly brought him contentment (naively, I imagine he will welcome the opportunity to pay public tribute to the influence of his wife, some 20 years his junior). “I find that intrusive. Delving into people’s private lives… It’s too personal. I’d feel myself to be very rude if I put the same thing to you.”

Uneasily, we talk geography. His adult life appears to have been an itinerant one. It was a long-held ambition to design his own house and latterly he achieved it on Ibiza, but the reality did not live up to expectations. Within a year he was back in the UK, on an estate in Gloucestershire, but then came last year’s floods. Now that has been sold and the future is Palma de Majorca/Monaco. “I don’t know what the hell went wrong with our country,” he says. “There’s a culture of thuggishness that I can’t help but blame on punk rock music.

“I know it’s fashionable to think it was a great advance, but it also inspired two generations of young people to think that being rude, aggressive and violent is cool – and it’s very much not cool. I felt less and less safe in the UK. You could no longer walk around the local town – I won’t say which it was – while all the pubs had been taken over by chains and turned into places with loud music and no chairs, designed for people to get plastered in and to start fighting. That’s not the country I grew up in. The Britain I love is disappearing.”

At least he has the consolation of this landmark year. His career, though latterly low-ish profile, has been a steady one: there have been 20-odd albums post-Tubular Bells, a smattering of Top Ten singles (“But he’s gone pop!” diehards wailed when Moonlight Shadow was released in 1983), tours, and a willingness to embrace different genres. “I think to myself, ‘How come you’re one of very few musicians from the Seventies who’s still got a record deal?’ It’s got to be something to do with my being able to change with the times.”

His latest incarnation? On Music of the Spheres, his score has been transposed for orchestra by fellow composer Karl Jenkins (the album features guest appearances by the young New Zealand soprano Hayley Westenra and Chinese piano virtuoso Lang Lang), then mixed again by its creator to produce something which is clearly Oldfield but with a classical twist. Accordingly, he seems pleased with it and Universal, his label, is very excited. There will be a launch event at the Guggenheim, Bilbao. So, after all he’s been through to get to this place… Well, surely he’s proud of himself at last? There is the longest of pauses before he responds with a decisive, “Yes.”

Music of the Spheres is released by Universal on March 17

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