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Mike Oldfield interviews

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mike2012Mike Oldfield have been busy giving interviews after the release of Man on the Rocks. Here is our round-up of these interviews.

The Telegraph:

Mike Oldfield interview: ‘I am a man of extremes’
After he performed Tubular Bells at the Olympics, Mike Oldfield was inspired to return to his Seventies rock roots. Helen Brown talks to him.

Mike Oldfield got the biggest career boost of all the artists who performed that night: at HMV, sales of Tubular Bells rose by 757 per cent overnight. He pays tribute to the experience on a track from the new album called “Following the Angels”, but most of the record’s guitar-driven 70s swagger spiralled out of hurricane Irene, which battered his home in the summer of 2011.

“There’s nothing more awe inspiring than seeing nature at its wildest,” he says. Safe behind his hurricane shutters, he thrilled at the sounds — “the howling. White noise yowling” and sat up all night watching it on the Internet. “What’s fascinating is that while what’s happening on the ground is wild, if you watch what the satellites show you from space then it’s just beautiful. This spiralling, slowly rolling, swirling thing.”

Read it here.

 

hmv.com talks to Mike Oldfield:

“I feel like I am at some sort of outpost of the British Empire.” 

Mike Oldfield is back, and he’s made a rock album. With words… We caught up with on the release of his new record, Man on the Rocks to talk about using technology to make an album from the comfort of his home in the Bahamas. This is your first studio album proper for 6 years, how long have you been working on it?

“About three years, two or three years I think from start to finish.”

It’s very different sounding record than we’re used to hearing from you – there are lyrics, for a start! What prompted the change of direction?

“It just felt like a good thing to do I guess. I wanted to do something different to the last project – which was not what I usually do either, it was a classical album! But I wanted to try and do something that I’ve never done before. I’ve tried making ‘songs’ to varying degrees of success, but I wanted to make a record that was more like the music that was around when I was starting out in the late sixties and early seventies, when you didn’t really have categories.

Read it here.

From Huffington Post:

The result is his 25th album, ‘Man on the Rocks’, an unashamedly rock album, in comparison to previous offerings, inspired primarily by Mike’s realisation, “I’ve done pretty much everything I want to do. What haven’t I done? Oh yes, a 1960s/70s sounding rock album… “

The album’s already charted, sharing list space with the likes of Pharrell Williams and Beyonce, seeming to prove there is still an audience for someone who was making music when these two were barely a blink in their respective elders’ eyes. Mike doesn’t sound worried about rock belonging to yester-year…

“I come from an age when there weren’t all these classifications,” he says. “You could just as happily be listening to Bob Dylan as to Bob Marley. For me it’s about melody.”

Read it here.

My colleague in ReviewsNewAge also has done an interview with Mike. You’ll find it here – via Google translate.