Mike Oldfield’s 26th album, Return To Ommadawn, would prove to be his last. Six years after its release in 2017 he announced his retirement. But he’d left his fans with a record many of them had asked for, as he told Prog just before its release.
“When I first began to think of what I should do for my new album, I went on social media and asked the fans for their opinion,” Mike Oldfield says. “So many of them seemed to want me to go back to the acoustic style of the first three albums, and Ommadawn appeared to be their favourite one.”
His decision was clinched by a comment from synth pioneer Jean-Michel Jarre. “He was doing a live Facebook chat with his fans and I went online to follow what was being said. One person asked him if he might ever collaborate with me, and his answer was interesting.
“He said that he loved my music, but that I was too acoustic for him. It got me thinking: if someone like him believes I’m an acoustic musician, it shows how important that part of my career has been. So with all this overwhelming evidence, I felt it would be very exciting to do a project again along those lines.”
Oldfield is keen to stress that this is a pure solo work. “I’m the only musician who is involved. I play everything. There are no guest appearances whatsoever.” Actually that’s not strictly true – those with keen ears will notice a very brief choral burst from children’s choir Penrhos Kids at the end of the record.
“I did wonder if people might be disappointed that the album doesn’t have a follow-up to On Horseback, the final song on Ommadawn,” he explains. “So I took one line from the choir who sang on that track and inserted it here. It’s a way of linking these two albums across more than 40 years; it’s not a new recording.”
He readily admits that he specifically designed the album for vinyl. There are just two tracks, titled Part I and Part II, each of which is around 20 minutes long. “I love vinyl and the way it brings people closer to music. As far as I’m concerned, if you listen to downloads, that has the same impact as what you hear in a lift! Of course, the album will be made available in all the usual formats. But for me it’s the vinyl one that matters.
“The cover is very elaborate and there’s a gatefold sleeve with photos I’ve taken of the instruments I used in the sessions. The aim is to give everyone hours of enjoyment as they try to identify all of them and what roles they played.”
However, Oldfield doesn’t have any plans to perform Ommadawn and Return To Ommadawn in the live environment: “It would just be too difficult. I’d have to find musicians who could play the parts in the way that I believe fits best, and that would be almost impossible to achieve.
“There are very talented people around who could duplicate what I’ve done, but it could never have the same emotional connection. The only way I could see this working is if you have 15 or more clones of me onstage!”
