Fact #160370
When:
Short story:
Five Miles Out by Mike Oldfield enters the UK singles chart where it will peak at No43.
Full article:
Mike Oldfield : Five Miles Out was one of the first normal songs I’d ever written. I realised that if I was ever going to get any airplay, I was going to have to write a normal song. Radio One was never going to play backwards Gaelic with African drums in it.
At this time I was just learning how to fly. I’d always been terrified of flying. I had many phobias, phobias of everything. I thought, “Well, if I’m ever going to see anything of this planet, I’m going to have to get over this fear of flying, and the most brutal way to do that is to do it." It terrified the hell out of me. I wasn't a very good pilot, but I managed to do it and get my licence, although I can't say I enjoyed much of it.
Amongst all this terror, I decided to write a song. I had a melody and I was sitting in a pub with all my pilot books thinking, "Now there's a nice little phrase." There were lots of fairly unusable words like ‘altimeter’ and ‘cruise control’, but I had lots of little things and I started piecing them together like a little collage. That one track took 2 or 3 months of solid work to complete and get right and there were lots of different versions. I could release a whole album of different versions, if I could find them. I had Maggie Riley singing it as though it were the romantic days of the 30s and that was a nice approach.
Then I had this brainwave. I thought, "Well, who's supposed to be singing this song? The aeroplane. So I'll have this mechanical voice, a kind of robotic thing." That worked for some strange reason. That was also the first time I sang. I had a couple of lines in that song. I do enjoy the physical act of singing, even though I'm not very good at it.
I'm always humming something or playing something, 24 hours a day. There's always something in my head. I don't have music on in the car or around the house because it disturbs my internal music, although there are times when I need to listen to music for research. Although it wasn’t a huge hit, people actually played Five Miles Out on the radio, which I thought was good.
(Source : not known)
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At this time I was just learning how to fly. I’d always been terrified of flying. I had many phobias, phobias of everything. I thought, “Well, if I’m ever going to see anything of this planet, I’m going to have to get over this fear of flying, and the most brutal way to do that is to do it." It terrified the hell out of me. I wasn't a very good pilot, but I managed to do it and get my licence, although I can't say I enjoyed much of it.
Amongst all this terror, I decided to write a song. I had a melody and I was sitting in a pub with all my pilot books thinking, "Now there's a nice little phrase." There were lots of fairly unusable words like ‘altimeter’ and ‘cruise control’, but I had lots of little things and I started piecing them together like a little collage. That one track took 2 or 3 months of solid work to complete and get right and there were lots of different versions. I could release a whole album of different versions, if I could find them. I had Maggie Riley singing it as though it were the romantic days of the 30s and that was a nice approach.
Then I had this brainwave. I thought, "Well, who's supposed to be singing this song? The aeroplane. So I'll have this mechanical voice, a kind of robotic thing." That worked for some strange reason. That was also the first time I sang. I had a couple of lines in that song. I do enjoy the physical act of singing, even though I'm not very good at it.
I'm always humming something or playing something, 24 hours a day. There's always something in my head. I don't have music on in the car or around the house because it disturbs my internal music, although there are times when I need to listen to music for research. Although it wasn’t a huge hit, people actually played Five Miles Out on the radio, which I thought was good.
(Source : not known)