Full of single mothers and muggers. And over-taxed: What the Tubular Bells star of that glorious opening ceremony really thinks about Britain

By Tom Leonard

Published: 17:40 EST, 7 August 2012 | Updated: 03:59 EST, 8 August 2012

Mike Oldfield gestures towards the pristine beach and, beyond, to a perfect turquoise sea. I can make out about a dozen small palm tree-fringed islands on the cloudless horizon. ‘Come on, just look ...’ he says, grinning.

I have just asked the creator of the phenomenally successful 1973 album Tubular Bells if performing in front of worldwide audience of a billion people at the Olympics Opening Ceremony has tempted him to end his self-imposed exile and return to Britain.

The answer is ‘no’. It seems the Reading-born father of nine is blissfully happy on his little tax-free island in the Bahamas.

Mike Oldfield, in a swimming pool in the Bahamas, which he has made his new home. He doubts he will ever return to Britain

‘I don’t think I’ll ever go back to Britain — I can’t stand being cold,’ he says. ‘I’m very comfortable with the local people here. They’re so very genuine and friendly. They don’t seem to have an agenda.’

We’ll get on to what Oldfield thinks about Britain and its ‘agenda’ later, but for now he’s still basking in the glow of the ceremony, which is even warmer than the Bahamas sunshine.

After decades in the critical wilderness, however, Oldfield admits he was surprised to get the Olympics’ summons.

Ceremony director Danny Boyle flew out to the Bahamas a year ago to show 59-year-old Oldfield his secret plans to use his music for the NHS segment of the ceremony.

They were an unlikely pair: the tax exile and the passionate Labour Party supporter. Though Oldfield admits he was initially ‘sceptical’, he  trusted Boyle could carry it all off.

Having lived in the Bahamas for three years, Oldfield and his family — wife Fanny and sons Jake, eight, and Eugene, four — flew to London four weeks before the ceremony.

Given how he often grumbles that he hasn’t found any new music worth listening to for 15 years, it’s not surprising that when he mentions the names of his younger co-stars — rapper Dizzee Rascal and rockers Arctic Monkeys — it is with complete bewilderment.

Mike Oldfield performs during the NHS segment of the London Olympics Opening Ceremony

‘Dizzee Rascal was on my coach to the ceremony,’ he says. ‘I hadn’t a clue who he was.’

The night was a ‘global triumph’ insists Oldfield. ‘It was a bit of fun. I don’t think Danny set out at all to present a political angle — he just wanted to entertain.’

We are sitting in the grounds of an expensive hotel on Paradise Island, which featured in the Bond film Casino Royale. Oldfield chose it as our meeting place for its link with Bond actor Daniel Craig, his opening ceremony ‘co-star’.

For all his reputation as a bit of an anti-social curmudgeon, the shaggy-haired Oldfield makes for congenial company.

But get him on one of his pet hates — spy cameras, the current state of rock music, the adverts he once took out in lonely hearts columns — and he gets fired up, and even a little tetchy.

He wants to see a resurgence of instrumental rock, and is planning a competition for young musicians to be held in the UK that will celebrate ‘real musicianship’ instead of the ‘mindless’ guitar thrashing and ‘talent-free clicking’ of computer keys that passes for popular music nowadays.

Mike Oldfield, pictured at his home in Majorca in 2008, had moments of torment during his 30-year career as a best-selling artist but is happier than ever now

It’s obvious that he’s hoping it will mark a comeback, for Oldfield clearly still feels badly treated by Britain.

Yes, everyone loved Tubular Bells (its global sales stand at 17 million) but its then 19-year-old boy wonder composer — a self-taught musician who played more than 20 instruments on the album — says he was soon caught in the backlash that faces anyone who is too successful.

‘There’s a British thing about hating people who are too clever,’ he says. ‘It’s uncool to be too clever. It’s a great shame, and it’s not the same in America.’

Post-ceremony, as well as trying to capitalise commercially by rushing out a six-disc greatest hits called Two Sides, Oldfield is working on his first rock album with lyrics.

Some of the songs will tackle the issue of domestic violence — an issue that defined Oldfield’s life for many years as he coped with his mother’s descent into addiction, insanity and, he believes, suicide.

For the man whose Tubular Bells opening piano solo was used for the horror film The Exorcist has spent years exorcising his own demons — depression, alienation, panic attacks and paranoia — with endless therapy sessions.

‘A lot of my psychological problems were due to witnessing terrible scenes of suffering and conflict to do with my mother and her mental disturbance,’ he says.

Mike Oldfield, with his seventh child, son Eugene in 2008. He says he now takes fatherhood seriously and believes there are dangerous consequences of single parent families

He says he had about seven years of normal, happy childhood in Reading before the birth of a Down’s syndrome baby — who survived a year — pushed his mother, Maureen, an Irish nurse, over the edge.

She became addicted to barbiturates, and later alcohol. Her husband Raymond, a GP, was not allowed to treat her, and her pleas for drugs led to violent scenes at home and even to her being sectioned.

With his two older siblings Sally and Terry (both now successful musicians) having left home, Oldfield withdrew into himself and discovered music, shutting himself away for hours to practice guitar. He left his grammar school with only one GCE.

At 19 — by which time his first LSD trip had convinced him he wanted to be a musician and not an RAF pilot as he had intended — his mother returned one day from work and choked to death in her sleep. Oldfield suspects it was suicide.

He later hired private detectives to dig up information about his mother’s Roman Catholic family. He blames her father’s traumatic experience while fighting in World War I, which he thinks was passed to his five children — all of whom suffered psychological problems.

His mother’s death not only made Oldfield feel angry and guilty, it also affected his attitude to women in general, he believes.

For years he was attracted to women like his mother — small, dark and neurotic.

In 1999, after a succession of ill-starred relationships (four of which produced children), Oldfield even placed adverts in newspaper lonely hearts columns. It was his sister’s idea, he says.

It was she, then, who lied about his age and described him as a ‘successful/good-looking musician … with occasional artistic moods.’

Oldfield says he has sorted out his women issues now, along with his psychological hang-ups. He feels he has never been happier and has been with his French-born wife, Fanny, since they met in 1999 while he was living in Ibiza.

The island was just one of the exotic places he ran away to after he decided to leave Britain.

Oldfield says he was advised in the 1970s to emigrate in order to escape the then Labour government’s 86 per cent taxes on his Tubular Bells royalties. He spent time living in Switzerland, Monaco, Ibiza (where the hedonistic and ‘poisonous’ lifestyle of drink, drugs and going days without sleep almost overwhelmed him) and Majorca.

The musician admits he never used to be much of a father to his seven older children, being too obsessed with his music and, in his mid-20s, too immature.

The musician poses with a guitar in the late-70s, when he reached fame for his best-selling music

He sings a different tune now, playing the part of devoted dad to his two youngest sons. He waxes lyrical about a father’s importance to children and the ‘dangerous’ consequences of single parent families.

‘For a society, the idea that a single parent is the right thing for a child is very dangerous,’ he says. ‘Those children are going to grow up into seriously handicapped adults, and that’s going to spread down the generations.’

While he stopped seeing a psychiatrist 15 years ago, he still meditates. Rising before dawn, he goes out early every morning on the jet ski moored at the bottom of his garden and takes his pick from a dozen deserted small islands.

‘I find a nice little rock and sit there for 20 minutes,’ he says.

The Bahamas may be a country increasingly full of gated communities and millionaire tax exiles, but Oldfield stresses that he lives in the cheaper end of Nassau and is still doing up the run-down five-bedroom 1950s house he bought when he and his wife moved there in 2009.

Classic: Oldfield's debut album, Tubular Bells, released in 1973. It was also the first album to be released by Virgin Records.

The likes of Sean Connery, Diana Ross and Julio Iglesias have homes on his island, New Providence, but Oldfield is not friends with them.

‘I’m totally anti-social. I can’t stand small talk or standing there with a cocktail,’ he says. ‘I’d rather sit with the local fishermen at the marina and talk about where you can catch the best marlin.’

He loves tinkering with his 68ft yacht, which he takes island-hopping, and with his valuable motorbike collection.

Some might find living permanently in the Bahamas a trifle dull, but Oldfield insists not. Apart from supplies of Amber Leaf rolling tobacco that friends bring from the UK, he says he doesn’t miss much about home.

He has grumbled about his home country being like ‘prep school’ with all its restrictive laws, health and safety rules, smoking bans and CCTV cameras everywhere.

He complains about the Big Brother culture and says Britain’s ‘brutish police in those weird jackets’ are nothing like the kindly bobby in the helmet he remembers from his youth.

By comparison, he says, he’s found the values of that old Britain in the Bahamas.

‘You go inland here and it’s just like Reading was in the 1950s. You see the kids going to school in their uniforms —they take their education very seriously here.

‘People don’t have a lot of money, but you can talk to anybody. In London, you’d be worried you were going to get mugged.’

Despite his peripatetic life in Switzerland, Monaco, Ibiza and Majorca, he said none were warm enough in the winter. That’s why he came to the Bahamas.

He accepts the islands are also attractive because they have no personal income tax — but then claims he’s not as rich as he was.

Most of his money came not from Tubular Bells but from the nearly 400 concerts he played in the 1980s and 1990s. Album royalties still ‘dribble in’, he says, particularly every Halloween when radio stations across the U.S. dutifully play the Tubular Bells music from The Exorcist.

It’s just a pity that from this income he doesn’t pay all his taxes in Britain — and so help finance the public services that were honoured at the Olympic opening ceremony in which he took part.