★★★☆☆
What are 42 years to musical geniuses? In 1975 Mike Oldfield, the socially anxious young man from Reading who had achieved sudden and unexpected fame two years earlier with Tubular Bells, released another atmospheric album that made full use of his multi-instrumentalist abilities. Ommadawn is a genre-fluid mix of progressive rock, folk, world and ambient music on which Oldfield combined squealing guitars with African drums and Irish pipes. It duly received polite praise from serious-minded young people keen to show to disapproving parents that rock could have the complexity and depth of classical music.
Then in 1978 the introverted Oldfield underwent a rebirthing programme as part of the Exegesis personal transformation course, and popped out of Exegesis’s metaphorical vagina as an extrovert. He married and divorced the course leader’s sister within the space of a month, posed nude in promotional photographs and left behind the inward-gazing headphone music of his past for a new life as a full-throttle millionaire hedonist. Until now.
With Return to Ommadawn, Oldfield, 63, has picked up where Ommadawn left off, right down to the Seventies-style fantasy cover artwork featuring a lone warrior and his trusty reindeer on a snowy mountaintop. As with the first album there are just two 20-minute tracks — Oldfield intends this to be a vinyl listening experience. Side one is a remarkable piece of music. It returns to the gentle, sincere mood of Ommadawn with an instrumental composition that is filled — for all its tempo shifts, jaunty motifs, pretty acoustic sections and exciting electric guitar riffs — with an overwhelming sense of melancholy.
There’s a strain of English music that specialises in melancholy. You find it in Pink Floyd, the Kinks, even in the Elizabethan composer John Dowland, and something about the first side of Return to Ommadawn evokes the mixed blessing of a Sunday walk in the countryside. However scenic the bushes and briars, you know it’s only a matter of time before it starts raining, you’re stuck in a jam on the M1, and you end up back at home, worrying about whatever horrors the week might bring. But there’s beauty in this, which is what Oldfield brings out.
The rich and transporting music on side one is a joy, but side two is far less effective. Oldfield is an unpredictable character. He celebrated the vast success of Tubular Bells by adopting Clyde, a male lion. Eventually he accepted that Clyde was never going to be the ideal house pet and, angry that he hadn’t received the royalties he felt were due for Tubular Bells, sent Clyde round to the offices of Virgin Records in the hope that he might eat the label’s founder, Richard Branson. (Clyde didn’t get past reception.)
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So it shouldn’t come as such a shock that Oldfield abandons the mood of the first half of the album for the kind of jaunty Celtic kitsch that wouldn’t sound out of place in Riverdance. By the time we get to the ten-minute mark, the pipe-and-drum-led Gaelic melodies are so unbearably pretty, you half expect Michael Flatley to jump out of the speakers and hop about the living room. As accomplished as it is — and Oldfield is playing every single instrument here — the enjoyment is marred by the impression that you have wandered into an Irish theme bar by mistake. So stick to side one and you have Mike Oldfield at his best: virtuosic, thoughtful and, for all of its world music touches, very, very English.
(Virgin)