Mike Oldfield – Five Miles Out
1982
7K Likes
Best comments
1.“Only Mike can add bagpipes to a rock song and make it sound amazing.”
More comments
- 2.“True story, too: Mike Oldfield was in a light aircraft that came through a huge storm... five miles out!”
- 3.“Overheard my boyfriend and his dad listening to what I was sure was Tubular Bells. I walk in and ask, 'Is that Mike Oldfield?' They both just look at me, bewildered. Then I – the youngest person in the room at 30 – played them this for the first time. My boyfriend looks at me and says, 'Y'know, you never cease to surprise me.'”
The story
Mike Oldfield nearly died for this song. He and his crew were flying from Barcelona to San Sebastián between concert dates in Spain when an inexperienced pilot, working off a bad weather forecast, took the light aircraft straight into a thunderstorm. For a while everybody on board figured that was it. They lived, and Oldfield turned the terror into the title track of his 1982 album Five Miles Out, with Maggie Reilly singing lead and Oldfield doing the voice on the radio through a vocoder.
The video plays it literal. A model plane bucks around superimposed on a stormy sky, the performers get chroma-keyed right into the weather, and early-'80s videotape effects pile on top. Oldfield shows up in several shots. Reilly, oddly, doesn't. It ends with the plane breaking out of the storm into the same scene that's on the album cover.
The single stalled at number 43 in the UK, but the album went to number seven, his best showing in years. This copy is from Heroes Of The 80s, an '80s archive channel, not an official Oldfield upload.
