Mike Oldfield – Let There Be Light
1995 · Directed by Howard Greenhalgh
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Best comments
1.“If I believed in heaven, this is what I'd play in my church.”
More comments
- 2.“Good psychedelic sketch. It was also in the 1996 Computer Animation Festival.”
- 3.“Arthur C. Clarke wrote a sci-fi novel called The Songs of Distant Earth – and for this album, he wrote a tribute to Mike Oldfield ending with: 'Welcome to space. There's room for all of us out there.'”
The story
Mike Oldfield made a whole album out of Arthur C. Clarke's novel The Songs of Distant Earth, the one where the Sun goes nova and humanity ships itself off to other stars. Oldfield met Clarke in Sri Lanka, and Clarke wrote the foreword for the liner notes but gave him carte blanche. Let There Be Light is the second track, and the single opens with real audio from Apollo 8, including the crew's reading from Genesis.
For the video Oldfield hired Howard Greenhalgh, the director of Soundgarden's Black Hole Sun and the Pet Shop Boys' early computer-animated clips, a guy known for mixing live action with graphics. He shot it in Miami and went for strange, otherworldly happenings. The full video rode along on the second pressing of the album's Enhanced CD, one of the first of its kind (Mac only, inspired by Myst, rendered on Silicon Graphics machines), and footage from it turned up in the BBC sci-fi documentary series Future Fantastic. The single reached number 51 in the UK in 1995.
This is a fan upload. The channel dmivko remastered the official video and notes it was assembled from the remix version's cut back into the official one.
